Drew’s work can be found at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Miami University unveils sculpture by Leonardo Drew on Western Campus
A great record label is about more than music. Yes, it’s about the quality of that music, the character of that music, the sound of that music. Yet it’s also about things beyond what’s heard. A great record label often has a look. It always has a style and a sensibility and, sometimes, when the planets line up, it can even have a mystique.
On all of those counts, Blue Note, the greatest of all jazz labels, and still going strong 85 years after its founding, more than qualifies.
Look, style, and mystique — there’s even a bit of music, too — are very much to be found in “The All Seeing Eye: Blue Note Records Through the Lens of Francis Wolff.” The show is at the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame, at the Boch Center’s Wang Theatre. A closing date has yet to be announced. Maybe it will run forever? Nothing wrong with that.
Wolff (1907-71) was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. He’d been childhood friends with Alfred Lion (1908-87). Lion was also Jewish and fled the Nazis. Both men were jazz enthusiasts. More than that, they were highly discerning and eclectic in their enthusiasm. Blue Note, the record label Lion founded when he reached New York, would reflect those qualities. When Lion was drafted, Wolff ran the company for him. He stayed on with Blue Note, as a senior executive, occasional producer, and house photographer. In that last role he took some 20,000 photographs, a matchless one-man visual archive of jazz.
“Eye” consists of nearly four dozen photographs, almost all of them by Wolff, ranging in date from 1941 to 1968. The prints were newly struck for the show. A few are familiar, such as the portrait of John Coltrane that is on the cover of “Blue Train.” There the portrait is cropped and tinged blue, an example of the use Wolff’s photos were put to by the label’s art director, Reid Miles. All but four of the photos in the show are black and white. In our color-dominated visual world, black and white now has two effects. It seems both otherworldly yet also more realistic and serious (your definition of those two words is as good as mine). That those two effects are ostensibly opposed makes the photographs all the more striking.
There are also 13 album covers, several blown-up contact sheets, and two videos. One of them is an interview with Don Was, the label’s current head. The other is Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in concert, performing “Moanin’.” The sound fills the two galleries, and it’s as irresistible as the show: mood as subset of mystique. There’s also a vintage Rolleiflex, Wolff’s preferred camera, though the one on display wasn’t his, and a copy of the label’s first press release. Publicity is to record labels as reeds are to saxophones.
Many factors went into making Blue Note … Blue Note. There were the musicians, of course. The label started out recording traditional jazz. The show includes photographs of Sidney Bechet and Meade Lux Lewis. (Is there a better jazz name than “Meade Lux Lewis”?) It recorded bebop early on. Look for Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell here. Later on it dabbled in the avant-garde. Note the presence of Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and Cecil Taylor. The heart of Blue Note was hard bop and beyond: Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins (both only briefly, but memorably, on the label), Blakey and the Messengers, Horace Silver, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson. All are in “Eye.”
Blue Note’s heyday coincided with the arrival of engineer Rudy Van Gelder. The sound that he — well, what’s the right verb: captured? created? forged? composed? That last one may be best. Technique as artistry is what Van Gelder practiced. Heard today, Blue Note recordings of the ‘50s and ‘60s are aurally unmistakable: full, crisp, spacious, robust, immediate, gleaming, though without ever sounding cold or metallic. The show includes a photo of a bow-tied Van Gelder, surrounded by recording equipment, looking like a one-man band with his collection of instruments.
The heyday also coincided with the tenure of art director Miles. He designed more than 500 covers for the label. Several are in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. His bold, unfussy use of photographs, illustration, typefaces, and layouts ensured that Blue Note albums look every bit as cool and distinctive as the music on them sounds.
The most important component of those designs was Wolff’s photographs, the Coltrane being the best known of many examples. Wolff had been a professional photographer in Berlin, so he wasn’t just a privileged amateur given entrée to Van Gelder’s studio. The vibraphonist and Blue Note artist Bobby Hutcherson described Lion and Wolff as being “more like jazz musicians than record executives. They loved to hang out and have a great time. They loved the music and had a real feel for it.”
That feel is everywhere apparent in Wolff’s photographs. There have been other very good jazz photographers: Herman Leonard, William Claxton, William P. Gottlieb, Chuck Stewart. Milt Hinton was himself a very good jazz musician. Lee Friedlander, who turns 90 in July, would be in any serious discussion of who’s the greatest living photographer. He worked for Atlantic in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Wolff differed from them because he was an insider without himself being a participant. It’s in the nature of cusps to create camera-friendly conditions.
Feel is indefinable. Other aspects of Wolff’s work are quite specific. The Rolleiflex produces square images, just the thing for an LP cover. It also has a twin lens, meaning Wolff didn’t need to interpose the camera between his face and his subjects. As he wandered through Van Gelder’s studio, taking pictures, the process would seem less formal than with a single-lens reflex camera. Wander is the right word. There’s nothing formal about these photographs, which is part of their sense of immediacy. Arranging lighting setups would have undercut that.
Worse, it might have distracted the musicians. Wolff made a point of not shooting while they were actually recording, only as they rehearsed and kibitzed. Instead, he used a handheld flash. “He’d hold the camera in his left hand,” Van Gelder later recalled, “with the flash held up in his right — Statue of Liberty style.” The use of flash accounts for the consistent velvety black backgrounds in the studio shots. That background can make for fabulous contrasts, as with the plume of cigarette smoke exhaled by Grant Green. (Boy, those guys smoked a lot.) It also ensures the viewer’s attention is wholly on the subject, and that subject is accorded a visual status within the frame that a Habsburg monarch painted by Velázquez might have envied.
“We established a style,” Wolff once said, “including recordings, pressings, and covers. The details made the difference.” Add understatement to the list of things that make classic Blue Note so special.
The label had no more important contributor over the past five decades than Michael Cuscuna. He oversaw numerous reissues, dug up countless lost sessions in the vaults, cofounded Mosaic Records (which reissued many earlier Blue Note releases in impeccable box sets), and presided over the Blue Note photography collection. Cuscuna died last month, at 75. Although not organized for that purpose, “The All Seeing Eye” might be considered a tribute to him.
THE ALL SEEING EYE: Blue Note Records Through the Lens of Francis Wolff
At the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame, Boch Center Wang Theatre. Ongoing. www.folkamericanarootshalloffame.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.
