Blue Note Records

In 1998 Blue Note purchased Premonition, and, when the label began distributing Barber’s albums, sales quickly rose. For her sixth album, Night Club (2000), Barber returned to interpreting familiar standard songs in her intimate yet dramatic style. The compact disc became a jazz best seller, spending eight…

…to play drums on several Blue Note Records recordings with jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. With Horace Silver, Blakey founded the Jazz Messengers (1954), toured Europe, and recorded (1955–61) a brilliant string of records for the Blue Note label. By encouraging young musicians to become members of the Jazz Messengers, Blakey…

…he played on dozens of Blue Note albums and accompanied top jazz artists from Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane in the early 1960s to latter-day young lions Joshua Redman and Roy Hargrove. Higgins’s drumming was characterized by his enthusiastic swing, very precise beat, and crisp-sounding, stimulating, often complex…