A Berlin jazz fan, a rented studio and a one-day session, 1939.

Blue Note began with a recording session rather than a company plan. Wikipedia says Alfred Lion first heard jazz as a boy in Berlin and settled in New York City in 1937. In 1939, shortly after the first From Spirituals to Swing concert, he recorded the boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis during a one-day session in a rented studio. That session is where the label starts.

The name came from the music. Wikipedia says the label took its name from the blue notes of jazz and the blues, and that in its earliest form Blue Note consisted of Lion and Max Margulis, a writer who funded the project. The photographer Francis Wolff, a childhood friend of Lion’s, emigrated to the United States at the end of 1939 and soon joined him. Writing in Eye magazine in autumn 1990, the typographer and critic Robin Kinross described the set-up as a small operation led by its founder and sole producer, Lion, with Wolff as his business partner, and noted that both men had come from Germany in the late 1930s.

The early catalogue looked backwards before it looked forwards. Wikipedia says the opening releases were traditional “hot” jazz and boogie woogie, including a recording of Summertime by the soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet. Sessions were often held in the early hours, after musicians had finished their evening work in clubs. When Lion was drafted into the army in 1941 for two years, Milt Gabler of the Commodore Music Store offered storage space and helped keep the catalogue in print, with Wolff working for him; by late 1943 the label was recording again.

The turn to modern jazz came after the war. Wikipedia says the saxophonist Ike Quebec acted as a talent scout for the label, and that in 1947 the pianist Thelonious Monk recorded his sessions as a leader for Blue Note, sessions that also brought in the drummer Art Blakey. Through the late 1940s and early 1950s the label recorded Bud Powell, Fats Navarro and Tadd Dameron, and Miles Davis and J. J. Johnson recorded for it between 1952 and 1954.

The sound had its own address in New Jersey. Wikipedia says Rudy Van Gelder recorded most Blue Note releases from 1953, after the saxophonist and composer Gil Melle introduced him to Lion. NPR’s Felix Contreras reported on 26 August 2016 that Van Gelder had begun by recording in his parents’ living room in Hackensack, while working by day as an optometrist, and that in 1959 he moved to a custom-built studio in nearby Englewood Cliffs with nine-foot cathedral ceilings. NPR listed Blue Note alongside Prestige, Savoy and Impulse among the labels he recorded for.

Liberty, United Artists, EMI and a revival in the 1980s.

Blue Note’s offices stayed in Manhattan. Wikipedia says that at the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s the headquarters were on West 61st Street and then West 63rd Street, and that at the end of the 1960s they moved to Broadway. Format changes shaped the business: the label began issuing 10-inch vinyl releases in 1951, and when the industry moved to the 12-inch LP in the mid-1950s the catalogue had to be recreated in the new format. Wikipedia says Lion considered selling to Atlantic at that point but did not act on it.

The independent years ended in the mid-1960s. Wikipedia says Blue Note was acquired by Liberty Records in 1965; Kinross, in Eye, dated Lion’s sale to Liberty to 1966. Wikipedia says Lion, who found it difficult to work inside a larger organisation, retired in 1967, and that from late 1967 to 1971 sessions were produced by Wolff or by the pianist Duke Pearson, who had taken over A&R from Quebec in 1963. Pearson left the label in 1971.

Ownership then passed through several corporate layers. Wikipedia says Transamerica Corporation acquired Liberty in 1968, the same year United Artists Records merged with Liberty and its subsidiaries, including Blue Note, and that in 1972 the group was consolidated as United Artists Records. In 1979 EMI bought United Artists Records and phased out the Blue Note label, which lay dormant until its relaunch in 1985.

The revival had a named leader. Billboard reported on 19 May 2015 that EMI had approached the executive Bruce Lundvall in 1984 about reviving Blue Note, then dormant for several years, and that he partnered with the producer Michael Cuscuna to bring back earlier artists, among them Jimmy Smith, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard and Jackie McLean, while signing newer names such as Cassandra Wilson and John Scofield. Wikipedia says a reissue series in which Van Gelder remastered his own recordings, the RVG series, began around 1998, and that in 2006 EMI expanded the label into the Blue Note Label Group.

