1951 - Start of the 10" Long Player Era

Start of the 10” Long Player Era 

 

Michael Cuscuna – The Blue Note Label: Discography – Greenwood Press 

Because of the financial burden of creating artwork, Blue Note was slow and cautious moving from 78s into the 10” lp format. They did not begin issuing lps until late 1951. Likewise, they did not move from 10” to 12” until the end of 1955, well after most labels. But on other levels, the label was far ahead of everyone else. Album covers became a distinctive component in the Blue Note mix. Frank Wolff’s extraordinarily sensitive and atmospheric candid photos and the advanced designs of Paul Bacon, Gil Melle and John Hermansader gave Blue Note a look as distinctive as its beautiful Bauhaus record ads of the 40s. 

1941 Marketing Brochure

Richard Havers – Uncompromising Expression – Thames and Hudson 

The challenge for Blue Note was to re-tool its catalogue from 78-rpm releases to 10-inch LPs. To begin with the company simply did not have the funds to effect the change. Things were at a low ebb both for the label and for Lion. His marriage had failed and he had moved to New Jersey, no doubt trying to save money to keep the label afloat. In 1950, there were just two sessions overseen by Lion: one with Bechet, the other with McGhee. Reducing the number of recordings was probably another cost-saving measure while Blue Note made the switch from 78s to LPs, a switch that required the company's store of acetates to be put on to tape, from which an LP master could be made.  

1945 Advertisement for a show
at the Town Hall, New York

The new format brought with it the additional cost of creating individual album sleeves. These were more expensive than the plain, mass-produced, 78-rpm paper sleeves that were a one-size-fits-all solution. When Blue Note began releasing their 10-inch LPs in September 1950, they did so in two distinct series. The first, built on the Bechet sessions, was launched with Blue Note LP 7001 by Sidney Bechet and reflects traditional jazz. The second, the Modern Jazz series, had the same release date and the first title was Blue Note LP 5001 Mellow The Mood. It featured an odd mix of music by Edmond Hall, Ike Quebec, and John Hardee recorded between 1941 and 1945.  

The initial six albums, priced at $3.75, featured sleeves designed by a 27-year-old New Yorker named Paul Bacon. An avid jazz fan, Bacon worked in a small local advertising agency and had got to know Lion through the Newark Hot Club. Bacon's artwork for such albums as Thelonious Monk's Genius Of Modern Music was influenced by David Stone Martin, who designed for Clef Records, but with one notable difference. Bacon's sleeves sometimes included one of Francis Wolff's photographs of the artist; it helped them to stand out. 

1948 marketing for Sidney Bechet
and Thelonious Monk 10" sides

Michael Cuscuna – Blue Note Photos – Francis Wolff – Flammarion 

Blue Note’s entry into modern jazz prompted Max Margulis to step away from the label and sell his interest to Alfred. The label’s reputation for individuality, taste and excellence was already being recognised. But its financial condition was, at best, very fragile. In 91949, Columbia Records introduced the 10” long-playing record which could offer up to twelve minutes of music on each side, enabling a record to contain three or four selections per side rather than one. 78 singles came in individual generic sleeves; all the necessary information was on the record label itself. The 10” LP introduced the need for album covers with information and graphics. A paper sleeve no longer sufficed because a record label could not contain all the information about an album’s worth of music. This development offered all sorts of marketing opportunities, but it also tremendously upped the cost of doing business.  

1950 Marketing for BN 103 Art Hodes

Richard Cook - Blue Note Records: The Biography – Secker and Warburg 2001 

The problem for Lion and Wolff was that it was also bringing about a new set of costs. Producing 78s in plain sleeves was cheap. But the start-up costs of the new idiom brought in a whole extra set of charges. There were covers to print and design. sleeve notes to write, photographs to develop. Although the mighty Columbia corporation fanfared its first long-playing records 1948, Blue Note did not follow suit, releasing nothing on microgroove until 1951. 

P41. In 1951. they finally released their first vinyl issues, ten-inch LPs which were initiated as two distinct series. First, they commenced a Dixieland series with BLP.7001, which reissued tracks from Sidney Bechet sessions of 1949 and 1950. The companion series was headed 'Modern jazz'. and began, somewhat incongruously, with the not-so-modern music from the Ike Quebec, John Hardee and Benny Morton sessions of the mid-forties. In an amazing piece of prescience, that first LP was given the overall title Mellow The Mood — Jazz In A Mellow Which - however unwittingly - anticipated the almost obsessive marketing of jazz as a 'mood music' in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Design by Paul Bacon
Photo by Francis Wolff

P49. Lion and Wolff were patrons of their arts as well as record businessmen. In the 1940s, their trade advertising in Down Beat, the leading American jazz magazine, and their give-away flyers, sometimes suggested the feel of the great Bauhaus school of design. 'Industrial' blocks of type were a simplistic but effective means of demonstrating what they were selling with ‘Blue Note’ always the huge, predominant phrase. For their first series of ten-inch the company employed three designers to establish the look. Besides [Gil] Melle, they had John Hermansader and Paul Bacon. Each employed 'interesting’ typography, or simply fanciful design: for all the subsequent suggestion that Blue Note was blazing a trail in jazz design from the first, though, the ten-inch covers actually offer little evidence of any coherent strategy. The unifying factor was, a separate ingredient: the photography of Frank Wolff.  

Richard Havers – Uncompromising Expression – Thames and Hudson 

When the initial batch of Blue Note 10-inch LPs came out, the information on the back was fairly limited: mostly an indication of who played on which tracks and text promoting other releases. Soon enough, however, the concept of liner notes took shape in response to people wanting to know more than just the bare facts. Enter Down Beat’s associate editor Leonard Feather, who became the first liner-note writer for the label. [One could argue Max Margulis had performed this role fairly exhaustively back in the 1940s...] Some of the first notes he contributed were for a series of albums by Erroll Garner called Overture to Dawn, which Lion decided to release. These home recordings, made in the closing months of 1944 at the home of Timme Rosenkrantz, a Danish nobleman and jazz fan living in New York, are fascinating time-pieces that offer an insight into the outstanding musical mind of the then 21-year-old Garner. By the early 1950s, Garner was well established and had a big hit in 1955 with his song ‘Misty’, although sadly not for Blue Note.