Music and Recording Features

One of the holy grails of Blue Note collecting is Hank Mobley, a 1957 set by the tenor saxophonist known among collectors by its catalog number: 1568. More than any other single title, it illustrates just how crazy the collectors' market for early Blue Notes has become. "I've seen one go recently for over $6000," Perlman says. "I've been collecting jazz records for 44 years, and I've never found one that was within my price range."

"Why Blue Note 1568 commands the price that it does? What's the story? I don't know," says Cohen. "All the [Blue Note] Mobleys come up on the marketplace very infrequently in good condition. You can't find any of them, even some which are in the early 4000 series, but that one's been singled out."

While album 1568 may be the top Blue Note collectible, it's the other end of the scale—selling large numbers of records at a cheaper price—that's behind Blue Note's current program of vinyl reissues. "HDtracks wanted to start selling Blue Note," Don Was begins. "iTunes wanted them mastered for them as well. Simultaneously, I went to a NARAS [National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences] convention, and sat down with a bunch of independent retailers and said, 'If you ran Blue Note Records, what would you do?' They all came back with the same thing: low-cost vinyl. They said we love the boxed sets, we want that, the high-resolution stuff, the audiophile stuff is good, but what we want is for young people who are coming in with limited budgets—or anybody who's coming in with a limited budget—and who wants to know more about the music to be able to experiment a little bit.

"We're not trying to compete with the audiophile records, which sound amazing—and if that's what you want, you should buy the ones that are out there, because they're really good. And this wasn't to correct what I thought was any audio oversights in previous editions. It was really just to try to reset back to Rudy [Van Gelder]'s original instinct. What we tried to do is emulate the sound of the first pressings. Part of the feel of the music has to do with the way Rudy mastered it. When you listen to the unmastered tapes, it's beautiful sounding, it's got this depth and clarity, but there's something in the little bit of compression and little EQ that he added."

Charged with making what he calls "the definitive digital file copy, the archive copy," mastering engineer Bernie Grundman, who's responsible for most of the new high-resolution 24-bit/96kHz and 24/192 digital masters, agrees that there's something to the notion that Van Gelder worked a little audible sorcery.

"Sometimes, the science isn't really telling you the truth. The theory doesn't quite work. There's some unknown factor that seems to make this thing sound better than that, but it doesn't make sense. I think anybody that's spent time with audio has run into that issue. There is no test equipment that can tell us what we're hearing. I think Rudy did a pretty good job most of the time with the balances. It's a lot of how we perceive the bebop sound, the quintet sound: trumpet, sax, and rhythm section. He was good at that.

"But he also had some problems in that studio, and he wasn't the cleanest guy in the world. He overloaded his mikes at times. You hear all those DC pulses coming through from trumpets when they hit the microphone too hard. But jazz records do that a lot. One thing about jazz records, it's the best performance that goes on the album. With jazz, it is about that performance."

According to Michael Cuscuna, who was on staff at Blue Note from 1975 to 1981, then acted as a consultant for them until 2007, the original session and master tapes are in good condition, and not—unlike those from other labels—fragile masses of splices.

"There are splices in them. On any given LP, there would be an average of, I would say, three to five splices, and invariably one would be for an insert ending because somebody fucked up on the out head and it was a great take. And then one or two would be where the trombone solo was ten times better on an earlier take, and so you take out the trombone solo and put in the better trombone solo. So that's two splice points, and that may happen twice in a record. There are many records, however, where there are no splices at all."

Despite these minor problems with Van Gelder's engineering, so far most of the titles reissued have not required major sonic remodeling. "Don always wanted to hear a test of what I'd come up with," Grundman says. "But at the same time, he wanted me to send over a flat transfer, without anything in the circuit. On some of them, I'd run the flat tape and think, 'God, I don't know what to do to this thing—it sounds great.' Maybe I'd make it sound a little wider, bigger, airier, something. It's something that I didn't really feel like I needed to do, but he might like it better. I don't like to deviate too much from something I think is good. But a lot of times, Don would pick the flat one, and I'd think to myself, 'Well, that's what I would have done too.'"

After hearing so many Van Gelder master tapes in a short period of time, Grundman discovered something. "It's interesting to note that a lot of these recordings, in the transitional period when stereo was coming in, were done in stereo, but I can tell that he was listening in mono. Because in stereo they sound a little off. On the boxes they say 'Mono made 50/50 from stereo.' In other words, they just combined the stereo. So the stereo is very binaural. It's very hard left and hard right on the solos, so they don't build up when you go to mono. And when you combine those old stereos to mono, the mix is perfect."

As with most things Blue Note, Cuscuna has the goods. "In October of 1958, to be exact—Hallowe'en, to be more exact—Art Blakey recorded Moanin'. That was the last album on which Rudy ran a stereo machine and a mono machine. What he did from that point on was, he recorded what Alfred Lion called '50/50 stereo.' Rudy was still basically mixing to mono, but he had worked out a good stereo spread, and so what he did was he put half of the music to one side and the other half to the other side. When it came time to cut the masters, he flapped them together to get the mono. And then he left them apart, and they were extreme, and the lathe would bring them in, to like 30° on either side of midnight, so that you would get a stereo sense, but a more cohesive sound than a completely split right/left thing. So that's what everything from that point up to 1970 was."

According to Don Was, Blue Note's new reissue program was been a success, with many titles quickly selling out their original press runs of 3000 copies. Of the problems in sound and pressing quality that some reviewers and audio critics have complained of, Was says, "It's not the audiophile stuff, but it sounds as good as . . . I mean, I still have my records from the '60s, and I took good care of them, and I compare them. We're in the ballpark with it."

Asked how he chose the first 100 titles, Was laughs. "I stayed in bed one Saturday and did it. It was a whole lot of fun." However, he admits to some inevitable sins of omission. "People have said, 'I can't believe you left out Kenny Dorham!' Leaving Sam Rivers out was also an oversight. And there are a couple of Andrew Hills that should have been in there. I am moved by how deeply people care about it. But we're not stopping at 100! This is just the first hundred. We're not going to destroy the masters."

Fred Cohen has similar feelings about the future of the Blue Note collectors' market. "There are a gazillion records still out there—records on shelves that they still enjoy, in closets, in basements, in storage facilities. Little by little, you see them. People die. People move. They get divorced. They get tired of certain records. They fail to pay storage fees and stuff goes into the market. The only thing that's really changed is that the ease of using the Internet has made every record owner and collector a dealer."