CHAPTER ONE Charlie Lourie The level of expression, the recorded sound, the graphics, and the courageous stretching of boundaries made blue note a distinct beacon in the documentation of jazz. On January 6, 1939, German emigre Alfred Lion entered a New York City recording studio and made a series of masterful recordings with boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis. In the process, Blue Note Records was created. During the next twenty-eight years, Lion produced one of the most visionary and artistically successful bodies of work in the history of the record business. The level of expression, the recorded sound, the graphics, and the courageous stretching of boundaries made Blue Note a distinct beacon in the documentation of jazz. It profoundly affected the lives of tens of thousands. Its excellence inspired most of today's leaders in the jazz record business to do what they do. And in the case of Michael Cuscuna and me, it literally shaped the direction our lives would take. We met at Blue Note in 1975, when I hired Michael to research the vaults for the wealth of unreleased material that was rumored to exist. We became friends, and ultimately created Mosaic Records in 1982, largely as a home for Blue Note masters which were neglected after the label became a moribund corporate casualty. One spring morning in 1983, a letter arrived. We opened it quite excitedly, since the handwriting on its envelope was as familiar to us as our own--years of examining hundreds of tape boxes with notes or contents scrawled on the back had embedded its distinctive look indelibly in our minds. It was the hand of Alfred Lion, who had by then been retired and incommunicado from the jazz world for sixteen years. Michael and I had just launched Mosaic. Since two of Mosaic's first three sets consisted of Blue Note masters, Alfred had written to find out who we were and what rights we had to release Blue Note recordings. Under ordinary circumstances the receipt of such a letter would be a routine occurrence requiring only a perfunctory letter of explanation. But these circumstances were hardly ordinary. Alfred and his partner Frank Wolff had sold Blue Note to Liberty Records in 1966. A year later, Alfred retired for health reasons, severing all his ties to the jazz community and dropping completely out of sight. The only relationship he continued to maintain was with his close friend Horace Silver, who, out of respect for Alfred's wish for privacy, never divulged his whereabouts. As the years passed and appreciation grew for the consistent brilliance of his life's work, Alfred's status as both a visionary seeker of talent and a sensitive and savvy producer of that talent attained the level of legend. Thrilled by a direct communique from Alfred Lion, Michael and I wrote back and explained our new company, expressed our respect and admiration for all he had accomplished, and sent copies of Mosaic's Thelonious Monk and Albert Ammons & Meade Lux Lewis sets. Both collections contained some of Blue Note's most historic recordings, but the latter, we knew, would be particularly important to Alfred, since it reconstructed his first recording session, which indeed was the genesis of Blue Note Records. A few weeks later a collect telephone call came in from Alfred to Michael. They talked for a long while, at first tentatively, then gradually more animatedly. it was a moving experience to watch Michael, who had become the world's pre-eminent Blue Note authority, at last have the opportunity to speak with the man who created it all--to actually hear Alfred's voice with its pronounced German accent, and to ask some of the questions that had been gnawing at him for most of his life. In a large sense, it was a grown son talking for the first time to the father he'd never met. After that first conversation Alfred telephoned often, and Michael and I each developed a warm friendship with him. Although in frail health due to a bad heart, his mind was razor-sharp, open to the new, and insatiably curious. We had hour-long conversations about music (he had a high regard for Prince), the machinations of today's record business (he liked his era better), medicine (he was experimenting with chelation therapy), and many other subjects. Alfred was a wonderful man to talk to--full of ideas, energy, warmth, good humor, and brimming with an infectious joie de vivre. During the first year and a half, our relationship was carried on clandestinely, at least as far as Alfred's wife, Ruth, was concerned. It was at the beginning of the second phone call when Alfred declared in a low, childlike whisper, "Ruth's gone out for a while, I can talk now," that we began to realize why he'd become jazz's Judge Crater. Ruth Mason was, and still is, a woman of great beauty, both inside and out. She joined Blue Note as the head of publicity after a successful stint as a New York jazz radio personality. In 1966, after being together for eleven years, she and Alfred were married. They loved each other deeply and were extremely supportive and protective of one another. One of Ruth's greatest concerns was that Alfred would succumb to a heart attack if they continued their stressful lifestyle. She convinced him to completely abandon the jazz life and move to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where they lived happy, quiet, healthy lives for twelve years. In 1979, concerned that Alfred would soon require better medical facilities than were available to them in Mexico, they