A MUSICAL LION PASSES FROM THE SCENE

The ultimate blue note was sounded Monday when Blue Note Records’ founder Alfred Lion died in San Diego.

It was hardly unexpected; Lion was 78 and had been in ill health for years. In fact, when he sold Blue Note in 1966, he had been on the treadmill so long, and was so worn out from the effort, that he made the most radical change of life style imaginable, moving to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where his address was a closely guarded secret.

What had taken place between the first Blue Note session (a blues piano date on Jan. 6, 1939) and Lion’s retirement almost three decades later was without parallel in the annals of recorded jazz.

Blue Note began on the smallest conceivable scale after Lion, impressed with Albert Ammons and other artists in the precedent setting “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall staged by John Hammond in December, 1938, decided that music of this quality needed to be preserved on records.

It is hard for anyone today to realize what a minuscule world the jazz community was in those days. The entire American recording industry consisted of three major companies--RCA Victor, Columbia and Decca--and the recently launched independent jazz label, Commodore, an offshoot of the Commodore Record Shop.

When Lion recorded Meade Lux Lewis and Ammons on that first day, he had almost no conception of how to get his records pressed and marketed. “I was Alfred’s first customer,” said Milt Gabler the other day, reminiscing about his own days as a recording pioneer at Commodore. “We bought 10 or 12 of the first Blue Notes, and he took a few dozen others around town. Later, when Alfred was drafted, we helped to keep the label alive and hired his partner, Frank Wolff, to work in our office.”

Both Lion and Wolff were refugees from Nazi Germany; Wolff, in fact, arrived a year or so after Lion on what was said to have been the last ship out. In addition to helping with the production of their early sessions, Wolff was a brilliant photographer whose work still graces many of the Blue Note reissues.

It was strictly a Pop-and-Pop operation, though after the release of a Sidney Bechet record of “Summertime” the company began to gain the recognition and distribution necessary for survival. Lion’s Army service, and the 1942-43 recording ban, put the label in limbo for a while, but by the mid-1940s the company was busily preserving some of the classic jazz of the day, making sessions with many of the New Orleans pioneers--Bunk Johnson, George Lewis--and swing giants such as Ben Webster, Teddy Wilson, Red Norvo and Edmond Hall.

In 1945, bebop began to take on importance and, although Lion preferred older styles, at the urging of saxophonist Ike Quebec he began recording Thelonious Monk, Milt Jackson, Bud Powell and others.

Blue Note became a virtual repertory company in which many musicians who began as sidemen graduated to sessions under their own names. Horace Silver, heard as a member of Art Blakey’s group, soon led his own quintet, which pioneered the burgeoning funk-soul-jazz movement.

“Alfred was totally dedicated,” said Silver, who was with Blue Note for 28 years. “He was conscientious, he had good ears; he saw to it that everything about his product, from the recording to the artwork, the photography, the liner notes, was flawless. He established a tradition of dealing only with music he believed in, instead of basing his plans on how well a record would sell.”

The list of men nurtured by Lion during the 1950s and early 1960s includes Jimmy Smith, Kenny Burrell, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, Freddie Hubbard, Clifford Brown, Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock and such avant-garde figures as Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman. Every once in a while a hit would emerge: Silver’s “Song for My Father,” Art Blakey’s “Moanin’,” Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder.”

It was demanding work, under constant pressure. Some of the artists, notably Silver and a few more who became close friends, were reliable and consistent; others, suffering from the personal problems that were endemic to that period, were hard to handle and may well have contributed to the physical condition that finally convinced Lion the time had come to give it up once and for all.

Blue Note went through several phases, from appalling attempts to commercialize it to excellent reissue packages. But, by the early 1980s, it was half-forgotten. Salvation came in the form of a new takeover headed by Bruce Lundvall.

Lion, who some years earlier had moved back to San Diego from Mexico, agreed to come to New York in 1985 for a concert Lundvall planned at which old and new Blue Note artists would celebrate the company’s born-again status. It was a nostalgic night. Onstage with Lion were Rudy van Gelder, the former optician who, as a sound engineer, had produced most of Blue Note’s treasured products and had established the unique “Blue Note sound,” as well as Reid Miles, who had been responsible for Blue Note’s artwork; Art Blakey, reunited with some of his alumni; Stanley Jordan, the young guitarist who was to become Blue Note’s most successful new artist under the reactivation program, and Herbie Hancock.

After the concert, Alfred and Ruth Lion went home to California. Last August, they were persuaded to leave again when a Blue Note Jazz Festival was staged on Mt. Fuji, Japan.

Last month, not having talked to him in a while, I called Alfred. He sounded weak, but some of the old spirit was still there. “That trip to Japan took a lot out of me,” he said, “but it was so wonderful to see so many old friends again.”

Hancock was one of the Blue Note graduates who went to Mt. Fuji. Learning of Lion’s passing, he said: “Alfred was the first to hire and record me, just as he made it possible for so many other young musicians to spread their wings. It seems as though almost everyone who is anyone today owed something to the groundwork that Alfred and Frank laid.

“He was a German, from the old school, who had a gift, a real insight into the qualities that the great black artists of his day were exhibiting. The world of music won’t be the same without him--I don’t suppose we’ll ever see his like again.”