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Blue Note Records holds a special place in the hearts of jazz fans. Since its founding in 1939, the label has recorded many of the most important names in jazz — a list limited just to saxophonists would include Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Joe Henderson, Joe Lovano, Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter — and chronicled the development of influential movements like hard bop, 1960s avant-garde and, more recently, jazz incorporating hip-hop textures.

Surprises and Snubs? Tell us which other albums should have been included in Blue Note’s list of 100 essentials and which perhaps should have been left off. Post a Comment»

To commemorate those achievements, Blue Note has created a “75th Anniversary Vinyl Initiative.” Beginning on Tuesday, and continuing through October of next year, each month Blue Note will release five remastered vinyl recordings that it considers “essential,” in jackets that retain the original, much-admired artwork. The complete list of 100 is here (PDF). (Here is the release schedule.)

The list highlights the depth of the Blue Note catalog, nearly 1,000 titles, and also lends itself to the kind of parlor games that jazz fans always love to play: Who got slighted? Who is overrepresented? The floor is now open to readers’ suggestions (and complaints). Is there anyone on the list you would have left off? And do you think that the recordings chosen to represent each artist are necessarily their best? What alternative choices would you have made? (Blue Note’s Spotify app includes many of its most notable artists and releases.)

“You can’t go wrong with that list, but yeah, it’s arbitrary, so you’re still going to miss a lot,” said Don Was, president of Blue Note “It was actually supposed to be 75 for the 75th year anniversary, but we couldn’t agree on 75, so we had to expand it to 100.”

WHERE’S BLUE MITCHELL?

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To get the conversation started: I was delighted to see “Unity,” by the organist Larry Young, included in the first month’s offerings. Not only is the record itself a joy, with wonderful performances from an ensemble that included Joe Henderson on saxophone, Woody Shaw on trumpet and Elvin Jones on drums, but I like to think that Blue Note was making a bold statement about its intentions by releasing a Larry Young record ahead of anything by Jimmy Smith, the best-known jazz organist of the time and a Blue Note stalwart who released more than a dozen records on the label.

Blue Note is also to be saluted for including some other artists who don’t have a big public footprint even among jazz fans, like the trombonist Grachan Moncur III, who is represented by “Evolution.” And I have to confess that though I wasn’t familiar with Tina Brooks, a tenor saxophonist who died young but played on a number of Blue Note sessions in the late ’50s and early ’60s, I found his “True Blue,” also on the list, to be a wonderful introduction to his work.

But I was also puzzled by some omissions from the list. Where is the trumpeter Blue Mitchell? The “essential 100” includes three recordings each by his contemporaries Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan. If I were compiling the list, I’d have found a way to include Mitchell’s “The Thing to Do,” a nifty 1964 session with a very young Chick Corea on piano and an even younger Al Foster on drums.

And what about the saxophonist Sam Rivers? “Fuchsia Swing Song,” from late 1964, was his extremely accomplished debut as a leader, an example of avant-garde ’60s jazz that still shows affinities with hard bop and blues. That seems more appropriate than Stanley Turrentine’s “That’s Where It’s At,” a routine effort from a humdrum player. Or maybe one of the four Hank Mobley records on the list could have been sacrificed. It’s always fun to hear Mobley blow, but four titles seems a little much for this exercise.

A ‘HIGHLY SUBJECTIVE’ LIST

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The Blue Note chief Mr. Was, 61, acknowledged that creating a truly definitive list of the label’s key recordings would be essentially impossible. In an interview this month, the veteran musician and producer talked about the process of choosing “the jewels of the Blue Note catalog” and the technical challenges the project presented. Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited and condensed.

Mr. Was has also responded in comments in a three-part posting. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)

Q.

What makes these records “essential” to a jazz record collector?

A.

(Laughs). Yeah, there’s a lot of hubris in a statement like that. The selection process was highly subjective, and having a couple of different interests within the Universal Group, you get a good cross-section. It’s a combination, I suppose, of some of the best-selling records from our catalog as well as some personal favorites — and quite often they overlapped. And also, this is a conscious effort to represent the post-1984 output.

I ran the list by a number of people, I made an initial list, and then we made revisions. Everyone agreed on the first 50, no one would say “that doesn’t belong in there.” And then the back half becomes highly subjective. I think you can say it’s one essential list, and everyone will come up with their own.

Q.

How did your relationship with this body of music begin? Do you remember the first Blue Note recording you ever heard?

A.

I absolutely remember, like I would remember getting struck by lightning. I was 14 or something like that, driving around with my mom, running errands in Detroit, and she pulled up in front of the library and left me with the keys to the car, to play with the radio. I was just fiddling with the dial, and found Joe Henderson’s “Mode for Joe,” which I think had just come out. I came in on the sax solo, and it was like “what the hell is this?” It was riveting, and it spoke to me.

Q.

In the online notes for this project, you talk about “running dozens of sonic experiments” to determine the best sound for these releases. Can you address that?

A.

Until the ’70s there are no multitracks, so you can’t go back and remix this stuff, which I think is good, because otherwise everyone would be editorializing all over the place. And you couldn’t just release the master tapes and have that be an accurate version of what the record was about.

But that opened up a can of worms. Because if the unmastered tapes are not the definitive version, then what is? What are you aiming for? What is the standard? Well, it’s the original intention of the artist, when everyone approved it and said “this can come out.” You gauge it by assuming that everyone has approved the first vinyl.

So what we did was line up all of the CDs that we can find, different incarnations of them, and the original vinyl, and we listen to the original vinyl to see if anything has ever come close to the original feel. That’s really what it’s about — not so much frequencies as feel, though there’s an integral relationship between the two. We went through and did blindfold tests on everything. Nothing is labeled, and we go through, and pick the one that comes closest to feeling like the original.

A lot of it is abstract, and it took a lot of trial and error to actually land on a formula that works. But I think that we have an m.o. now that is pretty much in place and is not so hit and miss any more.

Q.

Is there a conscious effort with this list to direct more attention to underappreciated musicians and instruments?

A.

Yes. Like I said, everyone is going to come up with their own list. There’s no definitive list, and there’s no right or wrong. But I thought it was important to show the breadth of the catalog. We didn’t just want to do the obvious records. But you have to do the obvious records too.

Q.

Certain artists have to be on this list because they are so important in jazz history, like Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, and others because they are so closely associated with the label and recorded so often for it, like Horace Silver. How did you decide which of their recordings to include and which to leave out?

A.

Some of it was personal. I did the exact same thing you would do, except I just happen to be the president of the company at the moment. I devoted a weekend to it, probably the most amount of fun I’ve had working at Blue Note, and I’ve had a lot of fun. I had Michael Cuscuna’s book, I had a list from the catalog department of the best-selling albums, and then I had my record collection. It was just a fanboy thing. It was a blast, but there is no great design there.

Q.

So does that mean you’re open to suggestions? There’s obviously never going to be unanimity on a list like this, and arguing over the choices is half the fun of it.

A.

I’m definitely going to pay attention to what comes out of your thing, what your readers are going to be doing. I’d love to respond. If you come up with a consensus on something we missed, we’ll put it in there. Maybe we’ll make November 2015 for five that didn’t make it. November 2015 is going to reflect the results you get on this thing, and you can tell your readers that. We just decided. That’s how subjective this is. (Laughs)

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