The most influential jazz label in music history, Blue Note Records, celebrates its 80th birthday this year. The round birthday is a fitting occasion to remember the two founders, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, who emigrated from Germany to New York, and their work.
This was also the opinion of Siggi Loch, founder of the jazz label ACT, who still knew Lion and Wolff personally and made them his role models. He therefore curated a band capable of casting the epochal years of Blue Note up to the mid-sixties in a program that takes a similarly wide and virtuosically curved arc as the artists of Blue Note. It begins with a short appearance by Axel Zwingenberger from Hamburg, who returns to the early years of his career on the piano and brings the unjustly ridiculed art, the boogie, back into the right light.
For his retrospective, Siggi Loch has chosen saxophonist Émile Parisien to lead the band, and his accompanying quintet includes Theo Croker (trumpet), Glenn Ferris (trombone), Yaron Herman (piano), Joe Martin (bass) and Gerald Cleaver (drums). As a special guest, saxophonist Benny Golson will be part of the party, which may confidently be called a small sensation. The musician, who turned 90 on January 25 of this year, was still actively involved in Blue Note's golden era, and his lyrically warm tone can also be heard on the 1958 landmark "Moanin'" by Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.
Siggi Loch caught the jazz virus when he heard Sidney Bechet's first recordings in the mid-fifties. His "Summertime" will now also open the evening "It must schwing", followed by classics - what else? - by Bud Powell, John Coltrane, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. What better way to describe the significance of the Blue Note label than with these names? "This project ", says Émile Parisien, was "one of the best of Siggi Lochs" many very good ideas, he himself and his band are already grateful to Siggi for it, "the whole jazz community will probably follow suit."
It remains to explain the slightly bizarre title of this Karsten Jahnke JazzNight. While Francis Wolff, as a photographer, was responsible for the covers of Blue Note's albums, which are still style-defining today, Alfred Lion defined their musical principles. And because, as an emigrant, he never really mastered the language of his new homeland, the phrase most often handed down by him is "It must schwing", to which all his musicians adhered. Blue Note without groove was and remained unthinkable. This is still the case today, but Siggi Loch lets his retrospective end in the mid-sixties. Lion retired in 1967, Wolff died four years later. The music they helped bring to world fame may still be called immortal.
Presented by Journal Frankfurt
Text source and more information about this event: https://www.alteoper.de/de/programm/veranstaltung.php?id=521139955
