Every decade or so, designers reach down to the JFK era for graphic inspiration. And when they do, the visual legacy of Blue Note Records is often what they’re after. Here’s what you need to know about the eternally cool label and how race, modernism, and a scarcity of resources shaped the hippest album covers on the planet.
Blue Note's first 12-inch LPs provided Reid Miles and Francis Wolff with a new, expansive canvas as playground and springboard. If 45s were originally targeted at teenagers, LPs were targeted at adults and audiophiles. The LP format, per this book’s authors, “allowed more detailed communication via the cover than the 45 typically attempted.” These covers were key communicative tools.
Subsequent eras of the record business saw this canvas reduce to cassettes and CD jewel boxes, until the digital era converted sound and image into immaterial lines of code. Most recently, as commercial recorded music migrated to streaming platforms, artists struggle not just for attention but context. Younger serious artists need a bulwark against the built-in ephemerality of the digital product. In the case of Taylor Swift, viewed as a perpetual high school student even as she’d matured into more of a Joni Mitchell, Blue Note-tinted portraiture suggests a different essence: vintage and retro, intimate yet highly styled, harkening back to an era of sophisticated hi-fi stereo listening.
Why now?
The basic elements are simple enough: duochrome portrait photography, limited color palette, provocative graphics, minimalist design, and typography-based composition—each cover a product of experience, craft, and taste.
What makes it Blue Note?
In the mid-’50s, Blue Note hired two people who would define its visual aesthetic for over a decade. The Berlin-born Jakob Franz “Francis” Wolff had been a commercial photographer and jazz fan in Weimar Germany before the Nazis banned both jazz and Jewish people, prompting his move to New York. Hired by childhood friend Alfred Lions, Blue Note’s founder, Wolff quickly brought on board Reid Miles, a young, Chicago-born artist who’d worked for Esquire and Madison Avenue, and assigned him the task of designing Blue Note’s first 12-inch LPs. Their explosive combination clicked right from the start—transforming a brand whose Andy Warhol covers preceded its apogee of hip.
Meet the proto-hipsters.
ana Del Rey is among the current pop stars who’ve been tapping a time-honored visual source. While her music sounds like millennial dream pop, cover art for her new album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd evokes the same aesthetic she grazed in earlier song titles like “West Coast,” “Shades of Cool,” and “The Other Woman”—the moody, sophisticated look and feel of early-’60s Blue Note albums. A hard-bop standard bearer for two decades, the jazz label is now, once again, a wellspring of graphic design, its covers’ peerless look and style reflected on albums by Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, and other artists who may well think Lee Morgan is a brokerage firm. Read on to learn the design elements of the original Blue Note covers, why these once-provocative graphics proved timeless, and why artists of a digital era might gravitate to this peak of post-war vinyl cool.
L
Jeffrey Kurtz
Design by
Chris Norris
Story by
Miles’ groundbreaking work was a mixture of limited budget and cutting-edge tactics. “Fifty bucks an album,” Miles later recalled. “One or two colors…and some outrageous graphics.” The result, as Felix Cromey writes in Blue Note: The Album Cover Art, were covers that “sounded like [they] knew what lay in store for the listener: an abstract design hinting at innovations, cool strides for cool notes, the symbolic implications of typefaces and tones.” Miles designed almost 500 Blue Note record sleeves during a period of some 15 years, a canon of work that defined the label.
One of Miles’ primary colors was the intimate portraiture achieved by Francis Wolff. A watchful, unassuming jazz-scene habitué, Wolff instantly assimilated himself into a recording studio and began shooting the session right away. Blue Note archivists noted his remarkable batting average, capturing shot after shot of uniquely relaxed, open moments from an artist as intense and taciturn as Miles Davis, layering mystique with pensive humanity. “Frank tried to get the artist's real expression, the way he stood,” Lions once told a reporter. “Reid was more avant-garde and chic, but the two together worked beautifully."
Miles
Wolff
Bold Graphics
Type as Design
Duotone
Limited Color
Bold Graphics
Type as Design
Duotone
Limited Color
Essentials
The ratio would change over a decade, but the overall aura—of a hip, brainy sprezzatura—prevailed throughout Reid and Wolff’s collaboration. But another quality is as crucial as any design principles: representation. Blue Note's covers foregrounded images of brilliant, smartly-dressed, idiosyncratic Black artists in the Jim Crow era. "It was very important to put these men's photos as prominently as possible on the covers," said Ruth Lions, Alfred's wife.
Bold Graphics
Duotone
Intro
Limited Color
Bold Graphics
Duotone
Intro
Limited Color
Type as Design
Duotone
Intro
Limited Color
Type as Design
Duotone
Intro
Limited Color
Bold Graphics
Type as Design
Duotone
Intro
Bold Graphics
Type as Design
Duotone
Intro
Duotone
Duotone portrait photography. Nearly punk-rock in its simplicity, this takes the authenticity of documentary photography and imbues it with potentially endless moods: mystic lavender, furnace red, and of course, all the shades of blue. Blue Note’s name refers to those parts of a pentatonic scale that Black artists bent, warped, and underscored in creating the first American music—and to the universal feeling of “blue.”
Bold Graphics
Type as Design
Intro
Limited Color
Bold Graphics
Type as Design
Intro
Limited Color
Reid
“Francis”
Limited Color
Unlike crooner-starring albums of the big band era, Blue Note records showcased dynamic groups of individuals: Thelonious Monk with Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers—bold voices in a single form. Miles’s designs often seemed to echo this, with two or three bold colors playing against a capacious white canvas.
Bold Graphics
As the ’60s progressed, Miles’ covers reflected broader movements in commercial art and industrial design, such as sports cars. Donald Byrd’s A New Perspective, which builds its swooping composition from the sensuous, aerodynamic lines of a foregrounded Jaguar, supports a portrait of the trumpeter that conveys smooth power.
Type as Design
Reid’s typographic flourishes often crowded out photo portraits all together. The cover of Joe Henderson’s In ‘n Out nestles its artist portrait within the dot of a lowercase “I.” The spectacular exclamation points on Jackie McClean’s It’s Time crowd out a tiny photo of its saxophonist, and the mighty "U" and "P" in Lou Donaldson’s Sunny Side Up are so visually buoyant Reid decided he didn’t need an artist portrait at all.
movie poster
Lionsgate, 2017
Coup d'État, 2002
album
Guess, 1991
advertisement
The
“Blue Note -tinted portraiture suggests a different essence: vintage and retro, intimate yet highly styled, harkening back to an era of sophisticated hi-fi stereo listening.”
sophisticated
highly
styled
vintage retro,
stereo listening.”
“Blue Note
Guess
All of the Above by J-Live
La La Land
By the way, Blue Note also makes great music.
Make it multimediatk!
The ratio would change over a decade, but the overall aura—of a hip, brainy sprezzatura—prevailed throughout Reid and Wolff’s collaboration. But another quality is as crucial as any design principles: representation. As Alfred Lions’ wife Ruth recalled Blue Note’s team “it was very important to put these mens' photos as prominently as possible on the covers,” foregrounding images of brilliant, smartly-dressed, idiosyncratic Black artists in the Jim Crow era.