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JAZZ ALBUMS AS ART SOME REFLECTIONS

JAZZ ALBUMS AS ART SOME REFLECTIONS 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 its own. The jazz record and its sometimes spectacularly beautiful grooves and sleeves prove again and again the truism that American art at its most original is where you find it. It is often produced in unexpected places by designers of 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 no color, no personality." In about 1935, some of these designless "tombstone" albums, as they were called, first appeared with pictures pasted onto their covers. The first jazz album, "Chicago Jazz" (1939), consisted of six 78s bound in an album whose yellow cover bore simple blue designs and drawings of the musicians at the edges; producer George Avakian (who at the time was an undergraduate at Yale), wrote the enclosed booklet. The new pictorial albums came about because of several factors.(3) As the U.S. recovered from the Great Depression, records began to sell again and companies sought new, more aggressive marketing techniques. The W.P.A. had sponsored artists to design murals, book illustrations, and other works of nonspecialized audience appeal and the American public was more aware than ever of visual art as part of everyday life. Many of those who entered the new field of album cover design had worked for one or more of the Federal government's work relief projects and brought to the new job the radical consciousness of the era. It is not so surprising that David Stone Martin, for example, who had been a muralist for the Tennessee Valley Authority, became a master at designing albums of jazz music, called by a key book of the period "A People's Music."(4) Movie posters, book jackets, and magazine covers of the 1920s and '30s also doubtless had an influence on the first makers of cover art for records. Like the covers for books and magazines, album covers were not only advertisements for contents held within, they were the thing itself: the "advertisement" one would actually take home. Album designer Robert Jones recalls that in the 1950s hip young adults would display album covers on their coffee tables along with expensive art books and magazines. Though the very first "abstract" album covers of the late 1930s looked somewhat like wallpaper and generally did not sell, Columbia's covers by Steinweiss revolutionized the market. His picture-cover albums of the early 1940s outsold the blank tombstones eight to one. In 1945, the introduction of self- selection in American record stores aided immeasurably in the shift toward more attractive record wrappers. Shoppers no longer requested records from clerks who retrieved them from walled storage shelves where only the spines showed. Rather, customers leafed through records in bins with rows of picture covers facing them. According to Jim Flora, Steinweiss's assistant and then art director at Columbia, "It was just like the supermarkets that came in around then. Instead of finding everything behind the counter, you went in with a grocery list, took a shopping cart and walked through, impulse-buying. That is what we were doing with records. You'd go in to buy a Heifetz violin concerto, for example, and see something else whose cover attracted you, and you would go out with two records instead of one."(5) In her study, Schmitz observes three general categories of album art: "painterly covers (the RCA Victor style); poster covers (the CBS/Columbia style); and highly graphic covers (found mainly at small, independent labels, but originating with David Stone Martin's covers for Moses Asch)."(6) Some of the early albums of 78s were magnificent designs with graphics on inside covers as well as on the fronts. Some had pages of texts inside, identifying music and musicians and explaining why the recordings were anthologized together. The first 33 rpm LPs were also rightly called ALBUMS in so far as they too gathered several recorded performances onto a unified disk. Like their multi-disk predecessors, LPs were anthologies. Transferred to one record, the original cover art was retained (minus endpaper art, if any) and the written pages were rearranged and edited to fit onto the single sheet at the back of the sleeve, the liner notes. LP cover art continued in the general pattern of the previous years: paintings, posters, highly graphic design. By the mid-1950s, more and more photographs were used on album covers, sometimes as part of a general design or collage, sometimes with a photo covering the entire space. According to Walter Herdeg's study RECORD COVER, the LP's square format "is considered by some photographers to have been influential in the rise in popularity of the single-lens, square-format, reflex camera--a tool obviously perfectly suited to record-jacket illustration."(7) In the 1960s and '70s, record companies began to issue double-albums or "twofers." When these two-record sleeves were hinged together (as what the industry called "gatefolds"), there were twice as many surfaces to cover, either with visual or written material. Sometimes an artist's single piece spread across an entire album, with its covers opened out to complete the long rectangular picture. Inside, the extra room led to what jazz writer Tom Piazza has called a "golden age" for liner notes.