George Butler

[Dan Gould]

Hindsight is a wonderful tool.

What else could he/they have done at the time?

I for one wish he was not credited with the demise of Blue Note and it's jazz content.....could it have been any different considering what was going on at the time?

You bet it could!

For those of us who were around and in the business at the time, this is not hindsight but, rather, first-hand recollection. Sometimes presumption might appear to be a wonderful tool, but it is inevitably conquered by that which really occurred.

Let's see:

Big corporation now owns the label.

The genre itself has changed drastically, with fusion changing the economics (in terms of expectations) almost as much as the bean counters did.

I don't know what you saw, but when you look around what the industry was putting out at that time, which companies had great "jazz" content? Maybe the releases could have been marginally better, maybe better artists could have been offered deals but if the implication is that BN could have stayed on the course Lion and Wolff were on that's nuts. If that's presumption over first-hand recollection, fine. But show me another jazz label owned by a major corporation that put out better/greater "jazz content" through its jazz label.

This wasn't Cobblestone/Muse, and it wasn't a labor of love anymore.

[JSngry]

I don't know what you saw, but when you look around what the industry was putting out at that time, which companies had great "jazz" content?...show me another jazz label owned by a major corporation that put out better/greater "jazz content" through its jazz label.

I can give you two, three if you want to count a distribution acquisition:

Columbia, pre-Butler. Clive Davis might have killed what he spawned, but before he did...major albums by Mingus, Ornette, Jarrett, a.o. Then Bruce Lundvall came in behind the left-over carnage and did fine.

ABC-Impulse! was another strong label up until the mid-70s. As one example, while BN was releasing Bobbi Humphrey, Impulse! was releasing Sam Rivers. It might be forgotten today, but the Steve Backer-led Impulse! was aggressively (and successfully to some extent) marketing artists such as Rivers, Gato Barbieri, & John Klemmer (who, remember, wasn't always a "mellow" player) to younger college audiences. To assist in this, they still had Pharoah (who went into a decline of sorts along the way), and they always had Trane, just as they still do. And then they got Jarrett from Columbia...

For that matter, I think that RCA was handling Flying Dutchman by the time the 70s got under way, and that was another label that put out some fine music, a lot of it with "contemporary" touches.

...the implication is that BN could have stayed on the course Lion and Wolff were on that's nuts.

I fully agree with this - now. But what really killed me then, and still sticks out like a sore thumb, is how little care and planning, and how seemingly much empty-headed trend-riding went on with what the label really got behind. Donald Byrd & Bobbi Humphrey have hits with the Mizells? Fine, lets have them make the same record over and over and over and over. And over. Same with Ronnie Laws/Wayne Henderson, same with Noel Pointer, same with damn near everybody. There was no evolution, no refinement of concept, no nothing except more and more and more (and more) of the same. The ones who sold got to keep making the same record longer than the ones who didn't, which is of course the nature of the beast, but compare how CTI managed to successfully present the same "sound" in a subtle yet real different # of ways. With CTI, there was always a sense that although the music was indeed "product", that the music itself mattered, that it was the reason for the product. With BN in the 70s, it was depressingly evident far more often than not, that what they were interested in was product, period, music be damned.

Like I said earlier, you can make "commerical" music and still do it with imagination, taste, flair, etc. Or you can find a formula or two and ride it until it drops dead. It was the latter course that BN took in the 70s, and that, far more than any "defilement" of the BN "legacy" or choice of "musical direction" is what sticks in the craw to this day.

Or to put it another way - do you think that all those putrid Gene Harris BN albums of the Butler era were the best they could have been? Could nobody have made the same "type" records with more taste and/or imagination? Or were they just going to have to be abominable no matter what?

I don't think so. I just think that it was a severe lack of imagination about how to hit that "new note", simple as that.

[Christiern]

Jim: "I just think that it was a severe lack of imagination about how to hit that "new note", simple as that.

You got it, Jim. Thanks for saving me the time it would have taken to give Dan a clearer retro glance.

