"A Tribute to Blue Note, The Harlem Renaissance and The Black Arts Movement Part 3"

The Black Arts Movement

or BAM is the artistic branch of the Black Power movement. It was started in Harlem by writer and activist Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones). Time Magazine describes the Black Arts Movement as the "single most controversial moment in the history of African-American literature-- possibly in American literature as a whole. The Black Arts Repertory Theatre is a key institution of the Black Arts Movement.

The movement was one of the most important times in the African American literature. It inspired black people to establish their own publishing houses, magazines, journals and art institutions. It led to the creation of African American Studies programs within universities. The movement was triggered by the assassination of Malcolm X Other well-known writers that were involved with this movement included Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Maya Angelou, and Rosa Grey. Although not strictly involved with the Movement, other notable African American writers such as novelists Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed share some of its artistic and thematic concerns. Although Ishmael Reed is neither a movement apologist nor advocate, he said:
I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.

BAM influenced the world of literature, portraying different ethnic voices. Before the movement, the literary canon lacked diversity, and the ability to express ideas from the point of view of racial and ethnic minorities was not valued by the mainstream.

Theatre groups, poetry performances, music and dance were centered around this movement, and therefore African Americans were becoming recognized in the area of literature and arts. African Americans were also able to educate others through different types of expressions and media about cultural differences. The most common form of teaching was through poetry reading. African American performances were used for their own political advertisement, organization, and community issues. The Black Arts Movement was spread by the use of newspaper advertisements. The first major arts movement publication was in 1964.

History

The Black Arts movement, usually referred to as a "sixties" movement, came together in 1965 and broke apart around 1975/1976. In March 1965 following the 21 February assassination of Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) moved from Manhattan's Lower East Side uptown to Harlem, an exodus considered the symbolic birth of the Black Arts movement. Jones was a highly visible publisher (Yugen and Floating Bear magazines, Totem Press), a celebrated poet (Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, 1961, and The Dead Lecturer, 1964), a major music critic (Blues People, 1963), and an Obie Award-winning playwright (Dutchman, 1964) who, up until that fateful split, had functioned in an integrated world. Other than James Baldwin, who at that time had been closely associated with the civil rights movement, Jones was the most respected and most widely published Black writer of his generation.
Although Jones' 1965 move uptown to establish the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) is considered the formal beginning (it was Jones who came up with the name "Black Arts"), the Black arts movement grew out of a changing political and cultural climate in which Black artists attempted to a place for themselves amidst remaining ideologies of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Black artists and intellectuals like Baraka made it their project to reject older political, cultural, and artistic traditions.

In his seminal 1965 poem "Black Art," which quickly became the major poetic manifesto of the Black Arts literary movement, Jones declaimed "we want poems that kill." He was not simply speaking metaphorically. During that period armed self-defense and slogans such as "Arm yourself or harm yourself' established a social climate that promoted confrontation with the white power structure, especially the police (e.g., "Off the pigs"). Indeed, Amiri Baraka (Jones changed his name in 1967) had been arrested and convicted (later overturned on appeal) on a gun possession charge during the 1967 Newark rebellion. Additionally, armed struggle was widely viewed as not only a legitimate, but often as the only effective means of black liberation. Black Arts' dynamism, impact, and effectiveness are a direct result of its partisan nature and advocacy of artistic and political freedom "by any means necessary." America had never experienced such a militant artistic movement.
Although the success of sit-ins and public demonstrations of the Black student movement in the 1960s may have “inspired black intellectuals, artists, and political activists to form politicized cultural groups,” many Black Arts activists rejected the non-militant integrational ideologies of the Civil Rights Movement and instead favored those of the Black Liberation Struggle, which placed an emphasis on “self-determination through self-reliance and Black control of significant businesses, organization, agencies, and institutions.” According to the Academy of American Poets, “African American artists within the movement sought to create politically engaged work that explored the African American cultural and historical experience.” The importance that the movement placed on Black autonomy is apparent through the creation institutions such as the Black Arts Repertoire Theatre School (BARTS), created in the spring of 1964 by Amiri Baraka and other Black artists. The opening of BARTS in New York city often overshadow the growth of other radical Black Arts groups and institutions all over the United States. In fact, transgresional and international networks, those of various Left and nationalist (and Left nationalist) groups and their supports, existed far before the movement gained popularity. Although the creation of BARTS did indeed catalyze the spread of other Black Arts institutions and the Black Arts movement across the nation, it was not solely responsible for the growth of the movement.