The current era has its own dates. Billboard said Lundvall stepped down as president in 2010, later taking the title of chairman emeritus. Variety’s Chris Morris reported on 3 February 2012 that the producer Don Was, who had joined in August 2011 as chief creative officer, had been promoted to president of EMI Music’s Blue Note Records, a move announced to staff in January, and that he would report to Dan McCarroll, head of the Capitol and Virgin label group. Wikipedia says that after Universal Music Group took over EMI, Blue Note came to be operated under Capitol Music Group, with Decca Records handling its UK distribution. Universal Music Group has owned the label since that takeover.

A label, a studio and the sleeves that framed them.

A record label’s identity rarely lives in one place. It is spread across a series of small, repeated surfaces that a listener meets again and again: the logo printed on the centre label of a vinyl disc, the mark that sits at the top or bottom of a sleeve spine, the run of letters and numbers that make up a catalogue number, and the rule set that decides how a front cover is laid out. Seen one at a time these details are modest. Seen across a shelf of releases they become the brand.

Spines matter because records are usually stored edge-on. A consistent spine treatment — the same typeface, the same position for the logo, the same order for artist, title and catalogue number — lets a run of releases read as a set. Catalogue numbers do similar work: a prefix and a sequence turn a list of records into an archive that collectors can follow.

Some labels go further and give their sleeves a house style, built by a single designer or studio over many years. Others let each artist lead and keep the label’s presence to a small mark. Imprints, sub-labels, shops and mail-order operations extend the same identity into new places, from a carrier bag to a shop sign. In each guide below, the question is which of these surfaces a label has used, and how consistently.

Reid Miles, Francis Wolff and the sleeve as a system.

The label’s visual identity lives mostly on its record sleeves. Kinross wrote in Eye in 1990 that Blue Note began issuing LPs late in 1951 and that its early covers, by designers including John Hermansader and Gil Melle, showed a company still looking for a style. In 1956, he wrote, Lion and Wolff found Reid Miles, the designer who gave them that style. Wikipedia says Miles had been working for Esquire magazine when Blue Note employed him that year.

The covers paired Miles’s layouts with Wolff’s camera. Wikipedia describes Miles’s design as distinguished by tinted black-and-white photographs, creative use of sans-serif typefaces, a restricted colour palette, often black and white with a single colour, and frequent solid rectangular bands of colour or white, influenced by the Bauhaus. Kinross described Wolff’s photographs as graphic in themselves, with clearly defined marks, strong contrast and large undisturbed areas, and said type was treated as another element to be configured into that graphic form. He traced the approach to New York magazine design, advertising and packaging, and to a good stock of American sanserifs in printers and reproduction houses.

Production details were part of the look. Kinross wrote that Miles worked from a simple brief from Lion summarising the character of each album, that the covers used very little illustration, though early drawings by Andy Warhol appear on a Johnny Griffin record and two early Kenny Burrell albums, and that in some black-and-red covers the white of the board reads as a third colour. Fronts were varnished and earlier printed letterpress, the sleeves were made from thick board, and the back covers gave recording details and liner notes a standard, sober treatment.

The catalogue gave Miles his material. Wikipedia names John Coltrane’s Blue Train and Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else among the mid-1950s sessions, Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder in 1963, Horace Silver’s Song for My Father in 1964, and Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch!, and lists Cool Struttin’, Midnight Blue, Unity and Hub-Tones among Miles’s sleeves. It says his association with the label ended in late 1967; Kinross wrote that Miles went on to photography and television.

The archive has kept being reissued. Wikipedia says that in 2019 the label launched a vinyl reissue series selected and produced by Joe Harley, named the Tone Poet series, and that in 2020 it released Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds, the debut of the South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini.

For a design guide, Blue Note Records shows how a strict kit of photographs, sans-serif type, bands of flat colour and empty space can become a label’s identity without a dominant logo. Compare ECM Records, another jazz label known for its sleeves, or Def Jam Recordings, also in the Universal family. For this guide we use session blue, navy and sleeve red with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Blue Note Records’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.