Hardformat - Reaching for the sublime in music design. Jazz covers (2): Reid Miles. No Jazz album cover is more a Jazz album cover than a Reid Miles Blue Note Jazz album cover. His designs became close to iconic. To many people, they simple are what Jazz looks like. My friend P (Hi, P!) And I recently made a comic book with jazz stories, packaged in a record sleeve.
Guess what we decided it should look like? Right. (Check out the design and a sneak peek at the comic here if you haven’t seen it before…) I’ve been wanting to dedicate a post to these record cover designs for quite a while, but in a way, it just seemed kind of obsolete to do so. Yesterday, however, I happened upon a nice little video. Et voila! If you want to see more of the original Miles’ record covers, or read a bit about him, check out some of these articles: Thinking Miles ahead on d|visible or The Jazzy Blue Notes on Retinart. (Found via The Casual Optimist) Jazz Covers (3): Paul Bacon. Anybody interested in Jazz, the history of jazz and the many anecdotes that come along with it, should pay a visit to the JazzWax – blog of Marc Myers. It’s filled to the brim with stories and interviews, with photographs and film snippets and, of course, record covers.
Recently Myers posted a 4-part interview with Paul Bacon who was one of the first designers and art directors to give jazz-albums their distinctive look. In the early years of LP cover design, there were no rules. The only driving force was that a cover had to be graphically gripping. Bacon worked for Blue Note and later for RiverSide. (Found via JazzWax) Jazz covers: David Stone Martin. I was planning on doing some kind of jazz weekend special in the near future, but since I started researching for it, I began digging up so much great material that it soon became clear to me I would never be able to fit it al in one weekend. So no weekend special. Instead you’ll be seeing jazz-related posts popping up every now and then, but let me get one thing clear from the start: I like jazz immensely, but I am by no means a big expert on the subject.
In fact, I’m quite a late convert and I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff I still need to discover. Which is great, of course. One of the nice things about jazz is undoubtedly that this music more often than not is accompanied by great visuals: photographs, record covers, typography and illustrations, jazz seems to bring out the most stylish designers. Today we focus on the work of an illustrator who made a name for himself doing jazz record covers. And may I suggest you put on a little music while you’re at it?
Blue Note Album Covers (Still & Animated) Project 33. This morning I came across a nice little blog called Project 33 which displays a collection of vintage record sleeves all designed with nothing but dots, rectangles, triangles, lines, abstract shapes or only typography. Very often the designs result in a completely abstract image, other times they become highly stylized representations of musical instruments for example. I showed the blog to a friend (Hi, M!) And he immediately started sending me examples of similar record sleeve designs, consisting of only abstract shapes or typography, but from very different times and styles of music. Meanwhile I started searching for other examples as well.
Here’s what we came up with… First of all, some examples from the Project 33 site, run by Jive Time Records from Seattle: And this is what M. came up with. Finally, the stuff I found: Covers were found at Birka Jazz Archive, Discogs and Vintage Vanguard. Wu-Note Record Covers | Twirk Ethic. I’ve seen several “design remix” projects (including the video game/book covers by Olly Moss) but Logan Walters’s Wu-Tang / Blue Note Record covers manage to breathe some new life into the trend. Walters did a great job of capturing Blue Note’s design style and the application succeeds in looking like Wu-Tang’s music sounds, gritty and bold. Bonus: Check out the latest Wu video: New Wu.