While it is easy to assume that the movement began solely in the Northeast, it actually started out as “separate and distinct local initiatives across a wide geographic area”, eventually coming together to form the broader national movement. New York City is often referred to as the “birthplace” of the Black Arts Movement, because it was home to many revolutionary Black artists and activists. However, the geographical diversity of the movement opposes the misconception that New York (and Harlem, especially) was the primary site of the movement.

In its beginning states, the movement came together largely through printed media. Journals such as Liberator, The Crusader, and Freedomways created “a national community in which ideology and aesthetics were debated and a wide range of approaches to African American artistic style and subject displayed. These publications tied communities outside of large Black Arts centers to the movement and gave the general Black public access to these sometimes-exclusive circles.
As a literary movement, Black Arts had its roots in groups such as the Umbra Workshop. Umbra (1962) was a collective of young Black writers based in Manhattan's Lower East Side; major members were writers Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, Al Haynes, David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Joe Johnson, Norman Pritchard, Lenox Raphael, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, James Thompson, Askia M. Touré (Roland Snellings; also a visual artist), Brenda Walcott, and musician-writer Archie Shepp. Touré, a major shaper of "cultural nationalism," directly influenced Jones. Along with Umbra writer Charles Patterson and Charles's brother, William Patterson, Touré joined Jones, Steve Young, and others at BARTS.

Umbra, which produced Umbra Magazine, was the first post-civil rights Black literary group to make an impact as radical in the sense of establishing their own voice distinct from, and sometimes at odds with, the prevailing white literary establishment. The attempt to merge a Black-oriented activist thrust with a primarily artistic orientation produced a classic split in Umbra between those who wanted to be activists and those who thought of themselves as primarily writers, though to some extent all members shared both views. Black writers have always had to face the issue of whether their work was primarily political or aesthetic. Moreover, Umbra itself had evolved out of similar circumstances: In 1960 a Black Nationalist literary organization, On Guard for Freedom, had been founded on the Lower East Side by Calvin Hicks. Its members included Nannie and Walter Bowe, Harold Cruse (who was then working on Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 1967), Tom Dent, Rosa Guy, Joe Johnson, LeRoi Jones, and Sarah Wright, among others. On Guard was active in a famous protest at the United Nations of the American-sponsored Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion and was active in support of the Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba. From On Guard, Dent, Johnson, and Walcott along with Hernton, Henderson, and Touré established Umbra.

Another formation of Black writers at that time was the Harlem Writers Guild, led by John O. Killens, which included Maya Angelou, Jean Carey Bond, Rosa Guy, and Sarah Wright among others. But the Harlem Writers Guild focused on prose, primarily fiction, which did not have the mass appeal of poetry performed in the dynamic vernacular of the time. Poems could be built around anthems, chants, and political slogans, and thereby used in organizing work, which was not generally the case with novels and short stories. Moreover, the poets could and did publish themselves, whereas greater resources were needed to publish fiction. That Umbra was primarily poetry- and performance-oriented established a significant and classic characteristic of the movement's aesthetics. When Umbra split up, some members, led by Askia Touré and Al Haynes, moved to Harlem in late 1964 and formed the nationalist-oriented "Uptown Writers Movement," which included poets Yusef Rahman, Keorapetse "Willie" Kgositsile from South Africa, and Larry Neal. Accompanied by young "New Music" musicians, they performed poetry all over Harlem. Members of this group joined LeRoi Jones in founding BARTS.

Jones's move to Harlem was short-lived. In December 1965 he returned to his home, Newark (N.J.), and left BARTS in serious disarray. BARTS failed but the Black Arts center concept was irrepressible mainly because the Black Arts movement was so closely aligned with the then-burgeoning Black Power movement. The mid- to late 1960s was a period of intense revolutionary ferment. Beginning in 1964, rebellions in Harlem and Rochester, New York, initiated four years of long hot summers. Watts, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, and many other cities went up in flames, culminating in nationwide explosions of resentment and anger following Martin Luther King, JR. April 1968 assassination.

Nathan Hare, the author of The Black Anglo-Saxons (1965), was the founder of 1960s Black Studies. Expelled from Howard University, Hare moved to San Francisco State University where the battle to establish a Black Studies department was waged during a five-month strike during the 1968-1969 school year. As with the establishment of Black Arts, which included a range of forces, there was broad activity in the Bay Area around Black Studies, including efforts led by poet and professor Sarah Webster Fabio at Merrit College.

