A good day for Blue Note...

It's pretty much "just" a hard-bop date (i.e. a few blues heads; Morgan had yet to get really modal), but it's one of the best - a definitive Blue Note session. Joe Henderson on tenor and the great Billy Higgins on drums. The title track is a total jazz classic and pretty much epitomizes the hard-bop sound; it defies you not to dance, even if only in your chair..

(And ti's good you're not Aaron -- so there's two of you, yay!)

The thing is, they are always re-releasing classic albums, but they have tended to favor more straightahead dates at the expense of more "out" records (and this is relative within Blue Note's catalog... very very generally speaking, and without having heard every allbum, I would venture to guess that what seperate Blue Note "avant" music from that of Coltrane or Ayler is that the compositions are more integral on a BN release, whereas Coltrane or Ayler might utilize short themes or melodies as starting points for very free improvising that ventures into all sorts of places not alluded to in the composition itself). Given the tastes of the general populace, this makes sense economically.

Aaron -- is Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder ('63) any good?
I honestly have only heard half of the album, but I really liked what I heard, and the title track is very classic.

Search for A New Land is a pretty great Lee Morgan album, I want to see Morgan's The Cooker reissued though.

update:
on oct 7, blue note will be releasing:
Lee Morgan "Sonic Boom"
Sam Rivers "Fucshia Swing Song"
Andrew Hill "Passing Ships" which is something from the sixties that hasnt been released ever i think (or at least that is what i think i read)

I really love this RVG series. I wonder how long they'll go with it.

i wonder when unit structures will get the RVG?

They will probably go with it until RVG is too sick to do it. ;-)

From this Joe Chambers interview, maybe I had come across this before but it makes a ton of sense:
https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/joe-chambers-blue-note-years-interview/
Unlike other jazz labels of the time, Blue Note paid musicians to rehearse beforehand, usually several days prior to the session date. According to Joe Chambers that was the reason why Blue Note recordings had a sense of focus and cohesion. “We sounded like a working band in the studio because we went and rehearsed for about a week. All of the rehearsals were held at Lynn Oliver’s studios. The music for Blue Note was more complex than just blowing sessions, so you required a little more time. We would put in four to five days for each album and by the time you went in the studio, you sounded real tight, like a working band.”

That makes a whole lot of sense.

FWIW I've really been coming to appreciate Joe Chambers more - first from going on a Bobby Hutcherson kick and more recently listening to all the Wayne Shorter records. I used to kind of think of him as poor-man's Tony Williams (I imagined to myself that they'd call him at Blue Note when Tony was busy), but I think that was unfair, he had his own thing.

So much good can happen when you don't just insist on doing everything the cheapest possible way in the short run. That's why we're still talking about Blue Note and not Vee-Jay.