returned to the States and settled in the Rancho Bernardo section of San Diego. For years Alfred remained true to his commitment to Ruth and avoided contact with the old life, except to stay in touch with Horace, who kept him up to date on old friends and new music. But seeing a New York Times review of our Ammons/Lewis and Thelonious Monk sets stirred passionate memories and prompted him to contact us. That letter and telephone call started him on the road to a reemergence, which Ruth was later to estimate added two wonderful years to his life. In 1984, the current Blue Note owners, Capitol Records, secured the considerable talents of Bruce Lundvall, in part to reactivate the label as a major force in jazz. As a means of garnering worldwide publicity for the relaunching, Lundvall devised the idea of a major Town Hall concert, which would feature many of the previous stars of Blue Note along with the label's new crop of signings. He asked Michael, whom he had hired as a label consultant, to plan the program, oversee the concert production, and produce the eventual recordings and home videos. At some point the happy, but far-fetched thought arose to invite Alfred and Ruth to the event, perhaps even as guests of honor. Telegrams from Michael and Bruce were sent, and three days later, to everyone's astonishment, the Lions accepted the invitation. When Alfred and Ruth arrived in New York, it was to a hero's welcome. The major press sought them out for interviews and old friends and associates clamored for a portion of their limited time in the Big Apple. But the moments of highest drama occurred when Alfred visited the rehearsals, where he was greeted for the first time in almost two decades by the great artists whose careers he had helped launch--artists who were now members of the jazz pantheon, such as Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Turrentine, Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henderson, Tony Williams, McCoy Tyner, Jackie McLean, Woody Shaw, Art Blakey, Johnny Griffin, Jimmy Smith, Lou Donaldson, Kenny Burrell, Ron Carter, and Curtis Fuller. The air was thick with emotion, and the deference and respect these men of great egos paid to Alfred after all those years was palpable evidence of his importance to their lives. At the end of a whirlwind week, on February 22, 1985, Alfred and Ruth walked onto the stage of Town Hall and were greeted by a sustained, thunderous, standing ovation by the sold-out house. I believe Alfred was a modest man who gave no thought to the importance or lasting value of his work. Like many men of remarkable accomplishment, he did it simply because he loved doing it. But on that night, with the jazz elite literally at his feet, he and Ruth experienced for the first time how the world felt about him. And as they say, there wasn't a dry eye in the house. The concert was a singular success and Bruce's vision of a worldwide publicity bonanza was fully realized. Press coverage was intense in major cities around the globe. When stories hit the Japanese media, the Japanese television network, NTV, took immediate notice. They were looking for a concept for a one-time-only jazz event that they could later televise. Impressed by the passion and excitement generated by the Town Hall event, plus the substantial sales of Blue Note recordings in Japan, they decided on a festival built around Blue Note. They hired Michael, the creative force behind the Town Hall concert, to produce a three-day, five-concert Blue Note festival to take place in late August, 1986, at a gorgeous site on Lake Yamanaka at the foot of Mt. Fuji. And, taking another page out of the Town Hall program, they invited Alfred and Ruth to come to Japan as the festival's guests of honor. That first Fuji festival (it became an annual event, and 1995 was the tenth!) was a magical event. The setting, with magnificent Mt. Fuji looming ever-present over the site, had a spiritual aura to it, and the artists responded by digging deep into their souls for music of extraordinary beauty. The audience contributed mightily as well. Where else but in Japan can one see a field packed with fifteen thousand teens and twentysomethings roar with excited recognition at the first four bars of Sonny Clark's "Cool Struttin"? We were all in jazz heaven. It was in this context that Alfred, in increasingly failing health, and Ruth stepped once again onto a stage to receive plaudits from an adoring public. And adoring it was. If they were received as heroes in New York, their visit to Japan was a virtual Second Coming. Alfred's reaction to all of this swung from shock to ecstasy--shock from his disbelief that he had traveled halfway around the world and was being celebrated in such a manner, ecstasy at the realization that it was actually happening. That his life's work was being acknowledged and validated. That he had made a difference. That weekend in Japan, Alfred took his last bow. He went home to San Diego, had more interviews, talked to various people who wanted to write histories of Blue Note, and continued to call us in Connecticut, although no longer secretly. On February 2, 1987, at the age of seventy-eight, his heart finally gave out. Obituaries appeared all over the world, and in Los Angeles and New York the jazz community gathered to pay homage to a good man. He was buried in a cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey, just a few yards from the grave of his friend, Francis Wolff. Which brings us to Francis and the