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Jazz Covers
Part design history, part trip down musical memory lane, this anthology of jazz album artwork is above all a treasure trove of creative and cultural inspiration. Spanning half a century, it assembles the most daring and dynamic jazz cover designs that helped make and shape not only a musical genre but also a particular way of experiencing life. From the 1940s through to the decline of LP production in the early 1990s, each chosen cover design is distinct in the way it complements the energy of the album’s music with its own visual rhythms of frame, line, text, and form. To satisfy even the most demanding of music geeks, each record cover is accompanied by a fact sheet listing performer and album name, art director, photographer, illustrator, year, label, and more.
551 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
6 people are currently reading
140 people want to read
About the author
Joaquim Paulo
7 books4 followersJoaquim Paulo is a consultant for major labels and directs a number of radio stations in Portugal. He started collecting vinyl at 15, and flies to London, Paris, New York and São Paulo to enrich his collection of over 25,000 LPs. He lives and works in Lisbon and dedicates his free time to recovering old and rare recordings.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 5, 2010
There are a variety of styles and eras represented in this interesting but flawed collection of jazz album covers. Instead of being an encyclopaedic collection of great graphic design from jazz albums of the past, Jazz Covers seems to be a compilation of a fan's favorite covers from their personal collection. Several of the records even have a "Promotional Copy--Not for Sale" sticker on them. Although not a flaw per se, the sometimes baffling inclusion of covers that do not demonstrate much in the way of innovative graphic design could stem from the curator's limited selection of albums they had access to.
One major issue with the book is that the covers are organized by musical artist rather than by graphic designer. Since it's ostensibly an art book, I'd like to have been able to compare a designer's work with other things they've done.
The short biographical statements about the designers are repetitive as well. One or two page biographies preceding a section containing a designer's work would have eliminated this repetition and contributed to the overall flow of the book.
There are several instances of carelessness and incomplete information throughout the book. Artist names are occasionally spelled incorrectly and on one page a cover is misidentified.
Overall Jazz Covers is worth taking a look at for a sampling of beautifully reproduced vintage jazz album covers from the early 1950s to the late 1970s with occasional more recent vintage covers thrown in. Look elsewhere for an in-depth history of jazz-related art and graphic design, however.
One major issue with the book is that the covers are organized by musical artist rather than by graphic designer. Since it's ostensibly an art book, I'd like to have been able to compare a designer's work with other things they've done.
The short biographical statements about the designers are repetitive as well. One or two page biographies preceding a section containing a designer's work would have eliminated this repetition and contributed to the overall flow of the book.
There are several instances of carelessness and incomplete information throughout the book. Artist names are occasionally spelled incorrectly and on one page a cover is misidentified.
Overall Jazz Covers is worth taking a look at for a sampling of beautifully reproduced vintage jazz album covers from the early 1950s to the late 1970s with occasional more recent vintage covers thrown in. Look elsewhere for an in-depth history of jazz-related art and graphic design, however.
November 9, 2022
Right off the top, the most salient characteristic of a book like this one is that it will be, by definition, highly subjective. In other words, no self-respecting "jazz fanatic" (or whatever term one might prefer) is going to agree with the choices made regarding which particular album covers should be included. I have no intention of listing all those that I would have chosen instead; if I did, this review would no doubt be even longer than it is likely going to be anyway. I will simply pick one, more-or-less at random, to represent all of them: 'Afro' by Dizzy Gillespie. For my money, the cover of that LP was one of the best ever designed. One of these days, if I am ever wealthy, I may well commission someone to make an enormous framed print of it so I can hang it on my wall. I remember seeing it for the first time as a little kid, probably in the late 1970s, and being completely mesmerised by how beautiful it was simply as art. It was never all that easy to find a copy of that record, never mind a nice one, as it had been out of print since the mid-1950s. It was never released on CD until 2002, and even then only as a limited edition. I finally got hold of a copy of that CD earlier this year, and it is in fact every bit as good as it looks. It sounds great, especially for such an early recording. On the other hand, someone would have had to fuck up by the numbers for a band this great to sound bad- the LP features arrangements by Chico O'Farrill, who also served as conductor, and aside from Dizzy himself, the line-up includes Ernie Royal & Quincy Jones (trumpet), J.J. Johnson (trombone), Hank Mobley & Lucky Thompson (tenor saxophone) (!), Candido Camero & Mongo Santamaria (congas) (!), and many other fine musicians as well. This band was absolutely smoking!!!
