Blue Note’s 75 years of hot jazz

This is a big book, a monumental text with 800 illustrations, 400 of them in colour, to be contemplated more easily on a lectern than in bed, celebrating the 75-year history of the greatest record company devoted solely to the variegated music called jazz.

Blue Note Records, with headquarters in Manhattan, originated in the romantic imagination of a privileged adolescent, a Jewish architect’s son (the Jewishness was significant), who was born and brought up in Christopher Isherwood’s neighbourhood in Berlin, which regarded itself, with justification, as Europe’s capital of jazz in the hedonistic heyday of the Weimar republic. Alfred Lion precociously consorted with the city’s artists, musicians and all-round bohemian intellectuals. In his early teens there he admired Sam Wooding’s American band in the Chocolate Kiddies revue; and Alfred’s mother introduced him to Sidney Bechet, the black American clarinet and soprano saxophone virtuoso, who took New Orleans jazz to Germany in the 1920s.

Alfred visited the United States on his own at the age of 18, in 1926, returned to Berlin, and settled in New York soon afterwards, a few years before the Nazis anathemised jazz as the decadent music of negroes managed by Jews that Goebbels said threatened to corrupt the culture of German youth.

In New York in the 1930s entertainment was racially segregated, notably in Harlem’s Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington first became famous in the black cabaret, whose patrons were all white, by order of the gangsters who owned the place. Network radio stations broadcast jazz from the Cotton Club, the Savoy Ballroom and New York’s hotels, where white swing bands played between coast-to-coast tours. By the late 1930s jazz records could be heard for a nickel a spin in America’s 200,000 juke boxes.