photographs at hand. Not long before he died, Alfred said, "You know, you have friends in your life, but maybe only one friend, really. Frank was that person for me." They had met as young boys in Berlin, where they lived in the same neighborhood, and became friends upon the discovery of their mutual love of jazz. The friendship deepened and lasted for almost fifty years. Frank became a professional photographer in Germany, and after joining Alfred at Blue Note late in 1939, it was only natural for him to bring his camera to recording sessions. During more than thirty years as a label executive he photographed almost every Blue Note session. In doing so, he amassed a vast library of images, which reveal him to be a brilliant and masterful artist in his own right. (And as an immense bonus for posterity, there is no more important body of work in recording history that can boast such thorough visual documentation as the recording sessions of Blue Note Records.) At first, Frank shot purely for the love of it. But with the advent of the LP era, and the attendant need for cover art, his work as a photographer became a vital resource for the label. His photographs came to be a distinctive element of hundreds of album covers, which helped to define the unique Blue Note gestalt. But the requirements of album graphics, publicity photos, and print ads utilized only a tiny fraction of the totality of his work. The rest of this photographic treasure trove, literally thousands of breathtaking images, was simply filed away by session in manila envelopes and never seen again by anyone. When the Lions retired in 1967, Frank packed the complete Blue Note photographic archive into a four-foot-long, three-foot-wide, three-foot-high carton and shipped it to Alfred in Cuernavaca. It was a gift that deeply touched Alfred, but it was also fraught with the pain of separation from his lifelong friend. Alfred could not bring himself to open the box, and simply stored it in his guest house, where it remained during his entire twelve-year stay in Mexico. After the move to Rancho Bernardo in 1979, the box was put in a garage. And there it sat, still unopened, until early 1986. It was then that Alfred, in a moment of utter poignancy, offered to let us use the photographs to illustrate our Mosaic booklets. This was, of course, a spectacular windfall for us. But as unexpected as it was, it was probably predictable given Alfred's nature. After our initial gift to him, we continued to send him Mosaic sets of Blue Note reissues as they were released. In time Alfred began to grapple with the reality that our booklets would be immeasurably enhanced by the addition of photographs from the actual sessions. When his lifelong compulsion to do things right finally overcame his powerful emotional resistance to confronting Frank's photographs, he made the offer. From that point on, the quality of our booklets took a quantum leap forward with the lavish inclusion of Frank's work. For a year, Alfred selected the shots and sent them to us. After his death, Ruth asked us to remove the collection to Connecticut in order to properly archive the priceless prints and negatives which had been languishing in manila envelopes for so many years, and to administrate their use. Ruth also had a strong conviction that Frank's talents should be more widely recognized, and she thought we might be able to help to achieve that. Quite naturally, our first thought was to publish a book. What better way to focus worldwide attention on the art of Frank Wolff than with a major presentation of his work in art book form? But we quickly dropped the idea when the daunting realities of properly doing such a project became evident. In October, 1993, we received the second fateful telephone call of this story. It was Oscar Schnider proposing a collaboration on precisely the book we wanted to do. We would write the text, and he would design a beautiful book that would communicate our shared enthusiasm for Frank's photography. At that moment, all the lights went on. We were familiar with Oscar's work and had no question about his ability to create a book of unique beauty. He is a gifted designer who has a successful business performing high-level assignments for major corporations. In addition, he's had a lifelong love affair with jazz and derives much pleasure from a sort of pro bono sideline designing innovative graphics for jazz record companies and artists' managers who couldn't possibly afford his normal fees. In fact, the last few Mosaic brochures are the direct beneficiaries of his largesse. For Michael and me, having someone of Oscar's caliber involved meant the difference between total immobility and vigorous action to bring this book to fruition. Finding a publisher at all, let alone a sensitive and responsive one, is often the most difficult and aggravating aspect of bringing a book to life. But the good fortune that blessed this project from the beginning continued in our first meeting with the people at Rizzoli. They had great respect for Blue Note's history, knew of Frank's photography, and had an instinctive appreciation for what we wanted to do. There are many great characters in this story whose lives will have a positive and lasting impact on the music world and everyone affected by it. But this is Frank Wolff's book and it exists solely to celebrate his consumate artistry. I hope we've come close to doing it justice. Copyright (c) 1995 Mosaic Images and Oscar Schnider. All rights reserved.