(8) Certain companies provided several pages between the twofers' covers--offering sometimes more than one essay, data of various sorts, and visual material crossing several genres. Some companies experimented with "threefers," opening out yet another panel of possibility. Boxed sets were the inevitable next step: several individual albums (complete with cover art and liner notes) set into a single box, sometimes with designs or pictures fitting together once the set was completely in place. More typically, records in simple inner sleeves were placed into boxes with booklets inserted as super-liner notes. Like Avakian's original "Chicago Jazz," the jazz record package again was large enough to accommodate a booklet inside. As jazz record dealer and historian Fred Cohen has observed, some of these boxes and booklets became very large and elaborate indeed. Verve's founder/owner Norman Granz, an innovative leader in so many aspects of presenting jazz music, unquestionably has made the most beautiful boxed sets in the business. His special limited edition of Ella Fitzgerald's renditions of Gershwin's "songbook" appeared in a teak art-deco box with handles, a briefcase of sorts with fine metal hinges; inside were the records, stamped virgin vinyl in varied colors along with a booklet of photos and paintings, essays, and other written materials plus a page of original signatures by Fitzgerald and the Gershwins. (This whole assemblage, sans original signatures of course, has been shrunken to fit the new and spectacularly beautiful CD box, "The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books.") Granz's set called "The Jazz Scene" was nearly as sumptuous a presentation of fancy vinyl, art, commentary, and memorabilia; it featured photographs by Gjon Mili, and a cover by David Stone Martin. This one is also currently available in a beautiful album of CDs--a miniature version of the old original book of records. Each of these projects was a kind of love letter from a producer to the artists he adored and their fans. On an inevitably less elaborate level, boxed sets for collectors and scholars were prepared with great care by Smithsonian, Bear Family, Franklin Mint, Time-Life, Reader's Digest, Mosaic, and sometimes by the commercial record companies capitalizing on the permanent value of jazz by presenting definitive and deluxe editions: the album equivalent of the Library of America. Here, as in the world of publishing, the album-as-anthology was often viewed as a teaching tool. The Smithsonian "Collection of Classic Jazz" set is the key example here: it is assigned all over the nation as part of the standard course of study in jazz's history and aesthetic values. The merit of the written parts of jazz record albums varies from publicity fluff and bunk to work of genuine critical/literary/historical value. Writers of liner notes include poets and novelists Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), Langston Hughes, Albert Murray, A.B. Spellman, and Stanley Crouch; musicians Gunther Schuller, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Lucky Thompson, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Bill Evans; jazz historians Martin Williams, Dan Morganstern, Leonard Feather, Barry Ulanov, Whitney Balliet, and Phil Shaap; and record producers George Avakian, Don Schlitten, David Himmelstein, Norman Granz, and Orrin Keepnews. As Tom Piazza's excellent SETTING THE TEMPO: FIFTY YEARS OF GREAT JAZZ LINER NOTES makes evident, these essays on the backs of records comprise "a minor literary genre," often providing background on the musicians and the recordings, historical contexts, musical analysis, a window into the recording process, intimate anecdotes and personal views of the musicians that have an immediacy and warmth rarely found in other jazz writing--setting the tempo, in a sense, for the listener's appreciation of the music.(9) What makes the liner notes unique as a form is that, unlike reviews or even a jazz concert's program notes, one reads them at the same time that one experiences the art: they offer criticism in the rudimentary sense of MAKING THE ART AVAILABLE, of enlarging its meaning in the moment of direct experience. Liner notes differ from recorded guides to museum art exhibits (a fascinating analogy) in that they typically make little effort to be objective or unobtrusively pedagogical; the best writers of liner notes, like the best sports writers, are passionately opinionated stylists. There is always that moment, which any jazz fan recognizes, of unwrapping the record, putting it on, and settling in to read the notes, to get the word on the music from the expert. Good liner notes stick in the listener's mind and attach themselves the experience of listening to the record; the best, in fact, like David Himmelstein's notes to Booker Ervin's "Setting the Pace" or Amiri Baraka's to "Coltrane's Live at Birdland," have themselves become classics, 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 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 which both worlds were transcended as black creative genius and Western technology were married in massively reproduced radar sound which found the future. A world, also, where Jim Crow found a comfortable and entrenched roost. So, perhaps not