This week begins the festival Blue Note Xperia, after a first edition, now two years old, who had served as a launching pad. While Norah Jones, whose latest album keeps up with the style and atmosphere of its beginnings, and Ben l’oncle Soul, already full, other artists will also be present, Al Jarreau, Charles Lloyd, Paolo Fresu and Richard Galliano and Jan Lundgren, passing by the representatives of the new generation, already well known, such as Robert Glasper, Christian Scott and Trombone Shorty, or to discover, like Kandace Springs and Terrace Martin. What brings these musicians, quite different by their style and their age? Belonging to the label Blue Note, as a producer or broadcaster, but not only, because the project Mare Nostrum, Fresu, Galliano and Lundgren, for instance, is published by ACT. The trio symbolizes the european presence within a group of artists, especially americans. This would, however, forget that Blue Note Records, the famous label founded in New York in 1939 by Alfred Lion, Max Margulis and Francis Wolff, all three German jews from Berlin.
Max Margulis, Pete Johnson, Abe Bolar, Alfred Lion, Ulysses Livingston. Photo taken by Francis Wolff in 1939 (DR)
This story could be told otherwise, in the intersection of the exchanges between Berlin, Paris and New York, either in the positive (that came from artists of african-americans in the German capital in the 1920s and early 1930s; travel in the United States of the few German fans of jazz) or negative (attempts of the nazis not ban jazz as a musical expression, but to make “white”, creating competing groups of underground berlin and american artists during the Second world War). Beyond the musical dimension of the presence of transatlantic jazz, there is a political and cultural history, one that will see american soldiers (which are already present in 1918), that they are white or black, accompanied by their citizen commitment for the liberation of the camps, the end of the fighting and the capitulation of nazi to the example of the young leader of the Band Dave Brubeck.
Dave Brubeck and his first Band (DR)
The artistic adventure exceptional Blue Note by Sidney Bechet, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, to Jason Moran today, crossed the dynamics of the cultural legacy of the New Deal the legacy of the Bauhaus and european modern art (Wolff is a photographer, and the graphic artists of the label will give an inimitable style to the disks home). In a pendulum motion quite interestingly, this is today the French, in this case the Universal group, who released Blue Note of a long phase of decline (like Impulse!). And it is a German born in Poland, Siggi Loch, who created in 1992 the label ACT, where the French Peirani and Parisien have found playmates for their latest CD (Michael Wollny and Joachim Kühn). It will be recalled also that the label ECM, founded in 1969 by Manfred Eicher, has edited a number of major american artists, starting with Keith Jarrett, while developing a european production of the highest level.
Keith Jarret Charles Lloyd Quartet by madafonka2
In 1989, the ECM allows the saxophonist Charles Lloyd, to restart his career. It will be at Pleyel on Saturday, November 19.
This post is also published on the blog of Christian Delage.
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