f things for sale in the marketplace of the moment which nonetheless have lasting aesthetic value: American vernacular art. Of course the raison d'etre of the jazz album is to provide listeners with reproductions of jazz performances. But it is also true that at its best the jazz record--especially the 12-inch LP but occasionally the early cylinder and the heavy (at first one- sided) pancake platter of yesteryear and even the 7- or 10-inch recording, and the CD of our own era--can be such a perfect package that it looks and feels just as jazzy as the music itself. The truth is that sometimes the entire package (cover art, liner notes, disk, and label) actually outswings the music it is meant to complement. In some cases one keeps the record only for the sake of its beautiful wrappers and writings! But when all of a jazz album's artistic values are high, music and package alike, the listener/observer/holder/reader has access to an aesthetic experience that is deeply and uniquely satisfying. Prior to the introduction of the 12-inch LP in 1950, 78 rpm jazz records (and records in all categories) were packaged either in single paper sleeves or in sleeve-pages of "albums" having two or more platters bundled together. They were "albums" (from Latin albus, "white") in the sense that they consisted of display pages where items were collected for storage and private viewing, like autograph or photo albums. According to the research of German art historian Martina Schmitz (whose 1987 book in German, ALBUM COVERS, is the definitive work on this subject),(2) before the mid-thirties, all record albums were plain, purely functional holders. "What they used originally was either brown, gray, or tan paper, said Alex Steinweiss, who became Columbia Records's first art director in 1940. "They would stamp in gold the name of the record, and it would just lie in the window of the record store like a tombstone: nothing attractive about it. It had ...