One would also think that a book like this, consisting almost entirely of photographs, would be an extremely fast read. That is particularly true when the reader is, though somewhat slowed by age, still occasionally capable of burning through a couple of hundred pages in a day. It was not the reading, however, that took so long, but rather the irrepressible "Inner Urge" (so to speak- thank you Joe Henderson!) to put the book down and run to the computer for the purpose of playing albums with which I was unfamiliar, but which looked interesting. Some of these were:
Ronnie Boykins' 'The Will Come' & Jorge Lopez Ruiz’s ’El Grito’, neither of which I particularly cared for; I'm also not sure why the unremarkable cover art of the former merited inclusion here.
Joe Henderson's 'Black Miracle' & Freddie Hubbard's 'Keep Your Soul Together', both of which I did quite like. I bought a copy of the latter a couple of weeks later. The former has apparently never been released on CD (or even cassette!); as far as I can tell, it was never even reissued on vinyl. That goes a long way toward explaining why I had never heard it before. It's a pretty good record, and I'll be keeping an eye out for a copy.
Hank Crawford’s ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’, Wilton Felder's 'Bullitt', Brother Jack McDuff's 'A Change Is Gonna Come', Nate Morgan’s ‘Retribution, Reparation’ & The Mtume Umoja Ensemble's 'Alkebu-Lan: Land Of The Blacks' were all reasonably good, and I'm glad to have been turned on to them (I already knew about the Mtume LP, but had never heard it). I'm not going to be running out the door or breaking the bank to get hold of any of them right this moment, but if I happen to run across a copy at the right price, I'll probably get it. The Hank Crawford record would be on the shopping list already if not for the somewhat obtrusive string arrangements (not that Don Sebesky was ever particularly subtle)...
The Hank Mobley/Cedar Walton Quintet's 'Breakthrough!' & Trudy Pitts’ ‘Introducing the Fabulous Trudy Pitts’ were both great, particularly the latter. It is an absolute travesty that this LP, and the late Trudy Pitts herself, are not better known. I am fairly knowledgable about music, but I had never heard of her until I read this book. The fact that this has never been released on CD outside Japan is simply ridiculous. I have never heard anyone tear it up quite like this on organ, and I've listened to Jimmy Smith, Jon Lord and damned near everyone in between. What she does to 'Autumn Leaves' is just indescribable, you simply have to hear it for yourself...
Monk Montgomery's 'Bass Odyssey' deserves special mention not only because I am a bass-player and have a weakness for LPs led by bassists, and not only because it was one of the eclectic handful of records released under the distribution agreement between Hugh Masakela's Chisa Records and Motown, but because it was an absolutely revolutionary recording in the history of the electric bass guitar. This record was released in 1971, and if there was any justice in this world it would have made Monk Montgomery considerably more famous than he ever got, maybe on the level of his younger brothers Buddy & Wes. Unfortunately, at the time he was mostly seen as just another competent but somewhat eccentric musician, and was also no longer young. He was an incredibly innovative and capable bassist, but is mostly remembered today merely as a footnote due to his early adoption of the then new Fender electric bass in the early 1950s. After recording a slightly more radio-friendly LP (and an obscure live album in South Africa) for Philadelphia International Records, he died in 1982 at the age of 60. 'Bass Odyssey' (which, unsurprisingly, has never been reissued or released on CD) was by far the best record I was turned on to by reading this book.
There were also several other albums included that I was familiar with, but which, for various reasons, I simply had not heard in some time, such as:
Lester Bowie’s ‘The 5th Power’,
Cannonball Adderley’s ‘Phenix’,
Curtis Counce’s ‘You get more bounce with Curtis Counce!’,
Philly Joe Jones’s ‘Showcase’,
Clifford Jordan's 'Glass Bead Games',
Pharoah Sanders' 'Tauhid',
Howard McGhee’s ‘Maggie’s Back In Town’,
'The Quintet Of The Year: Jazz At Massey Hall',
Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker’s ‘Bird and Diz’,
Charlie Parker’s ‘Bird at St. Nick’s’,
Larry Ridley’s ‘Sum Of The Parts’,
Melvin Sparks’s ‘Akilah!’,
Archie Shepp's 'Attica Blues' &
Jack Wilson's 'Easterly Winds'
In addition to all of those mentioned above, of course, was a third category- i.e. all those jazz albums included in this book to which I actually do listen regularly, for example:
'Dexter Calling' & 'One Flight Up' by Dexter Gordon,
'Iron City' by Grant Green,
'Mingus Ah Um' by Charles Mingus,
'A Blowin' Session' by Johnny Griffin,
'At The Café Bohemia Volume 1' by The Jazz Messengers (as well as 'Volume 2', which is also great, although it was not included here),
'The Gigolo' by Lee Morgan,
'No Room For Squares' by Hank Mobley,
'Home Cookin'' by Jimmy Smith,
'Lucky Strikes' by Lucky Thompson,
'Cherry' by Stanley Turrentine,
'Are You Glad To Be In America?' by James "Blood" Ulmer &
'Heavy Weather' by Weather Report
So, given all that, you may perhaps be able to understand why this took so long (it didn't help that it took me nearly a year to write this, either). I highly recommend all the recordings in the third category, and also (though with reservations in some cases) those in the second. Obviously, if old and imperfect recordings are a problem for you, the Massey Hall record is probably not going to cut it. The same is true of the James "Blood" Ulmer record (and Lester Bowie's) if more "avant-garde" jazz is not to your taste. All of them are good records, though, in their own ways, and hence worth listening to, at least in my opinion.
