Smaller can be bigger

A seismic shift takes place in the jazz world in March, when Wynton Marsalis -- perhaps the most visible living jazz artist in the world -- releases his first CD on the Blue Note label. After 20 years at Columbia Records, Marsalis is moving from a large label to a smaller label, from a multi-genre, primarily pop-oriented company to one of jazz’s legendary imprints.

Why leave a company that has released two dozen Marsalis albums over the last two decades?

It was not, according to Marsalis, because he was unhappy with his relationship with the people at Columbia.

“From a relationship standpoint it was working well,” he said recently by phone from New York. “I had been at Columbia since I was about 18 or 19, and I knew the group of people there and we worked well together.”

But Marsalis was less pleased with what he saw as the company’s drift away from jazz.

“It was beginning to be phased out,” he said. In the record industry, in general, pop music is the main business. Which means that things on the fringes go first [in an economic downturn] -- classical music, jazz, more art-oriented things. So, from a philosophical standpoint they were going in a totally different direction from the one I was going in.”

One could argue, however, that Blue Note’s enormous success with Norah Jones, as well as the recent issuance of CDs by Al Green and Van Morrison, have signaled a possible Blue Note dalliance with pop music, as well.

“I never thought about that at all,” said Marsalis. “Blue Note is Blue Note. And with Bruce Lundvall running it, it will always be a great jazz label.”

In the year or so that the transition was taking place, the rumor -- which no one will confirm -- circulated that Marsalis, through his agents, was looking for a million-dollar deal. A number that large is virtually unprecedented for a jazz artist. Marsalis’ sales at Columbia have been at the high end of the jazz market -- 7 million records worldwide via 33 jazz and 11 classical albums. But, although average CD sales of nearly 160,000 copies per release would delight most jazz instrumentalists, it’s not the sort of total that generates million-dollar deals.

Enter Blue Note President Lundvall. As the head of Columbia Records two decades ago, he had originally signed Marsalis (at the suggestion of A&R; chief George Butler) to the label.

“The funny thing was that I left Columbia before Wynton’s first album was released,” Lundvall recalled in a separate phone interview from his Manhattan office. “We’ve been friends ever since, and I really wanted to sign him to Blue Note. It seemed, somehow, appropriate.”

But, like the other executives approached about a Marsalis deal, Lundvall was bothered by the high numbers that were reportedly being asked.

“I said, ‘Look, I can’t do it. I’d love to have Wynton, I’d love just to be back together with him,’ ” he explained. “ ‘But we can’t make it add up.’ But we continued to talk for a long period of time as his people were looking around for a deal.

“Finally, we came up with a kind of special joint venture arrangement in which we can’t make a lot of money, but if we don’t sell records, we don’t lose a lot, either. And if we hit a certain point in sales, Wynton makes a lot more as a royalty, so it’s very fair, all the way around, the kind of deal that makes a great deal of sense for everyone.”

The relationship applies to only Marsalis’ jazz efforts, and he still owes one more album to Columbia’s classical division. After that, he’s free to make any kind of classical music deal he chooses, either with Blue Note’s parent, EMI, or with anyone else on an individual album basis.

Representatives of Columbia did not respond to requests for comment.

Blue Note has been a prime jazz label since the ‘40s; its continuing stream of jazz performances was interrupted briefly in the late ‘70s before Lundvall took over the reconstituted company in 1984. Like everyone else in the jazz world, Marsalis is awed by the track record of a company that has recorded, to name only a very few artists, boogie woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, bop greats Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, as well as Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter.

His move to Blue Note, Marsalis says, keeps with his desire to keep his focus on the music.

“The thing that I put most stock in,” he says, “is the playing, in the music, in developing with my band. Blue Note may seem like a smaller company, but for a jazz musician it actually feels like being at a larger label, because there are more people involved who are strictly dedicated to jazz. And because most of them are musicians themselves, they understand that I’m not going to change my artistic vision to go with whatever decisions have to be made from a business standpoint.”