in, year out, Francis Wolff, creator of the masterful catalogue of jazz covers for Blue Note is clearly the standout. And David Stone Martin is a very special case. His stylized drawings, usually using only one color or two, capture the intensity and playfulness of music itself, the will to improvise within strictly posted limits. He evokes the music at the same time that he also presents a credible likeness of the artists. In many of these cases the idea was to capture certain of jazz's musical values in visual form. The work was serious and yet playfully experimental; it was finished and complete at the same time that it was improvised and retained some of the made- up-on-the-spot freshness that defines jazz. It had an intellectual quality and yet it was spiritual and mysterious, searching. Extremely rare are those sets where music and package are perfect. Limelight, for example, did a series of albums with pop- ups between twofers and slanted booklets attached to the beautiful inside covers, but usually the music it was so beautifully surrounding was not equal to the cover design. Amiri Baraka's liner notes are the best in jazz, but rarely does the front cover art equal his essays on the back or, to be sure, the music in the middle. Even so, these near-perfect designs are richly worthy of display. And make no mistake: when, in the realm of LP recordings and their packages, everything is working, a multimedia American art form of tremendous value may be seen, read, held--and heard. * * * THE BLACK PRESENCE AND ABSENCE During the 1950s to mid-'60s, the community with the most advanced race relations in the nation had a segregated underside: Jazz country, USA a world where most of the gods were black and many of the acolytes were white. A world where interracial sex and marriage was almost ordinary and the dominant culture was formulated by contrary Negroes with strange names. A world within a world from w...