surprisingly, strong black presence in some areas, and underrepresentation and absence elsewhere, characterized the anomalous world of jazz. Given the long and close association between jazz musicians and African American painters, illustrators, photographers and sculptors, the paucity of the visual artists' work on the album covers of jazz LP records is remarkable. "Racism in the communications industry," is the first explanation that comes to mind. But the reality is more complex. There had been significant precedents in other communications areas. For example, during the 1920s and '30s, art work by black artists was used as dust jacket illustration for black-authored books produced by major publishers. In the early 1940s, Charles Alston worked as an illustrator for MADEMOISELLE. And from jazz enthusiast and painter Charles Mills' recollection that African American illustrator for ESQUIRE, E. Sims Campbell, "dealt with jazz" and produced work that appeared inside the cover of an ESQUIRE jazz publication in the mid-1940s, it's not hard to imagine this connection extending to his work appearing on the covers of 78 rpm and early LP jazz record albums. ESQUIRE was a leading exponent of jazz in the 1940s. By the 1950s and '60s, a number of African Americans had studied commercial and graphic art and were working in major media, for example, Georg Olden at CBS, Dave Brown at the NEW YORK TIMES, and Frank Braxon at Warner Brothers. And perhaps most significantly: unlike token blacks working in TV, film and publishing, African American jazz musicians were an essential--an absolutely indispensable--element of the business which employed them. Did any of them ever exert pressure on the recording companies to use work by black artists on the covers? Some of the important record producers at the time were Turkish--not obligated to "gentlemen's agreements." Interacting as close friends and kindred spirits, African American visual artists and jazz musicians were coming out of the same "bag" and expressing the experience in complementary ways in their respective mediums. Their collaboration in the creation and packaging of jazz seems only right and natural. Nearing the completion of his general article, Robert O'Meally and a few colleagues discovered that a fascinating story remains to be told about the black presence and absence in the art of the jazz LP album. A quick survey was conducted to gather information and plan part two of this article. The discovery began when Corrine Jennings of Kenkeleba Gallery in New York notified us of a color slide that she had taken of a painting by Charles Alston that apparently had been commissioned by Duke Ellington to be used as cover art for a recording of his "Black, Brown and Beige" suite. Alston's watercolor is entitled "Black, Brown and Beige"; there is a subtitle: "A Tone Parallel" and hand-lettered at the bottom is: "Columbia Recording Company." The painting never was used. Investigating the circumstances of the production and fate of the Alston work has been a useful exercise in learning about a matrix of racial, aesthetic, and economic motives within the recording industry. Recorded during its premier performance at Carnegie Hall in 1943, the "Black, Brown and Beige" suite was released in an abbreviated version in 1945 in an illustrated double sleeve with a photograph of Ellington on the cover. In 1958, Duke and Mahalia Jackson performed the piece at the Newport Jazz Festival. The release of that recording showed both performers on the cover. When the full, original recording was issued by Prestige in 1977 in a double sleeve containing a number of visuals including a photo taken during the 1943 performance, Alston's watercolor had long graced oblivion. Views vary on why the Ellington/Alston collaboration was aborted and if it, indeed, ever existed. Describing an "intervention" by record producers that undermined the artists' cooperative intent ("they interrupted an important relation--the artists were trying to visualize the rhythms"), Corrine Jennings cites photographer Al Hicks' experience as an example. In the 1950s or early '60s, Al Hicks photographed Art Blakey's group for the album, "Art Blakey Big Band," but the photo was not used. Hicks told her that people would "rush around" and make plans for cover art that sometimes was initially accepted by the recording companies but never used. Jennings also feels that the strong African imagery in the Alston painting was a factor in its rejection. She traced the close ties that could have led Ellington to commission or recommend the Alston painting as cover art: Duke's sister Ruth and Alston were friends. Ruth Ellington owns works by Alston. And Alston was married to the sister of Duke's close friend and personal physician, Arthur Logan. Veteran jazz critic Dan Morganstern surmises that the Alston painting may not have ever been intended as cover art. He points out that the "Black, Brown and Beige" suite was not subtitled "A Tone Parallel" as is stated in the painting and that recordings of the suite were not released by Columbia (as suggested by the hand lettering on the painting). "Ellington had sufficient clout (with the recording company)," he says. "They would have put the painting on the album if he had wanted." Now director of the Rutgers University Jazz Institute, Morganstern