The major-label landscape hasn’t been hospitable to jazz in recent years, but there’s a bit of good news on the horizon: OKeh Records, the label that released historic early recordings by Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Duke Ellington, is being revived under the corporate umbrella of Sony Masterworks. The new OKeh roster will feature contemporary artists, including the guitarist Bill Frisell, the saxophonist David Sanborn and the pianist and keyboardist Bob James; its first release will be “A Different Time,” by the pianist John Medeski, on April 9.
Wulf Müller, who joined Sony Classical as a jazz consultant last fall, is overseeing the label revamp. Mr. Müller has nearly 30 years of experience in the music industry, many of them in the realm of A&R and marketing for PolyGram and Universal. At OKeh he’ll work with Chuck Mitchell, who was recently appointed senior vice president of Sony Masterworks (and comes with his own major-label jazz pedigree, having worked as an executive at Verve and eOne).
“With Wulf Müller and Chuck Mitchell as the ideal partners, I’m thrilled that we are breathing new life into one of the coolest brands in recorded music history,” Bogdan Roscic, the president of Sony Classical, said in a news release scheduled for distribution on Thursday. “We feel there is currently an incredible wealth of exciting music out there that will find a new home and thrive on OKeh.”
Founded in 1918 by Otto K. E. Heinemann, a German émigré, OKeh Records released a typical mishmash of the era — popular and specialty songs — until it had a fateful hit in 1920 with Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” often credited as the first-ever blues record. Recognizing an opportunity, Heinemann began recording more African-American music, eventually hiring the pianist and singer Clarence Williams as director of “race records.”
After becoming a division of Columbia Records in 1926, OKeh went through a series of changes, branching out from jazz and blues. Among its pop hits in the ‘50s were “Cry,” by Johnnie Ray, and “ I Put a Spell on You,” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. In the ‘60s the producer Carl Davis, working with Curtis Mayfield, gave the label a soul makeover. Dormant during the ‘70s and ‘80s, OKeh was also resuscitated in the mid-‘90s as a blues label, releasing albums by Keb’ Mo and G. Love & Special Sauce, among others.
For now, at least, the new OKeh will be explicitly a jazz label and only deal in new releases. (Its back catalog is the province of Sony’s Legacy division, which last year released “Louis Armstrong: The OKeh Columbia & RCA Victor Recordings 1925-1933,” a 10-CD boxed set.)
And while its first batch of announced artists consists entirely of Americans, that’s not likely to be the case for long. The revamped label’s slogan is “Global Expressions in Jazz,” and Mr. Müller, who lives in Madrid, stands behind it. “What I want to achieve with OKeh,” he said in the news release, “is to build a home for jazz and jazz-related music of the highest quality, whatever its origins are.”