The initial thrust of Black Arts ideological development came from the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a national organization with a strong presence in New York City. Both Touré and Neal were members of RAM. After RAM, the major ideological force shaping the Black Arts movement was the US (as opposed to "them') organization led by Maulana Karenga. Also ideologically important was Elijah Muhammad’s Chicago-based Nation of Islam These three formations provided both style and ideological direction for Black Arts artists, including those who were not members of these or any other political organization. Although the Black Arts movement is often considered a New York-based movement, two of its three major forces were located outside New York City.

As the movement matured, the two major locations of Black Arts' ideological leadership, particularly for literary work, were California's Bay Area because of the Journal of Black Poetry and the Black Scholar, and the Chicago-Detroit axis because of Negro Digest/Black World and Third World Press in Chicago, and Broadside Press and Naomi Long Madgett's Lotus Press in Detroit. The only major Black Arts literary publications to come out of New York were the short-lived (six issues between 1969 and 1972) Black Theatre magazine published by the New Lafayette Theatre and Black Dialogue, which had actually started in San Francisco (1964–1968) and relocated to New York (1969–1972).

Although the journals and writing of the movement greatly characterized its success, the movement placed a great deal of importance on collective oral and performance art. Public collective performances drew a lot of attention to the movement, and it was often easier to get an immediate response from a collective poetry reading, short play, or street performance than it was from individual performances.
In 1967 LeRoi Jones visited Karenga in Los Angeles and became an advocate of Karenga's philosophy of Kawaida. Kawaida, which produced the "Nguzo Saba" (seven principles), Kwanzaa and an emphasis on African names, was a multifaceted, categorized activist philosophy. Jones also met Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver and worked with a number of the founding members of the Black Panthers. Additionally, Askia Touré was a visiting professor at San Francisco State and was to become a leading (and longlasting) poet as well as, arguably, the most influential poet-professor in the Black Arts movement. Playwright Ed Bullins and poet Marvin X had established Black Arts West, and Dingane Joe Goncalves had founded the Journal of Black Poetry (1966). This grouping of Ed Bullins, Dingane Joe Goncalves, LeRoi Jones, Sonia Sanchez, Askia M. Touré, and Marvin X became a major nucleus of Black Arts leadership.

As the movement grew, ideological conflicts arose and eventually became too great for the movement to continue to exist as a large, coherent collective.

The Black Aesthetic

Many discussions of the Black Arts movement posit it as the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.” The Black Aesthetic refers to ideologies and perspectives of art that center around Black culture and life. This Black Aesthetic encouraged the idea of Black separatism, and in trying to facilitate this hope to further strengthen black ideals, solidarity, and creativity.
In his well-known essay on the Black Arts Movement, Larry Neal attests, “When we speak of a 'Black aesthetic' several things are meant. First, we assume that there is already in existence the basis for such an aesthetic. Essentially, it consists of an African-American cultural tradition. But this aesthetic is finally, by implication, broader than that tradition. It encompasses most of the usable elements of the Third World culture. The motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world.”

Effects on society

According to the Academy of American poets, “many writers--Native Americans, Latinos/as, gays and lesbians, and younger generations of African Americans have acknowledged their debt to the Black Arts movement.”[8]
The movement lasted for about a decade, through the mid 1960s and into 1970s. This was a period of controversy and change in the world of literature. One major change came through the portrayal of new ethnic voices in the United States. English language literature, prior to the Black Arts Movement, was dominated by white authors.

African Americans became a greater presence not only in the field of literature, but in all areas of the arts. Theater groups, poetry performances, music and dance were central to the movement. Through different forms of media, African Americans were able to educate others about the expression of cultural differences and viewpoints. In particular, black poetry readings allowed African Americans to use vernacular dialogues. This was shown in the Harlem Writers Guild which included black writers such as Maya Angelou and Rosa Guy. These performances were used to express political slogans and as a tool for organization. Theater performances also were used to convey community issues and organizations. The theaters, as well as cultural centers, were based throughout America and were used for community meetings, study groups and film screenings. Newspapers were a major tool in spreading the Black Arts Movement. In 1964, Black Dialogue was published making it the first major Arts movement publication.