thinks that Alston's painting might be an "impressionistic interpretation of Duke, his music, and Columbia." Sylvia Harris, a graphic designer practicing today, offers a background explanation. "There were almost no 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 central, active, vocal force in jazz over the past 50 years, memoirist Roach will add critical detail to the history of modern jazz and the business that produced it. "Loring Eutemey did covers when Mingus and I had our own company--Debut," he says. And he notes that for most of the companies, "it's our music keeping them going, not classical music. But you don't see black people working there, not even sweeping the floors. It's something that I'm always complaining about." Some musicians created their own cover art. Ornette Coleman, who has been painting for more than 30 years, did a painting around 1963 for the cover of the Blue Note release, "The Empty Foxhole." "I had written a poem at that time and decided to do a cover to express the poem which was entitled, 'The Empty Foxhole,'" Coleman recalls. The painting depicts how "bombing disrupts the ground." His other cover paintings include "Art of the Improvisers" and "Colors" on a recent album of the same name. The latter painting "looks like a figure but when you get close up, you see it's an abstraction. I did the painting when I was doing the record. When I looked at the painting I thought it would represent the quality of conditions in people's lives and also inner, spiritual, qualities." A poem and liner notes by Coleman are on the back. Ornette Coleman also sought work by other black visual artists for albums he recorded or produced. His 1978 album "Body Meta" has cover art by his Nigerian and Ethiopian artist friends, Zeke Oloruntoba and Elizabeth Atnafu. He produced an album by James Blood Ulmer, "Tales of Captain Black" with cover art by African American illustrator Shelby McPherson (who now lives in California) and an accompanying booklet containing drawings by Zeke and Sarah Penn. For his part, James Blood Ulmer bought a painting by Peter Bradley that he wanted to reproduce on the cover of one of his recordings but, according to Corrine Jennings, the company said the work was too sophisticated. From cultural critic Greg Tate we get confirmation of our speculation that a little Miles Davis' art appeared on his albums. But Tate, commenting in FLYBOY IN THE BUTTERMILK (Simon & Schuster 1992), doesn't seem to think much of the visuals: "Now comes STAR PEOPLE, an LP of simple blues variations containing cartoon aesthetic art work by Miles and liner notes wherein the maestro explains his music to Leonard Feather, then defines his contributions to modern art thusly: 'All Drawings, Color Concepts and Basic Attitudes by Miles Davis.' Is he kidding us or what?" Always working a dual (flutist/visual artist) capacity, Lloyd McNeill did the cover for this "Tanner Suite" (1969) and "Treasures" (1975) recordings. Helping us plan part II of this article, McNeill canvassed his record collection and found some gems: Claude A. Ogundipe Fayomi's painting and Loring Eutemay's design for Randy Weston's self-produced 1964 "African Cookbook" release. Abidine's painting for the cover of "The Avant Garde" by Coltrane and Don Cherry (1966). (There is some Arabic script in the painting which leads McNeill to surmise that the artist could be a Nigerian form the northern part of the country.) Two Herbie Hancock albums presenting work by Robert Springett: "Sextant" (two Watusi dancers under a moon) and "Crossings" (three elderly black men getting off the "Dominique," a boat). Joseph Burbank's drawing based on a Chuck Stewart photo for the Eric Dolphy album, "Dedicated to Dolphy" (Cambridge). The photographer Chuck Stewart is something of a legend in the jazz community. Stewart began working as an assistant to Herman Leonard, a leading white surveyor of the jazz scene who sold photographs to the major labels. When Leonard moved to Europe in 1955, Stewart took over his trade. "I cannot absolutely say there was no prejudice," says Stewart, noting that the recording company art directors had the power to use other photographers and perhaps sometimes did so on the basis of race. "But most of my connections came through the musicians who asked for me." These musicians included Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and Duke Ellington--Stewart's photographs appear on their album covers. Regarding the relative scarcity of album cover art by African Americans, Stewart says, "when I was doing covers, I didn't think of it as an African American contribution. I thought of it as making a living, and fortunately I was successful. I had three kids, a wife and a mother-in-law. It never occurred to me that what I was doing was sociologically significant." Friendships developed from Stewart's professional association with jazz musicians and that close relation is documented in his JAZZ FILES volume of photographs originally published by Little Brown (1985) and then by DeCapo. The answer to our question about the dearth of record cover art by blacks seems so obvious to writer Amiri Baraka that raising it seemed fatuous. "Why aren't we free?," he asked impatiently in response. "What ever we lack in representation, it's because of lack of money, lack of