Filter Coffee, Blue Note Records and Colourising photos!

In the last couple of years I delved into three seemingly different spheres of interest which happened to compliment each other rather well.

I never was a coffee drinker or thought that I would enjoy the bitter taste of this widely consumed beverage but my discovery of drip filter coffee has made me appreciate this drug. I love drinking teas, so having a light roasted filter coffee felt similar and more native to my taste buds than a charred dark roasted espresso.

My new found caffeine addiction in term fuelled my other two recent passions. I have always been an avid hip-hop fan and have spent countless hours digging around for new artists and original music from which some of my favourite tracks borrowed samples. Even though I have appreciated Jazz since a child (mainly thanks to Tom&Jerry:) I never knew too much about the scene and the artists outside of the obvious giants like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald for example.

My sample hunt led me to discover the legendary Blue Note Records. The more I listened the more songs I recognised. Many of my favourite hip-hop producers often drew for a sample from these jazz masters and as much as I love their renditions after hearing the originals I realised I had only been shown a snippet from what I now know are masterpieces.

Blue Note Records was started by two German immigrants, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, who moved to New York and shared a passion for this music. They both had an amazing ear for "bangers" if I may say so, in particular Alfred Lion who managed to bring out the best of many artists, like John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Herbie Hancock, Dexter Gordon and many others. Francis Wolff on the other hand was an amazing photographer and thanks to him a lot of the sessions were documented in stunning images, a lot of them then being used by Reid Miles to create some of the most iconic album covers in music history.

This is where my third interest tied in. In recent years I had started to restore and colourise old black and white pictures. Francis Wolff's images were ideal for this hobby of mine, because they are such great photographs with perfect exposure which need no restoration really, leaving me to just add colour to them and image what the artists would have looked like through the view finder of his camera right before he captured them on his black and white film stock.

Here are several images from Francis Wolff's amazing collection which I dared to colourise. I would like to state that I do not own these images and do not want to deface the man's great work. I have approached them with full respect and awe to Francis Wolff, Alfred Lion and what their label has achieved! The caffeine-laced late nights listening to the music that came out of that label gave me a perfect backdrop to pursuing my colouring hobby.

John Coltrane during the recording of his classic album Blue Train. This is the image which was cropped and used for the cover of the album too.

Art Blakey during the recording of A night In Tunisia, his classic.

The man behind the pictures - Francis Wolff himself. Not sure who would have taken this photo lol

Thank you all.
Zdravko

P.S. Here is a link to more of his work -
https://www.morrisonhotelgallery.com/photographers/YOAYSz/Francis--Wolff