The so-called blue note is the “flatted” or slightly lowered third and seventh in a major scale. If this may seem too theoretical for you, just listen to the music on these original albums: the best in Jazz from the late Forties and Fifties, full of blue notes, guaranteed to blow your blues away. All of these sessions took place in and around New York during the heydays of Bebop (and soon Hard Bop) and aptly demonstrate why the “modern jazz” of these times still seems fresh today. Sax-stylists like James Moody, Hank Mobley, or Cannonball Adderley (under his alias “Buckshot La Funke”) show the wide range and the incredible creativity of Bebop, as do trumpeters like Clifford Brown or Art Farmer, pianists like Jutta Hipp, Horace Silver, Sonny Clark, Wynton Kelly, or Bobby Timmons. Some of the greatest – and rarest – albums of the period. Period.