I think the fact and documentation (i.e. album releases) speak for themselves, so really no need for further discussion on my part.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I was going to mention Impulse, too. Even when Impulse was issuing overtly commercial records in the late seventies, they were actually very, very good - Sonny Criss' "Warm and sunny" is a classic of that kind of music; Blue Mitchell's "African violet" and "Summer soft"; Jimmy Ponder's "Illusions" and "White room"; Clifford Coulter's two albums - this is stuff I still play and enjoy a lot. And, at the same time, they had a decent vault programme and issued stuff like Sonny Criss' Peacock album, the complete "Queen of the organ" set on a twofer and so on. And don't forget that ABC owned Peacock and the seventies Peacock albums I've got (and I've got quite a few) are not inferior to the company's product when Don Robey owned it.

Atlantic's seventies product is damn good, too! David Newman, Les McCann, Eddie Harris, Herbie Mann etc etc. on the jazz side - but its R&B/Soul/Funk stuff was as good as it had ever been.

Chess was also, by then, owned by a large corporation. And was still issuing fine gospel albums in the seventies. And some classic Etta James albums. And isn't McDuff's "Heating system" Cadet one you always rave about, Dan? (Well, someone here raves about it and not me, cos I've never heard it.) But Jimmy Ponder's "While my guitar gently weeps" is another fine album. I don't know Cadet's seventies jazz output as well as I should - but I'm sure there is some Stitt and so on in there that's a lot better than the average BN seventies material.

Yes, Blue Note could have done a LOT better. UA closed Solid State and moved Sonny Lester to Blue Note, but then let him get out of there, where any sensible company would have tried to keep him onside. Don't you think we'd perceive Blue Note differently if the material that he issued on Groove Merchant had continued to come out on Blue Note?

MG

[JSngry]

Yes, Blue Note could have done a LOT better. UA closed Solid State and moved Sonny Lester to Blue Note, but then let him get out of there, where any sensible company would have tried to keep him onside. Don't you think we'd perceive Blue Note differently if the material that he issued on Groove Merchant had continued to come out on Blue Note?

That's a good point, especially since so many of the Butler-era BN albums had him as "Executive Producer" and fewer others as "Producer". There was clearly room under the Butler "umbrella" for other producers to work, and why Lester chose not to (or had it chosen for him) is an interesting question.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

A guy I know in the music business in West Africa once said to me, "it's easy to make money in music; all you need is to know what to do and how to do it", and smiled, knowing that it applied to everything.

But Blue Note's people in the seventies seemed to have neither the knowledge of what to do nor how to even do what they thought they should be doing half decently.

MG

[paul secor]

i remember 1997? perhaps...when lee morgan's last session, grant green live at the lighthouse, donald byrd's ethiopian knights and elvin jones at this point in time all appeared in the CD store up there in providence. yes it must have been 1997. i bought them all and i don't think a better batch of reissues has been put out by blue note at once before or since.

I disagree strongly with that one, but you have the right to your opinion.

[JSngry]

Not the Elvin, that was vault material produced by Omar Clay, Butler being "Executive Producer".

The Byrd...not at all fond of that one...just as bad as the Mizell stuff in my opinion, albeit for different reasons...

The Morgan...yeah, but...if you look at the timeline and the original album credits, there was a "transition" period where Butler at first co-produced w/Wolff and then actually produced artists left over from the old BN, and it seems as if he stayed out of the way for those albums/artists. This is one of those. Nothing at all "Butler-ish" about it at all.

As for the Grant, that was GGs last album for BN. Butler (w/Wade Marcus) had been around for Grant's albums since Visions. If you again look at the timeline, when Butler first assumed the lead at UA/BN, there were a lot of "pop-jazz" albums like Visions by a lot of people. In retrospect, these were not as bad as they seemed at the time, although few were as good as you'd want them to be either. If he had stopped there, ok, the shift was on once UA/Transamerica, bought out Liberty (far more the turning point than Liberty buying out BN, I think), and it could have been just another case of corporate bullshit winning the day.

