New Statesman: Spirit of Birdland

Bruce Lundvall is one of the great survivors of the record trade. A big, jovial man, unspoiled if not untouched by the cruelties of the business, Lundvall is a benign fixture in an industry that has seen careers rise and fall as rapidly as those of the artists they are meant to look after. He goes back a long way, to the time when the American record scene was a strange mix of gangsters, good guys and old-time businessmen trying to get a fix on how a young industry was going to develop and grow.

In some ways, the situation is the same today. Despite its glamorous status, the music biz is small and still overrun with amateurs running boutique labels or musicians doing it their own way. People shop for soap powder and biscuits every week, but most still buy no more than one or two CDs a year. Usually, those discs are the multi-platinum sellers that drive the industry forward. But the music Lundvall loves, and which he has made a point of supporting for decades, is jazz, which supposedly accounts for only 3 per cent of the market.

For the past 14 years Lundvall has been the boss of the most eminent of jazz labels, Blue Note, which celebrates its 60th birthday this year and is now part of Capitol/EMI. It is a felicitous place for him to end up. As a high-school kid, sneaking into jazz clubs with a borrowed motorcycle licence as his ID, Lundvall was actually there when A Night at Birdland, one of the defining albums of the hard bop movement, was recorded by Blue Note - "and I remember a tune they played that never got on the record, too". After getting out of the army at the end of the 1950s, he knocked on the door of the Blue Note boss Alfred Lion and asked for a job, to no avail. Blue Note was one of those boutique labels then, and Lion couldn't afford to hire anyone. Twenty-five years later, when Lundvall was asked to head up a reactivated Blue Note, he coaxed Lion out of retirement to join in what became the celebratory resurgence of the label.

"The record business back then was just so exciting," he says when I meet him for coffee; he is thinking back to his first job at CBS in 1960. The company was directed by the flamboyant genius Goddard Lieberson, the kind of savant who has disappeared from the industry, replaced largely by cultural neophytes with a ruthless business doctrine.

Lieberson was a man who could talk with equal enthusiasm to Aaron Copland or-Bob Dylan. Lundvall, who has responsibilities on the classical side as well as for jazz, has clearly modelled himself on Lieberson, rather than the hoods who were the other face of the business back then. He remembers Morris Levy, the crooked boss of Roulette, calling him in the 1960s after Lundvall had released a session entitled Live at Birdland. "Kid," came this slow, impassive growl down the line, "you know I own the name 'Birdland'." Lundvall shakes his head with a smile. "We settled it, and it didn't cost much, but we had to pay him."

Our coffee has turned into lunch, and Lundvall sips reflectively on a glass of merlot. "I'm carrying forward a legacy," he says, and for once such a remark doesn't sound like a corporate sound-bite. Apart from dealing with Blue Note's peerless back catalogue, the label has nurtured new artists and mostly conducted itself with a thoughtful demeanour: no concept albums and little hack-work. Jazz always seems to live on borrowed time at major labels: it flourishes in a quiet way, as if scared of drawing attention to creativity that makes modest money and tops no charts. In Blue Note's case, though, the label has survived 60 years, a grand marque that has long since earned its stars. There's no better place for a veteran like Lundvall to fly a small flag for a spirit he thinks should never have gone out of the business, but which mostly has.

This month Blue Note reissues 12 of its most distinguished titles as 24-bit editions remastered by the original engineer, Rudy Van Gelder