Blue Note Record's New CD & Tour

By Hugo Kugiya
Special to The Seattle Times

The record label marks its 70th year with an album, "Mosaic: A Celebration of Blue Note Records," and concert tour, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Moore Theatre, 1932 Second Ave., Seattle; $28-$35 (206-292-2787 or www.themoore.com). When Bill Charlap was a teenager in New York City — he was a music student at the school immortalized by the movie "Fame" — his best source of reference material was the public library near Lincoln Center, where he checked out jazz records by the musicians he emulated. More often than not, the records were Blue Note releases.By 2000, Charlap had become an accomplished jazz pianist and arranger, and when his own Blue Note Records album (the first of six) came out that year, the moment was just short of transcendent, like a ballplayer's first at-bat in Yankee Stadium."

I remember getting all those records from the library," said Charlap, 42, "and seeing that Blue Note Pac-Man on it, and all those jazz giants. So when I first signed with them and my album came out and it had that Blue Note [symbol] on it, I thought, 'Wow, I can't believe that's my name on there.' "

The legendary record label nearly synonymous with jazz is marking its 70th year with an ambitious album and concert tour by a combo led by Charlap. The group, which performs Thursday at the Moore Theatre, includes drummer Lewis Nash, bassist Peter Washington, trumpeter Nicholas Payton and saxophonists Ravi Coltrane (the son of jazz great and Blue Note artist John Coltrane) and Steve Wilson. The album, "Mosaic: A Celebration of Blue Note Records," attempts to do what seems impossible: to distill the 70 years of artists and albums into eight carefully chosen, reinvented songs.

The album represents the work of McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Cedar Walton, Art Blakey, Joe Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson, Thelonious Monk, Duke Pearson and Horace Silver. The group chose to record eight songs: "Search for Peace," "Dolphin Dance," "Inner Urge," "Little B's Poem," "Criss Cross," "Idle Moments," "The Outlaw," and the title track "Mosaic." Not all the songs represent an artist's best-known work, and many landmark songs were left out.

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