Yeah, I'd say it's pretty much worth getting anything on the label by artists you like or think you might like. They had a very strong run.
←
I don't disagree. But why is that? I mean, what was it about Black Saint/Soul Note that often resulted in an artist's best work?
←
I think this is a particularly interesting question because BS/SN don't have the same label mystique as BN, Impulse! or ECM, which would potentially bias assessments upward.
Guy
←
Well, I guess it depends on what circles you run/ran in. I know that at the time, those lables were considered the most happening in jazz by some. But the albums were import-only back then, so getting them took some extra work if you lived outside of a major metropolitan area. Plus, the artists were mostly represenative of the then-"avant-garde" (in widely varying degrees), or else were folks like Andrew Hill, George Russell, Billy Harper, et al, people who just weren't "interesting" to most American jazz lables of the time, the various Arista offshoots notwithsanding. Although as time went by some more "mainstream" players began to record for both labels, Black Saint was (mostly) for the newer cats, Soul Note for the vets. It was music that was neither marketably retro nor marketably funky nor marketably fusiony, nor marketably "classic" hardboppy, nor marketably anything else other than truly contemporary jazz of many different "styles" (quiet as it's kept, the "avant-garde" is anything but monolithic in terms of "style") w/o any guile, "isms", or anything else. That's always been a hard sell at any given point in time, but, as always, it makes for a catalog with good staying power. If you can stay in business.
As to why they got such good results so consitently, I guess they just had the good sense to go after players who were in a good zone at the time, set'em up in relatively comfortable situations, not interfere too much, and then just go ahead and document the results. Radical idea, eh?