The book itself is, as coffee-table books go, one of the better ones I've seen. There are a few different versions- large format hardcover slipcased, two large format paperbacks slipcased, etc. Some of these are horrifyingly expensive even secondhand, hundreds of dollars for the large format editions. This is the smaller 8" x 6" hardcover from Taschen's Bibliotheca Universalis series, and although it is much smaller than the others it still looks good and works perfectly well- it even looks pretty on a coffee table. Even these normally go for more than US$50.00 new. They aren't very easy to find used in any format, so if you see one for a reasonable price you should get it (more recently, they published Funk & Soul Covers as well, which I'll hopefully review at some point).
One would also think that a book like this, consisting almost entirely of photographs, would be an extremely fast read. That is particularly true when the reader is, though somewhat slowed by age, still occasionally capable of burning through a couple of hundred pages in a day. It was not the reading, however, that took so long, but rather the irrepressible "Inner Urge" (so to speak- thank you Joe Henderson!) to put the book down and run to the computer for the purpose of playing albums with which I was unfamiliar, but which looked interesting. Some of these were:
Ronnie Boykins' 'The Will Come' & Jorge Lopez Ruiz’s ’El Grito’, neither of which I particularly cared for; I'm also not sure why the unremarkable cover art of the former merited inclusion here.
Joe Henderson's 'Black Miracle' & Freddie Hubbard's 'Keep Your Soul Together', both of which I did quite like. I bought a copy of the latter a couple of weeks later. The former has apparently never been released on CD (or even cassette!); as far as I can tell, it was never even reissued on vinyl. That goes a long way toward explaining why I had never heard it before. It's a pretty good record, and I'll be keeping an eye out for a copy.
Hank Crawford’s ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’, Wilton Felder's 'Bullitt', Brother Jack McDuff's 'A Change Is Gonna Come', Nate Morgan’s ‘Retribution, Reparation’ & The Mtume Umoja Ensemble's 'Alkebu-Lan: Land Of The Blacks' were all reasonably good, and I'm glad to have been turned on to them (I already knew about the Mtume LP, but had never heard it). I'm not going to be running out the door or breaking the bank to get hold of any of them right this moment, but if I happen to run across a copy at the right price, I'll probably get it. The Hank Crawford record would be on the shopping list already if not for the somewhat obtrusive string arrangements (not that Don Sebesky was ever particularly subtle)...
The Hank Mobley/Cedar Walton Quintet's 'Breakthrough!' & Trudy Pitts’ ‘Introducing the Fabulous Trudy Pitts’ were both great, particularly the latter. It is an absolute travesty that this LP, and the late Trudy Pitts herself, are not better known. I am fairly knowledgable about music, but I had never heard of her until I read this book. The fact that this has never been released on CD outside Japan is simply ridiculous. I have never heard anyone tear it up quite like this on organ, and I've listened to Jimmy Smith, Jon Lord and damned near everyone in between. What she does to 'Autumn Leaves' is just indescribable, you simply have to hear it for yourself...
Monk Montgomery's 'Bass Odyssey' deserves special mention not only because I am a bass-player and have a weakness for LPs led by bassists, and not only because it was one of the eclectic handful of records released under the distribution agreement between Hugh Masakela's Chisa Records and Motown, but because it was an absolutely revolutionary recording in the history of the electric bass guitar. This record was released in 1971, and if there was any justice in this world it would have made Monk Montgomery considerably more famous than he ever got, maybe on the level of his younger brothers Buddy & Wes. Unfortunately, at the time he was mostly seen as just another competent but somewhat eccentric musician, and was also no longer young. He was an incredibly innovative and capable bassist, but is mostly remembered today merely as a footnote due to his early adoption of the then new Fender electric bass in the early 1950s. After recording a slightly more radio-friendly LP (and an obscure live album in South Africa) for Philadelphia International Records, he died in 1982 at the age of 60. 'Bass Odyssey' (which, unsurprisingly, has never been reissued or released on CD) was by far the best record I was turned on to by reading this book.
