o blacks trained in the psychology of package design which was developed in the 1950s and '60s. The designer is driving the process. He decides what he wants on the cover, goes and finds the art, and puts the lettering on. It's (the fate of the Alston painting) got less to do with politics and more to do with no blacks being inside that world. "The covers are controlled by marketing. Most of the artists don't known about the subtle packing strategies developed from studies done in the 1950s. Faith Ruffin (a historian at the Smithsonian) says that designers used blue a lot on jazz albums because of the feeling it conjured. The process was not driven by artistic decisions but by marketing and promotion decisions." But the album cover was not entirely a graphic design domain. More than any other type of recorded music, jazz record covers were a showcase for modern fine art (particularly painting). All people who followed the arts understood that abstraction and other forms of modern art perfectly expressed the values and spirit of jazz. Photographer Al Hicks describes the recording industry of the 1950s and '60s as a turf carved up and staked out by racial and ethnic groups. He says that most artists or graphic designers who had the opportunity to do covers on a commission or in-house basis were Jewish, and so were the booking agents, and the club owners were Italian. Hicks knew black visual artists and photographers who tried to get work and "hustled to get things together only to find out at the last minute they had been given the run around." Corrine Jennings says that a "tight monopoly where the musicians had little control over the ultimate product" explains the shift that occurred after the 1960s when some musicians tried to produce their own records. One such musician was percussionist Max Roach. When we contacted him, he said he had been up since 5 a.m. on deadline for completing his autobiography. A centra...
