Bkue note studio3/16/2023 ![]() So he got the bug to start recording jazz, an impulse that really hit him when he saw John Hammond’s “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall in December 1938. In the mid-’30s, he and his mother moved to New York, where he fell in with the whole Commodore Records shop crowd, all the guys who were big mavens and collectors who became important in the record business later, like John Hammond and Milt Gabler. He was working on lobster boats down there and eventually started an import-export business that brought him into contact with New York. He and his mother went down to South America, to Chile. Thelonious Monk was like this fully formed alien that had just landed on earth. He wasn’t running away from anything-he was running to something. He was on his way to America to get close to jazz. For me, the important point is he was not a refugee. I think he told me he left Germany before Hitler was elected, but some people say it was after the election. But he brought with him all of these 78s that he had managed to accumulate.Īlfred wanted to get back to New York any way he could. That put him in the hospital for three or four months, and then he was sent back to Germany. One day, one of the dock workers who didn’t like immigrant labor hustling in on their jobs-a timeless American motif-whacked him in the back with a two-by-four with a nail sticking out of it. With every cent he earned, he would buy 78s. He literally slept on benches in Central Park, and he eventually got a job on the docks offloading boats. He went to New York with no money at all in the late ’20s. He became close with Frank, and they really became jazz mavens.įrank stayed in Berlin and studied photography, but Alfred was obsessed with the music. ![]() In the early ’20s, he started to find the other guys, including Francis Wolff, who were his age and were getting interested in this new music. His mother had some sort of commercial jazz 78s around the house, and he started listening to those. But he said, “I just remember loving the sound of the beat of the drums.”Īrt Blakey, the heartbeat of Blue Note, leading the Jazz Messengers at the Cork ‘N Bib on Long Island, October 1958. All the musicians thought he was real cute, so they just protected him so he wouldn’t get caught. He would sneak out and get into the orchestra pit, and he’d just sit down behind the drums. He told me that when he was a little kid-six or seven years old-and his family was on vacation, his parents would put him to bed and then they would go out to the ballroom and dance. Collectors Weekly: How did Alfred Lion, the founder of Blue Note, get interested in jazz?Ĭuscuna: Alfred was raised in Berlin his mother was French and his father was a Berliner. The box set was really a solution to figure out what to do with 30 minutes of unissued Monk. That was not enough for a full album, but it occurred to me that if I took all of Monk’s music for Blue Note, put it in chronological order, and folded this new stuff in, I’d have a perfect four-LP set. I had also found half an hour’s worth of unissued recordings. I suggested a set of the complete Thelonious Monk Blue Note recordings-his Blue Note recordings were his most important work, and they were not readily available. We devised a plan, which included doing some box sets. In the early ’80s, when work was slow, Charlie and I decided to convince Capitol EMI to restart Blue Note. That lasted until about 1981. By the end of the ’70s, the whole record business had crashed, and it really wouldn’t come back again until the advent of the CD in ’85, ’86. and do something.” So I went into the vault and we started doing double albums and, later, single albums of previously unissued material. My inquiries fell on deaf ears until 1975, when I met a guy named Charlie Lourie, who had just joined Blue Note. I started to keep a list of these sessions in a little notebook, and in 1973 I started banging on the door of Blue Note to find someone to show it to. Naturally I had a lot of jazz-musician friends, and many of them told me that they’d played in a lot of Blue Note sessions that were never released. When I was a jazz DJ in Philadelphia, Blue Note was always my favorite label. “Blue Train,” 1957, was John Coltrane’s only album for Blue Note.
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