ics, touchstones of the music.(10) Some listeners retain old LPs even after, for the sake of convenience, duplicate CD copies also are purchased, in order to retain liner notes that they can easily see and hold while listening to the music. One may easily place jazz album art within Martina Schmitz's (overlapping but nonetheless useful) framework for looking at album art in general: posters, paintings, designs. What remains to observe is that while historically the major album designers in jazz have not been black, from time to time works by major black artists have been presented on jazz albums. Two paintings by Jacob Lawrence were used on reissues by Riverside Records, evidently to emphasize the complex artistry involved in the recordings by King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton (and to offer complex visual puns and commentaries on music and musicians). Of the artists who rose to prominence in the 1960s and '70s, Jeff Donaldson, Frank Smith, and Alfred J. Smith did paintings that were used as album cover art. In the 1980s, works by Romare Bearden were reproduced on a series of albums by Wynton Marsalis; these, too, offered not only a visual counterpart to the music but also a sense that Marsalis, like Bearden, was making art not just for the moment but for the ages. In the case of Roy Decarava, who did several covers for Columbia Records as well as other labels, the artist gave up the negatives (and then the companies seem to have lost them)! In this instance, the art is thus available solely on the albums and now on CD reissues bearing the original album art. Decarava collectors: Go get those albums! Jazz albums also feature work by Andy Warhol (who did many jazz covers as a young painter struggling to make ends meet), Jackson Pollock, and Wassily Kandinski. Paul Bacon, Daniel Czubak, and Robert Parent are among the key designers in this idiom, each of them creating minor masterpieces. Among photographers working year...
