Blue Note: Uncompromising Expression: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939

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Blue Note is unquestionably the most iconic jazz label there’s ever been. But when Alfred Lion started the label in 1939 with a recording of boogie-woogie pianists Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons, his intention was simple: To release music that he felt was important. It is a mission that he never wavered from, nor have the Blue Note albums that have followed in his illustrious footsteps. This list of 50 albums is a mere fraction of the LPs that Blue Note has put over the years. Let us know in the comments, below, which ones you think we may have missed. 50. Don Cherry – Complete Communion This iconic album was Sonny Rollins’ fourth and final LP for Blue Note, capturing him on stage in one of New York’s most prestigious jazz venues in the company of bassist Wilbur Ware and drummer Elvin Jones. The tenor titan plays with an authoritative vigor, providing a masterclass of how to improvise without resorting to repetition and clichés. The absence of a pianist allows Rollins to play in a free and unfettered way. 32. The Jazz Messengers – At the Café Bohemia Vols I & 2

Blue Note: Uncompromising Expression: The Finest in Jazz

The major misses that spring to mind are Pullen-Adams “Breakthrough” and Joe Henderson’s “State of the Tenor.” Missing Pullen-Adams is kinda excusable because everybody forgets that one; missing State of the Tenor is like forgetting about Stan Musial. Richter's slightly less traditional pieces also resound; both the underwater choral hymnal "Iconography" and the stately organ piece "Organum" echo the spiritual ambience that characterized his work for Future Sound of London. There is absolutely nothing exclusive or contrived-feeling about it. In fact, not only is Richter's second album one of the finest of the last six months, it is also one of the most affecting and universal contemporary classical records in recent memory." [9] Shutter Island (2010); both the original and the remix with Dinah Washington's vocals from her 1960 hit " This Bitter Earth" [5]Despite Lion’s admiration for “American vitalism”, jazzmen like Morgan proved to be rather too freely expressive and uncompromising for their own good. Shaw called music the brandy of the damned, and it’s all the more addictive if combined with heroin and cocaine. Blue is the colour of lush, sensual midnight, and also of a bleary, bruised, hungover dawn. A sorry conclusion comes with the fate of the trumpeter Lee Morgan, who dispensed “soul jazz to the max” until in 1972 he was unsoulfully gunned down at the age of 33 by his commonlaw wife during a gig at Slug’s Saloon in the East Village. His wounds were superficial; Havers primly omits to mention that he bled to death on the floor because the ambulance was reluctant to venture into the lawless no-go area where Slug’s was located. Not all jazz clubs were as stylishly avant garde as the Village Vanguard. The Blue Notebooks is the second album by neo-classical producer and composer Max Richter. The album was conceived in 2003 and released on 26 February 2004 on 130701, an imprint of FatCat Records. It is a protest album about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and violence in general. NORAH JONES ANNOUNCES RECORD STORE DAY LP “PLAYING ALONG”& UPCOMING PODCAST GUESTS INCLUDING DAVE GROHL, THE NATIONAL & MORE Richter, Max (8 July 2016). "Millions of us knew the Iraq war would be a catastrophe. Why didn't Tony Blair?". The Guardian . Retrieved 8 July 2016.

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Schepper, Ron (10 March 2004). "Max Richter – The Blue Notebook – Review". Stylus Magazine. Archived from the original on 1 September 2006 . Retrieved 19 December 2018. The Blue Notebooks received widespread critical acclaim from contemporary music critics. [ citation needed] The Blue Notebooks was composer Max Richter’s Iraq War-themed, and critically-acclaimed, second album. Max Richter has described The Blue Notebooks as “a protest album about Iraq, a meditation on violence – both the violence that I had personally experienced around me as a child and the violence of war …” He composed The Blue Notebooks in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Initially, he released the album for specialist indie label 130701 on February 26, 2004. A deluxe, expanded reissue was released by Deutsche Grammophon to celebrate the album’s 15th anniversary. The Guardian named the Blue Notebooks as one of the 25 best classical music works of the 21st Century. Richter composed The Blue Notebooks in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He has described it as "a protest album about Iraq, a meditation on violence – both the violence that I had personally experienced around me as a child and the violence of war, at the utter futility of so much armed conflict." The album was recorded about a week after mass protests against the war. [3] Yet as Havers explains, that American idiom – used, like abstract expressionist painting, as propaganda for go-getting Yankee liberties during the cold war – owed its preservation on records to a Berliner. Blue Note was founded in 1939 by Alfred Lion, the son of a Jewish architect who settled in New York in 1933 after fleeing from the capital of the Third Reich. Lion slept rough at first in Central Park, and when he could afford to rent a room immediately installed a Victrola gramophone to play the jazz records he bought on excursions uptown to Harlem.a b Pytlik, Mark (1 July 2004). "Max Richter: The Blue Notebooks". Pitchfork . Retrieved 21 November 2017. Richard Havers’s book about Blue Note records, with its details of the inspirations and excesses of the label’s major talents, amounts to a history of jazz itself A blue note is a flattened or – in the terminology of jazz – a “worried” note, which dips below the major scale to vouch for the intensity of an emotion; Blue Note is a record label which, since its foundation 75 years ago, has recorded the bluest and most worried jazz performers. Shaded by nocturnal melancholy, blue is the preferred tonality of their music. A classic album by Miles Davis was called Kind of Blue, and Blue Note later recorded the guitarist Kenny Burrell’s Midnight Blue, attuned to the mood of a moonlit sky seen through the glare of urban streetlights. Dazed (2023-06-23). "Max Richter and Tilda Swinton delve into their Glastonbury performance". Dazed . Retrieved 2023-08-19.