Sony Bets That Jazz Can Still Be Hip

By Devin Leonard,  January 30, 2014
Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins will celebrate his 84th birthday this year. His cloudlike hair turned gray decades ago, but Rollins still blows with miraculous force. He recently demonstrated his staying power in another way: In January he signed a contract with Sony Music Entertainment’s (SNE) OKeh Records, one of the last major-label jazz imprints.

At a time when big record companies have all but given up on the genre, Sony has been assiduously signing jazz artists. Last year it resurrected OKeh, a dormant label known for recording historic sessions by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five in the 1920s, as a jazz imprint within the Sony Masterworks division. This year OKeh plans to release as many as 20 albums. Wulf Müller, a veteran music industry executive in charge of signing artists to the label, hopes that one of those will be by Rollins , whom he personally courted. “He’s still a fantastic artist, and he’s still searching for the final kind of way to express himself, and he will never stop searching for that,” says Müller.
Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-30/sony-targets-jazz-fans-with-okeh-record-label-revival