The Black Arts Movement, although short, is essential to the history of the United States. It spurred political activism and use of speech throughout every African American community. It allowed African Americans the chance to express their voices in the mass media as well as becoming involved in communities.
It can be argued that “the Black Arts movement produced some of the most exciting poetry, drama, dance, music, visual art, and fiction of the post-World War II United States” and that many important “post-Black artists” such as Toni Morrison, Ntzoake Shange, Alice Walker, and August Wilson were shaped by the movement..
The Black Arts movement also provided incentives for public funding of the arts, and increased public support of various arts initiatives.

Key writers and thinkers of this movement

Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka (Born Everett LeRoy Jones.) Jean Carey, Bond Walter Bowe Gwendolyn Brooks, Ed Bullins, Steve Cannon, Harold Cruse, Tom Dent Ray Durem Addison Gayle Nikki Giovanni Rosa Guy Lorraine Hansberry Al Haynes David Henderson Calvin Hicks Marvin X (known as Marvin Jackson) Ron Karenga Adrienne Kennedy Keorapetse John O. Killens Robert MacBeth Haki Madhubuti "Willie" Kgositsile Nannie Larry Neal Yusef Rahman, Sonia Sanchez, Barbara Ann Teer, Lorenzo Thomas, Askia M. Touré

"A Tribute to Blue Note, The Harlem Renaissance and The Black Arts Movement Part 2"

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

The first major movement of African-American literature, beginning around 1923 and flourishing until the depression, but providing a stimulus that lasted through the 1940s.

The renaissance mainly involved a group of writers and intellectuals associated (often loosely) with Harlem, the district of Manhattan that, during the migration of African Americans from the rural South, became the major center for urbanized blacks. Harlem was described by Alain Locke (1886-1954) as "not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life." The renaissance was associated with the New Negro Movement, so called because of the anthology, "The New Negro" (1925) edited by Locke, whose introductory essay is the closest to a manifesto or statement of ideals that the Harlem Renaissance has. In it he writes of the Negro who is no longer apologetic for blackness but who takes a new pride in a racial identity and heritage, of the "renewed self-respect and self-dependence" felt in the contemporary black community, which is "about to enter a new phase."

Elsewhere Locke urged writers to examine the meaning of an African past and to utilize this in their art. This urging coincided with a growing interest among whites at the time in primitivism, evident for example in Eugene O'Neill's plays "The Emperor Jones" (1920) and "All God's Chillun Got Wings" (1924). The Harlem Renaissance was partly fostered by the existence of this interest, and by the concurrent development of American modernism and the readiness to accept experimentation and to expand the breadth of artistic expression. The renaissance was greatly assisted by several whites, especially Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964), whose enthusiasm for African-American culture was reflected in his popular 1926 novel NIGGER HEAVEN. Locke had explicitly called for social and artistic interracial cooperation in "The New Negro," commenting that, "The fiction is that the life of the races is separate, and increasingly so. The fact is that they have touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable levels." One characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance was a move toward so-called "high art" in black writing, rather than the use of folk idioms, comic writing, and vernacular that had often been considered the special realm of African-American writing up to that time. In some respects this shift mirrors the change from rural to urban life for many blacks in this period. However, several of the Harlem writers made powerful use of folk idioms such as the blues, particularly Langston Hughes (1902-67). The Harlem writers also engaged in an intense debate regarding the place of the African American in American life, and on the role and identity of the African-American artist.

In this sense the Harlem Renaissance is by no means a monolithic movement with a single purpose. For example, the artistic differences between Hughes and the poet Countee Cullen (1903-46) are instructive. Cullen believed that an African-American poet should be free to write in mainstream established traditions, and need not racialize poetry. "I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet," he said, and wrote in forms such as the sonnet and became a translator of Euripides. Hughes, on the other hand, saw this attitude as a betrayal of racial identity, an aping of white European-ness, and sought in his work to accept and explore his blackness using forms and idioms that he associated with it. Both are major poets but their differences point to the relative breadth of the movement and to the development of quite different kinds of African-American writing in the Harlem Renaissance.

Prominent Harlem Renaissance writers include James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961), the Jamaican-born Claude McKay (1889-1948), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Nella Larsen (1893-1964), Jean Toomer (1894-1967), Arna Bontemps (1902-73), Gwendolyn Bennett (1902-81), and Helene Johnson (1907-95).