education, lack of opportunity. The reason is not because we're evil, stupid niggers." During his Greenwich Village period of the 1950s and early '60s, Baraka wrote jazz criticism (including liner notes) and was friendly with jazz musicians as well as with visual artists. Close relations between jazz musicians and visual artists also existed among the folks who visited, hung, played and/or stayed at Ornette Coleman's Artists' House in SoHo and in the Weusi artists collective that was active in Harlem in the 1960s. Painter Joe Overstreet says that Coleman's Artists' House was one of the first loft coops on Prince Street. Moving there in the late 1960s, Coleman lived over a gallery and space where musicians could play. At the time Joe Overstreet was living over Eric Dolphy in a loft on Water Street. Practicing day and night, Dolphy never slept much and "drove me crazy," Overstreet recalls. "He would lay out his instruments in a row and, proceeding from left to right, would pick up one after another to play." "Music Making the Harvest Grow," a drawing by Weusi member Ademola Olgbefola appears on the back cover of "Rare Bird," a recording of previously unreleased music of Charlie Parker issued on the Oki Doke label in the 1960s or early 1970s. Taking an altogether different view, bassist Ron Carter places the responsibility for getting more black-produced cover art squarely on the musicians and artists, themselves: "The musicians just leave the studio (after recording) and don't get involved," he says. "They could have presented some artists for the companies to consider--presented some options for the art work. But the musician just goes home--doesn't think about what's on the cover." He also questions the attitude of the artists: "The painters and sculptors don't see it (the jazz album cover) as an appropriate and viable medium to show their work." Carter was just arriving home from a trip to Cleveland so, except for himself, we didn't ask him about exceptions to the pattern that he perceives. Black artists whose work appears on Ron Carter's albums include Manuel Hughes, Roy Decarava, Valerie Maynard and Carter's son, Myles. Carter, who's married to an art dealer, declares "I've been actively pursuing this for years (getting more black visual artists on covers)." One intriguing "exception" known to Ron Carter and other persons we contacted is African American artist Richard Jennings who was known as "Prophet." In the 1960s Prophet aimed his creation at the album cover not the gallery wall. The artist did covers for an album by Max Roach, two by Eric Dolphy, including "Out There" on Prestige, a painting for a Thelonius Monk album cover (which was based on a black and white photo of Monk by Al Hicks); and he may have done a John Coltrane sleeve. The "Out There" painting WAS out! Its details include music floating out of the earth into the universe. Visual artist Tom Feelings remembers attending a going-away-to-Sweden party for Prophet at Max Roach's house. Described variously as "crazy," "eccentric" and "clairvoyant," Richard Jennings was from Detroit and, according to Ron Carter, now lives in California. Other artists who produced art for record covers may include Tommy Ellis ("Nibbles") and perhaps also Dave Brown, a graphic artist who worked at the NEW YORK TIMES and who, on his own, did many illustrations based on jazz themes. (Visual artists whose works appeared on other types of recordings include Tom Feelings who sold three works in the late 1960s to the owner of Folkways Records and Al Smith who did the cover for the 10-part collection of the songs of the civil rights movement produced by the Smithsonian.) Musicians who have used original art on their covers include the late Sun Ra, Art Ensemble of Chicago; and San Francisco musicians Butch Morris and Horace Tapscott. After helping with the survey, Corrine Jennings reflected on the hard times of some of jazz music's most gifted artists: "Art Blakey told me he hid in Africa for seven years, trying to get out of a recording contract. That's how he got the nickname Buhaina. He liked to lie but I don't think he lied in this case. Albert Ayler ended up floating in a river. Charles Parker died with thirty cents in his pocket. When you think of Coleman Hawkins doing one night stands when he was very elderly, you see we don't control the means of production in any way." But Jennings does acknowledge the role that musicians can play in decisions made by art directors for cover art and notes that "J.D. Parran, a jazz musician, was interested in using a 1960s Alston piece and asked if I could help him get permission." "Musicians have been 'meat' for the industry. At least hip hop artists are producing their works and controlling it to the extent that they can. But they don't have distribution. It's a step up but a step back morally," concludes visual artist and Howard University dean Jeff Donaldson, referring finally to the lyrics and lifestyles of gangsta rap.--Juliette Bowles 1. I want to acknowledge here the generous assistance of Dan Morganstern, director of Rutgers University's Institute for Jazz Studies. 2. Martina Schmitz, ALBUM COVERS: GESCHICHTE 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). 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.

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