But he didn't, and it wasn't. The whole Blue Note Hits A New Note thing was enormous in terms of "push" (i.e. -marketing). You could sign up for a freakin' newsletter for cryin' out loud, in case you wanted to know how chapped Bobbi Humphrey's lips were or weren't at her last gig, I guess...This wasn't intended to be just a co-opting of a label's name, this was a hoped for movement, a redefining of a legacy/brand name/whatever. And almost all of it was crap and/or repetitious redoings of a formula that had worked one time. There was no "rebuilding" or "redefining", just cheap opportunistic riding of a formula and farming out of work to slicksters, who did what slicksters do - make slick music for ready, and short-term, consumption. The only two "serious" artists left on the label were Hutch & Horace. The former's output began to be produced (to lessening effect as time went by, imo) by Dale Oehler (Butler again being "Executive Producer"), the latter's work shifting from Butler w/Marcus to Silver w/o any noticeable change, so I think this was one of those "stay out of the way" dynamics. And they got less and less push as time went by. Silver's was the very last release of new, original material on BN before it went inactive, and believe me when I tell you that it was released damn near in a vacuum.

All "style" & no substance. Go to THIS PAGE and see how the covers got prettier and prettier while the music got emptier & emptier. And that's not just a sign of the times either, since, as noted earlier, you can (and some did) make "commercial", "jazzy" music that is not as totally devoid of content as most of this effluvia was.

I'll give this much to Butler's BN though - it laid the groundwork for GRP, since Daves Grusin & Rosen became an active production team there. So if you want some, any, kind of "lasting legacy" from it all, there it is, and you can have it.

[Christiern]

Jim, you keep mentioning the Mizell brothers and the name alone gives me the creeps. They were beyond horrible, IMO, but theirs was the kind of crap Butler supported--he was clueless when it came to jazz and, for that matter, the music industry..

[sidewinder]

The whole Blue Note Hits A New Note thing was enormous in terms of "push" (i.e. -marketing). You could sign up for a freakin' newsletter for cryin' out loud

Sure was. The marketing hype was even big over here, in most of the popular music press. Heck, I even remember hearing one of Donald Byrd's 45s being played on BBC Radio 1 in their prime lunchtime pop music slot around 1976. Closely followed by John Handy 'Hard Work' on Impulse, of course.

Edited April 22, 2008 by sidewinder

[JSngry]

No real beef against the Mizells here, they're deeply respected in certain "beat-ology" circles, and on those terms, I can get them. but other than that, unlike much of the other "funk jazz" of the era, it didn't grab me then, and I still haven't "gotten" it, other than I know have a better appreciation of what they were doing. It's an ok concept for a change of pace (at the very most), but these guys kinda took it everywhere, and damned if I have yet to warm to it.

Another thing about the Butler BN - the longer it went on, the more and more it was all about L.A. based studio dates, not about "slick street jazz" or whatever you want to call it. That's one thing in particular that made Sonny Lester's Groove Merchant work the "Possible Parallel 70s Blue Note Alternative" that MG suggests it was - Lester slicked shit up, but underneath it all was usually some East Coast club talent. BN, otoh, turned into a production factory, like CTI only without the imagination or real jazz skills featured in the mix. Strictly production...

I'm imagining Groove Merchant 70s music w/some slickass 70s BN covers, and...I don't think I can handle it!

[JSngry]

...John Handy 'Hard Work' on Impulse, of course.

An Esmond Edwards production!

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

...John Handy 'Hard Work' on Impulse, of course.

An Esmond Edwards production!

I'd forgotten about "Hard work". Yes, Esmond produced most of the good, sound, commercial stuff at Impulse - though Ed Michel did the Coulters. Esmond also did the Ponder album on Cadet and hired Bob James for the arrangements - kind of superior Kudu.

MG

[Christiern]

I always thought Ed Michel diluted the work of good musicians by adding electronic elements. BTW Ed was working for Riverside in London back in 1960-61, when I was with the label.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I always thought Ed Michel diluted the work of good musicians by adding electronic elements. BTW Ed was working for Riverside in London back in 1960-61, when I was with the label.

I don't detect any of this on the Clifford Coulters. Nary an electrode...

Well, except the organ and guitar

MG