Blue Note Records began on 6 January 1939, when Alfred Lion, a jazz enthusiast who had emigrated from Berlin, recorded the boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis in a New York studio. His childhood friend Francis Wolff, a photographer, joined him after leaving Germany at the end of that year, and Wolff’s session photographs became part of the label’s identity.
From 1953 most Blue Note sessions were recorded by the engineer Rudy Van Gelder, and from 1956 Reid Miles designed covers with bold type, tinted photographs and solid blocks of colour. In the 1950s and 1960s the label became the home of hard bop and soul jazz, with Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley and Wayne Shorter. Liberty Records bought it in 1965; it was relaunched in 1985 and is now part of Universal Music Group. Its catalogue has also fed sample-based music: Us3 built its 1993 debut on Blue Note samples, and in 2003 the label let Madlib rework its archive for Shades of Blue.