"A Tribute to Blue Note, The Harlem Renaissance and The Black Arts Movement Part 1"

BLUE NOTE RECORDS HISTORY
In 1925,16-year old Alfred Lion noticed a concert poster for Sam Wooding's orchestra near his favourite ice-skating arena in his native Berlin, Germany. He'd heard many of his mother's jazz records and began to take an interest in the music, but that night his life was changed. The impact of what he heard live touched a deep passion within him. His thirst for the music temporarily brought him to New York in 1928 where he worked on the docks and slept in Central Park to get closer to the music.

On December 23, 1938, Lion attended the celebrated Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall. The power, soul and beauty with which boogie woogie piano masters Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis rocked the stage gripped him. Exactly two weeks later, on January 6 at 2 in the afternoon, he brought them into a New York studio to make some recordings. They took turns at the one piano, recording four solos each before relinquishing the bench to the other man. The long session ended with two stunning duets. Blue Note Records was finally a reality.

The label's first brochure in May of 1939 carried a statement of purpose that Lion rarely strayed from throughout the many styles and years during which he built one of the greatest jazz record companies in the world. It read: "Blue Note Records are designed simply to serve the uncompromising expressions of hot jazz or swing, in general. Any particular style of playing which represents an authentic way of musical feeling is genuine expression. By virtue of its significance in place, time and circumstance, it possesses its own tradition, artistic standards and audience that keeps it alive. Hot jazz, therefore, is expression and communication, a musical and social manifestation, and Blue Note records are concerned with identifying its impulse, not its sensational and commercial adornments.”

At the end of 1939, Lion's childhood friend Francis Wolff caught the last boat out of Nazi-controlled Germany bound for America. He found employment at a photographic studio and joined forces with Lion at night to continue Blue Note. In the late 1940s, jazz had changed again, and Lion and Wolff could no longer resist the be-bop movement. Saxophonist Ike Quebec had become a close friend and advisor to both of them. Just as he had ushered in their swingtet phase, he would also bring them into modern jazz, introducing them to many of the new music's innovators and encouraging them to document it. Soon they were recording Fats Navarro and Bud Powell and giving Tadd Dameron, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, among others, their first dates as leaders. Lion and Wolff became especially fascinated with Monk and helped his career in every conceivable way. Despite critical resistance and poor sales, they recorded him frequently until 1952.

Monk's case was the first major example of what Horace Silver described in a 1980 interview, "Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff were men of integrity and real jazz fans. Blue Note was a great label to record for. They gave a first break to a lot of great artists who are still out there doing it today. They gave me my first break. They gave a lot of musicians a chance to record when all the other companies weren't interested. And they would stick with an artist, even if he wasn't selling. You don't find that anymore."

Album covers started to become a distinctive component in the Blue Note mix. Frank Wolff's extraordinarily sensitive and atmospheric photos and the advanced designs of Paul Bacon, Gil Melle and John Hermansader gave Blue Note a look that was both distinctive and beautiful.

Meanwhile, Lion was making first albums by the likes of Horace Silver, Lou Donaldson, Clifford Brown, Wynton Kelly, Elmo Hope, Kenny Drew, Tal Farlow and Kenny Burrell. He was also recording significant sessions with established modern talents like Kenny Dorham, George Wallington, Milt Jackson, Miles Davis, Thad Jones, Sonny Rollins and Herbie Nichols.

In 1952, Alfred became intrigued by the sound of a Triumph recording that saxophonist-composer Gil Melle had done at engineer Rudy Van Gelder's parents' home in Hackensack, New Jersey, where Van Gelder had a recording set-up in the living room. Blue Note had always been known for its superior sound and balance, but in Rudy, Alfred found an intelligent, kindred soul from whom he could extract an ideal sound. Van Gelder engineered most of the major jazz recordings of the '50s and '60s for many labels. He told me, "Alfred knew exactly what he wanted to hear. He communicated it to me and I got it for him technically. He was amazing in what he heard and how he would patiently draw it out of me. He gave me confidence and support in any situation."

By 1954, Blue Note naturally gravitated toward a system that was much akin to a repertory theatre company: using a revolving cast of sidemen and leaders who would assure them the creativity, compatibility and dependability that Blue Note sought. Leaders would appear on each other's projects: recurring sidemen would be groomed to grow into leaders. Sometimes such instances could be purely serendipitous. Horace Silver's first session was to have been a Lou Donaldson quartet date that Lou had to cancel at the last minute to go out of town. Alfred thought it was time for Silver to make his debut anyway and offered him the same date as his own trio session.

