Blue Note

In the 70 years since German immigrant Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff's little label let out its first roar, Blue Note Records has become to jazz roughly what bread is to the sandwich. Thelonious Monk blew open new bebop routes in 1947 with the late-night film noir feel of his moody masterpiece "'Round Midnight." In the '60s, another piano pioneer, Herbie Hancock, burned down a whole new rulebook with the boogaloo beat and modal maneuvers of "Cantaloupe Island," and some three decades after that, Blue Note racked up its first platinum album ever with US3's worldwide hip-hop hit "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)," built around those same hard-boppin' Hancock riffs. Now that's history in motion.

Get further into the Blue Note groove with hard-bop heroics and avant-garde adventures, in Next Steps.

People tend to talk about the classic "Blue Note sound" in the singular, forgetting that there are at least five or six, as the label never stopped marking new milestones. Horace Silver helped put hard bop's funky face on the map in 1955 — with some help from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers — with the goose-necked grooves and bluesy moves of "The Preacher." Eric Dolphy's 1964 album Out to Lunch was instrumental — no pun intended — in taking jazz beyond even bebop's heady harmonic universe, but "Something Sweet, Something Tender" showed that "out" sounds could still bear a tuneful turn. And even in the '80s, when cynics declared jazz "dead," Stanley Jordan jolted the scene by unveiling not just a new sound, but also a radical new approach to his instrument, with pianistic fretboard expeditions like "The Lady In My Life."

From boogie-woogie barnstormers to hip-hop heads, find out who put the "blue" in Blue Note, in Deep Cuts.

Blue Note's name came from the term for the tone that gives a melody its "blue" edge. That potent touch of tight, tart soul shows up all over the seven-decade story that started with the 1939 Albert Ammons/Meade "Lux" Lewis session that birthed the piano-pounding "Boogie Woogie Stomp." It's there in the sensual sigh Cassandra Wilson brings to her husky-voiced reinvention of the Hoagy Carmichael/Johnny Mercer standard "Skylark" too. And you can still hear it breaking through in the new millennium when piano prince Robert Glasper shakes up a cocktail of hip-hop beats and "blue" bop riffs on "F.T.B."

From bebop to hard bop and beyond, Blue Note has battered at the boundaries of jazz nonstop throughout its seven-decade saga. It's hard to believe the same label unleashed the "New Thing" left turns of Jackie McLean's "Jacknife," the blues-drenched organ jabs of Jimmy Smith's "Blues After All," and the multi-platinum pop-jazz of Norah Jones' cool crossover smash "Don't Know Why," but it's all been part of the Blue Note continuum. From the fiery front lines of the avant-garde to the swingin', sweaty stages where bop was born, Blue Note has continually pummeled the pillars of complacency, and our blow-by-blow Essentials set puts you ringside for the sweetest-sounding sparring sessions you'll ever hear.