There were also several other albums included that I was familiar with, but which, for various reasons, I simply had not heard in some time, such as:
Lester Bowie’s ‘The 5th Power’,
Cannonball Adderley’s ‘Phenix’,
Curtis Counce’s ‘You get more bounce with Curtis Counce!’,
Philly Joe Jones’s ‘Showcase’,
Clifford Jordan's 'Glass Bead Games',
Pharoah Sanders' 'Tauhid',
Howard McGhee’s ‘Maggie’s Back In Town’,
'The Quintet Of The Year: Jazz At Massey Hall',
Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker’s ‘Bird and Diz’,
Charlie Parker’s ‘Bird at St. Nick’s’,
Larry Ridley’s ‘Sum Of The Parts’,
Melvin Sparks’s ‘Akilah!’,
Archie Shepp's 'Attica Blues' &
Jack Wilson's 'Easterly Winds'
In addition to all of those mentioned above, of course, was a third category- i.e. all those jazz albums included in this book to which I actually do listen regularly, for example:
'Dexter Calling' & 'One Flight Up' by Dexter Gordon,
'Iron City' by Grant Green,
'Mingus Ah Um' by Charles Mingus,
'A Blowin' Session' by Johnny Griffin,
'At The Café Bohemia Volume 1' by The Jazz Messengers (as well as 'Volume 2', which is also great, although it was not included here),
'The Gigolo' by Lee Morgan,
'No Room For Squares' by Hank Mobley,
'Home Cookin'' by Jimmy Smith,
'Lucky Strikes' by Lucky Thompson,
'Cherry' by Stanley Turrentine,
'Are You Glad To Be In America?' by James "Blood" Ulmer &
'Heavy Weather' by Weather Report
So, given all that, you may perhaps be able to understand why this took so long (it didn't help that it took me nearly a year to write this, either). I highly recommend all the recordings in the third category, and also (though with reservations in some cases) those in the second. Obviously, if old and imperfect recordings are a problem for you, the Massey Hall record is probably not going to cut it. The same is true of the James "Blood" Ulmer record (and Lester Bowie's) if more "avant-garde" jazz is not to your taste. All of them are good records, though, in their own ways, and hence worth listening to, at least in my opinion.
The book itself is, as coffee-table books go, one of the better ones I've seen. There are a few different versions- large format hardcover slipcased, two large format paperbacks slipcased, etc. Some of these are horrifyingly expensive even secondhand, hundreds of dollars for the large format editions. This is the smaller 8" x 6" hardcover from Taschen's Bibliotheca Universalis series, and although it is much smaller than the others it still looks good and works perfectly well- it even looks pretty on a coffee table. Even these normally go for more than US$50.00 new. They aren't very easy to find used in any format, so if you see one for a reasonable price you should get it (more recently, they published Funk & Soul Covers as well, which I'll hopefully review at some point).
October 23, 2022
Jazz records album art from the 50s and the 60s mainly. Available in two sizes and I bought the record size version. Really nice, because a lot of pages have original size art on them. Other ones only have two or three small pictures (a bit too small). I was hoping to find more info on the artwork itself, it’s there, but short. It has to be, because every comment is in English, German and French. The reason I really dislike these multi langual versions. Maybe they better left some artwork out, because not everything is that great or relevant. Also it’s missing some really important covers (not because of their music, but because of their design). In the end, it’s not about the music, it’s about the artwork and it seems they forgot that when creating this book.
Production Value: outstanding. Nice heavy big book with thick pages
Cover: dust cover has a 50s feel to it, I like the book more without it
Photo-Text Ratio: 9 to 1
Appeal: I was hoping to find a definitive work about about artwork of jazz covers
Captivation: It’s nice to just wander through the book
Overall Score: It looks good, but is missing stuff and could have been more about the artwork and the designers
Buy, borrow or bury: borrow, it’s not a must have
Production Value: outstanding. Nice heavy big book with thick pages
Cover: dust cover has a 50s feel to it, I like the book more without it
Photo-Text Ratio: 9 to 1
Appeal: I was hoping to find a definitive work about about artwork of jazz covers
Captivation: It’s nice to just wander through the book
Overall Score: It looks good, but is missing stuff and could have been more about the artwork and the designers
Buy, borrow or bury: borrow, it’s not a must have
May 14, 2015
A broad selection yes, with some great covers and some interesting text. Personally, I could have done with the latter and perhaps more in the way of putting the design in a social context. It is fun though, and they've not gone for the obvious, including some less well known examples of this great art form.
Readers may be interested in my blog which develops my thoughts on the subject
http://philbrett.me/2015/05/13/cool-j...
Readers may be interested in my blog which develops my thoughts on the subject
http://philbrett.me/2015/05/13/cool-j...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews