Original Blue Notes can be extremely rare, especially sought-after titles. With the help of this guide, you should be able to identify the provenance of any Blue Note record, and set your sights accordingly. Many features are needed to verify an original or a first pressing. What to look for in an “original” Blue Note LP Inner sleeves were often lost, mixed up, or swapped for commercial advantage, but it’s the best you have. However study of inner sleeves confirms many popular Blue Note titles were repressed more or less continuously, in small batches, to top up dealer inventory, throughout the first half of the Sixties. The inner sleeve, which was added immediately after pressing, is a guide to the date of manufacture. These are asychronous events: they did not occur on the session date or the release date, but some undocumented time between the two, which determined the printed paper label address applied, and whether or not deep groove dies were used at the time of pressing. Between those date are various stages of manufacture – mastering and metal-ware production, label printing, cover fabrication, and shortly before release, actual vinyl pressing. At the other end of the process you have the release month, which is documented in Schwan catalogues and music press reviews of new releases, usually Billboard. There is recording session date, which sounds definitive but some Blue Note titles draw together tracks from sessions that may be years apart. It becomes clearer when you consider the business process of a record company like Blue Note, issuing a new title. The label on a record is a useful guide to provenance but by no means definitive. There are even cases of Lexington address labels appearing on Liberty re-pressings. To further complicate matters, re-pressings first drew on old stocks of labels for that title. The NY address was in use for new titles between mid 1961 and mid 1966, but new titles on the earlier 47W63rd label stray into that period, and NY address labels spill over into the Liberty years. Thus there is an overlap between labels use in the period of changeover. Release was at best three months and in some cases several years after the session date. Actual timing of release was dictated by Alfred Lion’s commercial judgement, and vinyl was pressed shortly before the release date, using those labels. Labels were printed generally within a few months of the recording session, part of the process to prepare each album for release. A label indicates the Blue Note address at the time the label was printed. Note: The years in which labels were in use are approximate. These labels were used for repressing popular titles, prior to the major Capitol EMI reissue initiative, which was launched in the mid-80s under the banner “The Finest In Jazz Since 1939” Update to incorporate two early 1980s Capitol-EMI “interim labels”, blue label white note design similar to United Artists, but text now includes manufactured by Liberty Records Inc, and subsequently, by Capitol Records Inc. LondonJazzCollector Blue Note Cheat Sheet The first titles manufactured overseas were in the Liberty, United Artists and EMI period, which are covered in separate pages, for Japan and Europe. The Blue Note label had no overseas licensing agreements in the golden era (up to 1966), and US pressings were simply exported. It covers the period of the original Blue Note Records company in the decade up to 1966, and then through the hands of subsequent owners Liberty Records Inc, United Artists and EMI, through the dj compilation decade, up to the modern “audiophile” editions of the present day. This Guide commences in 1956, with the 12″ 1500 series microgroove vinyl LP, which I consider the beginning of modern “high fidelity” and which coincides with the beginning of use of then new condenser/valve microphones. The earliest Blue Note recordings were issued on 78 rpm shellac and then 10″ microgroove, largely the domain of the purist collector, as many of these recording (though not all) went on to be republished in various permutations on 12″ LP. The Blue Note label, from the ’50s to the present day – the definitive guide for the audiophile record collector. Welcome to the m ost frequently viewed page at LondonJazzCollector!
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