On the subject of Horace Silver, Lion felt in late 1954 that Horace should do a record with horns. He and the pianist arrived at the ideal personnel: Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Doug Watkins and Art Blakey. The date went so well that these five men decided on a common purpose and formed a co-operative band called The Jazz Messengers. The group's idea was to present soulful modern jazz that incorporated the language of be-bop (without the virtuosic cliches of its second-generation followers) and the soulful, warm roots of blues and gospel music. It worked, and it became, with Van Gelder's engineering, the Blue Note sound.

Soon after, Blue Note would set in motion another trend in jazz. On the advice of Babs Gonzales and other musicians, Lion and Wolff ventured out to hear a Philadelphia pianist who had abandoned his original instrument and woodshedded intently for more than a year on a rented Hammond organ in the corner of a warehouse. As Frank Wolff told it in 1969, "I first heard Jimmy Smith at Small's Paradise in January of 1956. It was his first gig in New York. He was a stunning sight. A man in convulsions, face contorted, crouched over in apparent agony, his fingers flying, his feet dancing over the pedals. The air was filled with waves of sound I had never heard before. The noise was shattering. A few people sat around, puzzled, but impressed. He came off the stand, smiling, the sweat dripping all over him. 'So what do you think?' 'Yeah', I said. That's all I could say. Alfred Lion had already made up his mind."

Around the same time, Wolff met Reid Miles, a commercial artist who was a devout classical music fan. They struck up a rapport and Miles became the designer for the label for the next 11 years. He relied on Alfred to describe the mood and intent of each album and then created wonderful graphic covers that were different from each other, but still maintained an indefinable Blue Note look.

It was 1956, and the cast that gave the label its sound and identity - Lion, Wolff, Van Gelder, Miles, Blakey, Silver, and Smith - was complete. For the next decade or so Blue Note dominated the artistic and commercial courses of the music. As Wolff once said, "We established a style, including recording, pressing and covers. The details made the difference."

The early '60s saw Blue Note move to a higher plateau in the record industry. While they had always had strong sales with Jimmy Smith, Horace Silver and others, Donald Byrd's "A New Perspective", a unique 1963 album for jazz group and wordless choir, began crossing over to more general audiences. The next year, the company released two albums that were unexpected blockbusters, which had lengthy stays on the pop charts: Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder" and Horace Silver's "Song For My Father".

In addition to continuing its hard bop tradition with Morgan, Mobley, Silver, Blakey and younger men like Hancock, Green, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard and Joe Henderson, the label also moved cautiously into the avant-garde. Although a lot of chaotic and inferior music was passing for art in that movement, Lion and Wolff typically found the best and most substantial artists of the genre to record. Their first project was Jackie McLean's 1963 group with Grachan Moncur, Bobby Hutcherson and Tony Williams, all of whom would soon be recording their own albums as well. Tony's albums led to an association with Sam Rivers. There were also impressive works by Larry Young and Andrew Hill as well as the grand old masters of the avant-garde: Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman.

When Liberty Records made them an offer to sell out of Blue Note in 1965, they took it. Lion stayed on until mid-1967, when health problems forced him to retire. Wolff and Duke Pearson divided the producing chores, and the roster still maintained many fine straight ahead artists, but jazz was moving into another cycle of hard times, economically and artistically. There were few working groups and few decent, good-paying clubs. The scene did not provide an environment in which it could nurture young talent and perpetuate itself.

Frank Wolff slaved away at Blue Note until his death in 1971. With Wolff's death and the lessening involvement of Duke Pearson, the label's emphasis shifted more toward fusion. Donald Byrd discovered Larry Mizell and asked him to produce "Black Byrd", a huge hit. Mizell later produced Bobbi Humphrey who was brought to the label by Lee Morgan.

The old Blue Note managed to survive through a program of reissues and previously unreleased material that Blue Note executive Charlie Lourie and Michael Cuscuna started in 1975. That program survived sporadically until 1981: the last active Blue Note artist was Horace Silver, who recorded for the label from 1952 until 1980.

In 1982, Lourie and Cuscuna started Mosaic Records as a by-product of trying to convince current owner Capitol Records to restart Blue Note. Our first releases were complete Blue Note collections by Thelonious Monk and Albert Ammons-Meade Lux Lewis. In mid 1984, EMI hired Bruce Lundvall to resurrect the label in earnest in the United States. The label was relaunched the following February with the "One Night With Blue Note" concert of all-star bands composed of new and old Blue Note artists at New York's Town Hall. Blue Note was reborn.