Blue Note Records is an American jazz record label, established in 1939 by Alfred Lion and Max Margulis. Francis Wolff became involved shortly afterwards. It derives its name from the characteristic "blue notes" of jazz and the blues.

Originally dedicated to recording traditional jazz and small group swing, from 1947 the label began to switch its attention to modern jazz. While the original company did not itself record many of the pioneers of bebop, significant exceptions are Thelonious Monk, Fats Navarro and Bud Powell.

Historically, Blue Note has principally been associated with the "hard bop" style of jazz (mixing bebop with other forms of music including soul, blues, rhythm and blues and gospel). Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey, Lou Donaldson, Donald Byrd and Grant Green were among the label's leading artists.

The label is currently owned by the EMI Group and in 2006 was expanded to fill the role of an umbrella label group bringing together a wide variety of EMI-owned labels and imprints specializing in the growing market segment of music for adults.

4000 series

The Modern Jazz Series continued into the 1970s with the LPs listed below. Many were issued in both monaural versions (BLP series) and stereo versions (BST 84000 series). Beginning with 4258 all subsequent LPs (with three exceptions: 4263, 4264, and 4265) were issued only in stereo. Most of the first 300 numbers of the 4000 series have been reissued by Toshiba-EMI in Japan ("Blue Note Works 4000" series); the catalog numbers are TOCJ-4###.

Image source: birkajazz.com. Text source: Wikipedia.