Celebrating 75 Years of Blue Note Records, Southbank Centre

Well-known jazz record label Blue Note is celebrating 75 years, and Southbank Centre is hosting the party
Few record labels loom larger in the history of jazz than Blue Note. Since helping to launch the 'hard bop' genre in the 1950s, the label has taken most of the big names under its wing at one time or another. Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool, Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else, Maiden Voyage by Herbie Hancock and Song For My Father by the recently departed Horace Silver – these milestone recordings have had a cultural significance that has stretched well beyond the history of jazz, and we have Blue Note to thank for them.  
It’s now 75 years since Alfred Lion and Max Margulis founded the label. To mark the anniversary, the Southbank Centre is hosting a special evening on 22 November, as part of the London Jazz Festival, featuring some of the best of Blue Note’s current crop of artists – who, like the hard boppers before them, are taking jazz in bold new directions. 
Robert Glasper, the pianist known for his crossover projects with the likes of the Mos Def, will be leading proceedings with fellow pianist Jason Moran – whose work, much like Glasper’s, nods towards hip-hop as well as bebop, blues and gospel. In the first half of the show they’ll be performing duets, taking their cue from classic Blue Note recordings but bringing their experimental approach to bear. 
Then, in the second half, they’ll be joined by a host of other Blue Note musicians, most of whom don’t seem to have been announced yet. But guitarist Lionel Loueke and drummer Kendrick Scott are definitely on board – and that’s reason enough, we’d say, to get booking now.