| Between the years 1954 and 1967, at the height of hard bop and amidst a myriad of stylistic innovations in jazz, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff sought to project an image of Blue Note Records as a distinctly hip and modern record label. They incorporated markers of hipness and modernity into the various aspects of their products, including marketing strategies, album sleeves (cover art, album and tune titles, and liner notes), and of course the music itself. This dissertation seeks to understand how Lion and Wolff created such a meaningful and lasting image by analyzing its constituent elements, determining how they represented contemporary ideas of hipness and modernity, and examining how the disparate musical styles that Blue Note recorded were incorporated into a single, coherent image.;Hipness is simultaneously a philosophy and the external styles and behaviors that express that philosophy. The specific markers of hipness that were available to Lion and Wolff were popularized by several hip subcultures active in the fifties and sixties, including jazz musicians, black and white hipsters, and the beats. While the hip styles of these subcultures varied, they all shared a hip worldview that emphasized individuality, nonconformity, spontaneity, authenticity, and direct, unmediated self-expression. The markers of modernity incorporated into Blue Note's image were visual, textual, and musical. They included cover art that features a Bauhaus-influenced minimalist approach to graphic design, liner notes that stress the modernist aesthetic duality of an artwork taking its place within a historical tradition while expressing the spirit of its own time, and musical styles that integrate the modern musical elements of bebop in the 1940s and modal and free jazz in the 1950s and1960s, as well as the Afro-Modern elements of blues, gospel, and other African American roots musics. Different combinations of these musics resulted in the styles of hard bop, soul jazz, free bop, and the New Thing that Blue Note recorded between 1954 and 1967. All four styles participate in the hip and modern image of Blue Note Records in slightly different but related ways. |
