Plus: Listen to a Spotify playlist of classic Blue Note songs here

Seventy-five years ago, in the hopeless days of the Depression and with fascism rising in Europe, a German-Jew on the run named Alfred Lion made a gamble. He started a record label in New York — Blue Note, he called it — and signed mainly African-American musicians, most of whom had music and little opportunity elsewhere, no fallback plan, no safety net. A thoroughly American story, in other words.

The first recording was a boogie-woogie number — light in the darkest of days — by not one, but two pianists, Albert Ammons and Meade "Lux" Lewis, a session rousingly re-created last month at New York's Town Hall by two young Blue Note talents, Robert Glasper and Jason Moran, both friends of hip-hop and pop. They wore tuxedos with limited-edition Blue Note Adidas shell tops, and seamlessly transitioned into recent work by Glasper, who routinely packs 25-year-olds into venues like the Highline Ballroom (for anyone who may think of Blue Note, or jazz, as sepia-toned).

The Town Hall concert was just the beginning of a year-long celebration that includes the Portland Jazz Festival currently underway; an exhibit at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles opening in March; a Moran performance at the Kennedy Center in May; an autobiography from Bruce Lundvall, who revived the label in the 1980s; a book from Thames & Hudson in the fall; and all sorts of releases, both reissues of some of the classic titles on vinyl and new ones by many in the label's impressive roster, including Ambrose Akinmusire, Joe Lovano/Dave Douglas, Bobby Hutcherson, and Wayne Shorter, whose excellent release last year, Without a Net, expresses the ethos of Blue Note and jazz itself.

Moran and Glasper, signed in 1998 and 2005 respectively, both talked at Town Hall about how they were told by Lundvall — in the spirit of Alfred Lion — to make the music they wanted. "You make the music, we'll sell it," Glasper said of Lundvall. What more lilting words could a creative soul hear?

Other labels have done a great service to jazz, but Blue Note, through its staying power and willingness to take risk, has reflected the diversity within jazz: hot, cool, swing, bop, hard bop, free, fusion, to the eclecticism of today, like Roseanne Cash, Al Green, Norah Jones, the superlative Brazilian mega-star Marisa Monte, and José James. You wonder, if the nimbleAlfred Lion — informed by a life in which risk was a necessity — didn't document this music, would anyone else have? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe some of it, maybe not in the same way. We'll never know. And anyway, he did, thankfully.

Funny thing about Lion: He's never been celebrated as a superhero of race relations, maybe because he didn't pound his chest the way so many in the arts and politics did during the Civil Rights Movement. Lion loved the music, especially the pre-war music. He even — and this was a Blue Note thing — paid musicians to rehearse. He wasn't a "do-gooder," but he done good.

The label's greatest period was the mid-1950s through the late-1960s — Lion sold off the label in 1967 because of health issues — as the world began to roil and jazz had already lost its prominence as America's popular music. But there it stood, with artists (and yes artists, not merely recording stars as the word is used to mean today) like Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk (his very best work is on Blue Note), Bud Powell, Jackie McLean, Horace Silver, Bobby Hutcherson, Eric Dolphy, Grachan Moncur III, on and on, producing urgent, vital work. Jazz was an aging heavyweight standing in the middle of the ring in the later rounds against this young upstart, rock 'n' roll, throwing haymakers, and landing.

And Blue Note was there, ringside, like Howard Cosell, while Cecil Taylor howled and did more to rip things down than any beatnik or hippie. This revolution may not have been televised, but it was photographed by Francis Wolff (who alsoemigratedfrom Germany), engineered by Rudy Van Gelder (a former optometrist), anddesigned by Reid Miles, a graphic designer for Esquire in the early 1950s before hecreated almost 500 album covers in fifteen years, with three assists from Andy Warhol in 1958.(Thank heavens vinyl is back in fashion.) And that, the four of them, was more or less the team. It was a tiny operation, the epitome of a small business, something that helped make this country great. Has there ever been a tighter production quartet in recorded music history than Lion, Wolff, Van Gelder, and Miles?

At their best, the albums were objets d'art. Not only did they have substance and style — the musicians provided the former and wore the Esquire fashions of the day — but the cover designs by Reid Miles, not a jazz fan by the way, pointed to where the music might be headed: Jimmy Smith, titan of the Hammond organ, posing in front of a soul food luncheonette; Art Blakey, in jacket and tie, working up a sweat behind the hi-hat; Larry Young, the searching keyboardist, enveloped within a piece of modernist architecture.

That heavyweight fight, rock vs. jazz? We know who eventually won — the skilled boxer doesn't always impress the judges, or the public — but a comeback was in store. Blue Note, after a period of dormancy, like jazz itself in the 1970s and early 1980s, was brought back to life by Bruce Lundvall, with help from legendary producer Michael Cuscuna, starting with a reunion concert at the same Town Hall in New York where the 75th festivities launched. But true to the spirit of the label, it was more than reissues and the old days. Lundvall would soon sign musicians like young guitarist Stanley Jordan, and pianist Don Pullen, a splendid avant-garde player out of the Charles Mingus orbit.

Since 2012, the label has been headed by the unlikely but somehow perfect Don Was, of the post-disco outfit Was (Not Was), famous for the immortal anthem "Walk the Dinosaur." Was is as far from a suit as you can imagine, which is why he's so endearing as an executive. He has only strengthened the label, signing new musicians like Gregory Porter and José James, bringing back Terence Blanchard and Wayne Shorter, andgreen-lighting Elvis Costello's collaboration with the Roots.

Anniversaries are everywhere in the culture, but seventy-fifth anniversaries? And from artistic endeavors? This very magazine had its eightieth last year,and everyone acquainted with American literature knows well Esquire's contribution to it, then and now.

On one of the very early Blue Note releases from 1939, this statement appeared, not so much a manifesto, but a raison d'etre, written, presumably, by Alfred Lion himself, simple but profound:

Blue Note records are designed simply to serve the uncompromising expression of hot jazz and swing, in general. Any particular style of playing which represents an authentic way of musical feeling is genuine expression. By virtue of its significance in place, time and circumstance, it possesses its own tradition, artistic standards and audience that keeps it alive. Hot jazz, therefore, is expression and communication, a musical and social manifestation, and Blue Note Records are concerned with identifying its impulse, not its sensational and commercial adornments.

What else to say? Oh, yes: Happy birthday, Blue Note.

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