For the better part of the 20th century, jazz music was America’s popular music. And the biggest jazz singers doubled as its brightest pop stars: Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughn, Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, to name just a few marquee names. Best-selling albums for stalwart jazz labels oft-times featured a singer out front of the band. But not at Blue Note. The founders of the label – Alfred Lion, Max Margulis, Francis Wolff – first swooned to the sophisticated breakneck sound of bebop, cutting early sides of Thelonious Monk before documenting the edgy sound of hard bop with label mainstays like pianist Horace Silver, trumpeter Clifford Brown, and drummer Art Blakey, with nary a vocalist in sight. (The two lone exceptions to that rule both occurred in 1962: Sheila Jordan’s Portrait of Sheila and Dodo Greene’s My Hour of Need.)
That all changed in January 1963 when trumpeter Donald Byrd brought an 8-piece gospel choir into the studio to add wordless vocals to a set of tunes made with his group. Blue Note didn’t know what to do with the session, letting it sit in the vaults for a full year before finally releasing A New Perspective, an audacious blending of jazz with gospel. It shocked purists, but broke into the Billboard 200 and even yielded a single in “Cristo Redentor.”
It also yielded a curious new hybrid. While Blue Note had all but eschewed vocal jazz and the like in its lengthy discography, it also became the home for a curious string of albums that amalgamated vocals with jazz into startling new forms. Some albums hearken back to the church music of the bandleaders’ childhood, while others feel dosed by the particularly mind-expanding acid trips of the late ‘60s. Lyrics might be soulful, spaced-out, or politically-acute. You might not hear any standards getting sung by velvet-voiced singers, but you could get spoken word, gospel, avant-garde opera, R&B, even some comedy monologues sprinkled in. Adventurous, ground-breaking, always unexpected, these albums remain some of the boldest imaginings in the vast Blue Note catalog.