Blue Note: Outstanding Cover Artwork
21. October 2007 – 16:44 by
There are probably only very few people into Jazz who don’t own a remarkable collection of Blue Note records. That’s no suprise as almost all Jazz greats have recorded for the label and rather often those recordings are considered to be among their best. Though besides the great music there is at least one more aspect which makes those albums stand out: the cover artwork.
I first paid attention to the cover artwork when I bought Eric Dolphy’s phenomenal album Out To Lunch which was first released in 1964. The cover photo - an image of a shop’s closed door and a sign reading ‘Will Be Back’ - along with the cover design and typography - the album’s title in black bold type with an exclamation mark at the end - caught my eye. I thought it was very advanced for the time. Well, maybe it wasn’t; I don’t know anything about design and typography.
Anyway, I liked it a lot and still do. So I had a closer look at the Blue Note covers and realised most of them had been designed by Reid Miles who had worked for Blue Note during its heyday from the mid-1950’s to the late 1960’s. He had designed almost 500 cover artworks for the label. Although he was not a Jazz fan at all - he was into Classical music - he had captured the music and the mood very precisely in his artwork.
Usually the covers feature a photo of the artist taken by Blue Note’s co-founder Francis Wolff and design and typography by Reid Miles; sometimes the cover photo was also taken by Miles (e.g. for Out To Lunch). The combination of great photos and very advanced design make the Blue Note records of that time stand out from the rest. Some artwork like the one for Andrew Hill’s Point Of Departure, also from 1964, are still be modern looking nowadays, I think.
So I was pleasantly suprised that there is a whole book dedicated solely to the cover artwork Blue Note’s records and especially to Reid Miles, Blue Note - The Ultimate Collection. Almost 400 cover artworks are shown on the 288 pages of the book in seven inch format. It is highly recommended to all Jazz fans, designers, and everyone else into good design and cover artwork.
The book was published by Chronicle Books in 2002 already but is still available from your local bookstore, Amazon or Chronical Books for $19.95.
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