50 Years of Music at Its Best From Blue Note; Independent Labels Are Being Squeezed Out

B lue note: a seductively bent tone that gives jazz one of its most bewitching sounds. What better name could there be for a record company that has been chronicling the best of the music for half a century?

A just-released retrospective of that era--”Blue Note 50th Anniversary Collection”--is a virtual cornucopia of jazz at its best. Label founder Alfred Lion was a dyed-in-the-wool jazz fan who ran his company as a personal expression of his own eclectic tastes, and the collection provides a remarkably colorful cross section of jazz’s halcyon years.

Bruce Lundvall--a veteran jazz record executive, and current president of Blue Note--described the difficulties of choosing selections from the company’s vast catalogue of boogie-woogie, bop, funk, blues and avant-garde.

“Oh, it was hard,” he explained. “There was so much history to document. The obvious problem was whether to do it by decade or by style, and the collection’s producer, Michael Cuscuna, felt strongly that we should overlap styles with decades. But we had to slave over it, and it was frustrating, in part because of some of the wonderful cuts were just too long to include.

“There are a few people I’d like to have heard who didn’t make it--Herbie Nichols, Elmo Hope, a few less well-known names--but generally I think we finally got about as strong a representation of the Blue Note era as we could have done.”

The five-album collection includes entries from a stellar gamut of names ranging from Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley to Herbie Hancock, Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard and Bobby McFerrin. It would be hard to imagine a more valuable basic entry for anyone’s jazz record library.

LITTLE GUYS FINISH LAST: Billboard’s jazz listings this week suggest that the success of the Blue Note story might be somewhat more difficult to bring off in the 1990s.

The 15 top jazz albums and 25 top contemporary albums, with only a few minor exceptions, are all distributed by major record labels. The biggest companies--Warner Bros., MCA, Columbia, Atlantic--are predictably significant players. But even the names once associated with the finest independent labels--Verve, Blue Note, GRP and Windham Hill--have become part of the distribution controlled by the majors.

As the Blue Note anniversary confirms, some of the best jazz has always come from boutique-sized companies that began as the reflection of highly individualized musical tastes. Companies like Riverside, Prestige, Fantasy, Atlantic (at least in the beginning) and countless others have made priceless contributions to the history and evolution of jazz.

The music they produced was almost always fresh and alive, and frequently challenged the existing musical Establishment. There are few, for example, who would disagree with the statement that Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and Bill Evans, among many, did their best work before they became affiliated with major labels. Yet the current trend toward big-distributor dominance in the retail stores seems to be working against the possibility that similarly gifted new talent will have the opportunity to grow and develop their skills on small record labels.

“It’s worrisome, no doubt about it,” said Sam Sutherland of Windham Hill Records, an independent whose product is handled by a major distributor. “But of course there’s the devil and the deep blue sea to worry about. Small labels always have to worry about getting their money back, and artists want to make the best deals they can. There’s no minimizing the advantage I have, now that I now can pull out a computer printout and show performers what they’re making, market by market.”

Is there a solution? Probably not. But it wouldn’t hurt to ask your local store manager to set up a separate rack category for independent jazz record labels--those without major-label connections. They need all the help they can get.