Jazz Albums as Art
In the Process of Completing Research for This Issue, I Realized That What I Want to Say May Be Divided into Two Sections. Part One Surveys the General Topic of Album Art; Part Two (Outlined in the Accompanying Sidebar) Considers the Conspicuous Absence of Black Artists from the Process of Designing Jazz Packages: Covers, Liner Notes Etc. This Second Part Will Be Published in an Upcoming Issue.--R.G.O'M.
The enclosed portfolio of album cover art springs from my ongoing concern with the emergence in the United States of a jazz culture that has affected not only virtually all other music, here and elsewhere, but other forms of expression as well. This influence has been exceedingly potent in the visual arts world where for nearly a century, painters, sculptors, photographers, and filmmakers have been inspired by jazz to create visual counterparts of the music. Working in varied media, artists have not only created likenesses of the musicians and their instruments, they have attempted to capture formal aspects of the music itself--its rhythms, call/response exchanges, and impulses to improvise--in the work that they do as visual artists who want their work to swing.
In the process of pursuing these various lines of influence,(1) it has occurred to me that the jazz record album itself comprises a unique and significant item of American material culture (above all the covers but also the entire package, including the shellac, vinyl, and metal disks, the liner notes, and the sleeves and boxes that hold them). What follows here is a set of brief notes reflecting on the jazz record package or album as a unique multimedia creation deserving a comprehensive scholarly study and perhaps a museum show of...
... middle of paper ...
...ESCHICHTE UND ASTHETIK EINER SCHALLPLATTENVERPACKUN IN DEN USA NACH 1940 (Munchen: Scaneg, 1987).
3. See Martina Schmitz, "Facing the Music." PRINT 40 (March/April, 1986), pp. 88-99.
4. I refer to Sidney Finkelstein, JAZZ: A PEOPLES MUSIC (New York: Citadel Press, 1948).
5. Schmitz, ALBUM COVERS, p. 41 (Appendix).
6. Schmitz, "Facing the Music," p. 90.
7. Walter Herdeg, ed. RECORD COVERS (Zurich: Graphis Press, 1974).
8. Tom Piazza, SETTING THE TEMPO: FIFTY YEARS OF GREAT JAZZ LINER NOTES (New York: Doubleday, 1996).
9. Piazza, p. 1.
10. Piazza, p. 2.
* * *
Bibliography:
INTL. REVIEW OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ART
Vol. 14, No. 3, 1997, pp. 38-47
Copyright (c) 1997 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ART,
which is published by the Hampton University Museum.
ii.Sonny was so serious about being a jazz musician that he stayed at the piano day and night at Isabel’s house when he moved in with her. “At first, Isabel would write me, saying how nice it was that Sonny was so serious about his music and how, as soon as he came in from school, or wherever he had been when he was suppose to be at school, he went straight to that piano and stayed there until suppertime. And, after supper, he went back to that piano and stayed there until everybody went to bed.” (Baldwin,
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” The Jazz Fiction Anthology. Ed. Sascha Feinstein and David Rife. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. 17-48.
Howard, John Tasker. Our American Music. 1946. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1954. 666. Print.
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” The Jazz Fiction Anthology. Ed. Sascha Feinstein and David Rife. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. 17-48.
Interview footage of her colleagues, fellow musicians, and friends such as Annie Ross, Buck Clayton, Mal Waldron, and Harry “Sweets” Edison look back on their years of friendship and experiences with the woman they affectionately call “Lady”. Their anecdotes, fond memories, and descriptive way of describing Holiday’s unique talent and style, show the Lady that they knew and loved. The film also makes interesting use of photographs and orignal recordings of Holiday, along with movie footage of different eras. With the use of these devices, we get a feel for what Holiday’s music meant for the audience it reached. The black and white footage from the thirties of groups of people merrily swing dancing, paired with a bumptious, and swingin’ number Billie Holiday performed with Count Basie called “Swing Me Count”, makes one wonder what it might have been like to actually be there. To wildly swing dance to the live vocals of Billie Holiday must have been an amazing experience, as this film demonstrates.
Kenton, Stan(ley Newcomb)." New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Ed. Barry Kernfeld. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” The Jazz Fiction Anthology. Ed. Sascha Feinstein and David Rife. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. 17-48.
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” The Jazz Fiction Anthology. Ed. Sascha Feinstein and David Rife. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. 17-48.
Richard Cook & Brian Morton. The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD. Seventh Edition. East Rutherford, NJ: Penguin Books(USA), 2004
Jazz music prospered in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Jazz was created by African Americans to represent pain and suffering and also represented the adversity that racial tension brought. (Scholastic) African American performers like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie “Bird” Parker came to be recognized for their ability to overcome “race relati...
Kernfeld, Berry. New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, The. Vol. II London: The MacMillan Company, 1988
In the 1950s, the growth of cool jazz stemmed a blend of white musicians, such as Chet baker and Gerry Mulligan, but major African-American groups, such as the Modern Jazz Quartet, were also expressing this style. However, it would take until the late-1950s for “cool jazz” masterpieces, such as Mile Davis’ The Birth of Cool, to become a dominant mainstream style of jazz. These musical trends define the origins of “cool jazz” within the context of the etymological use of cool as a musical style in the early 1950s. Certainly, the merger of “cool pose” culture in African-American culture had crossed over in white jazz music as a way to merge these two cultural phenomenon into a single musical
Carringer, Robert L.. The Jazz singer. Madison: Published for the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research by the University of Wisconsin Press, 1979. Print.
By the end of World War I, Black Americans were facing their lowest point in history since slavery. Most of the blacks migrated to the northern states such as New York and Chicago. It was in New York where the “Harlem Renaissance” was born. This movement with jazz was used to rid of the restraints held against African Americans. One of the main reasons that jazz was so popular was that it allowed the performer to create the rhythm. With This in Mind performers realized that there could no...
Powell, A. (2007). The Music of African Americans and its Impact on the American Culture in the 1960’s and the 1970’s. Miller African Centered Academy, 1. Retrieved from http://www.chatham.edu/pti/curriculum/units/2007/Powell.pdf