I have always loved album cover art. It's one of the places where two of my great passions—art and music—come together nicely. Jazz albums in particular have always had great cover art (both the Blue Note and ECM labels are famous examples), but there are some other special examples worthy of note.
One of my favorite instances of this convergence is to be found in two of the signature albums of Dave Brubeck: Time Out and Time Further Out. Both present a starkly modern approach to jazz, which Brubeck was exploring at the time, and both offer wonderfully expressive visual parallels in the cover art.
By contrast, the second album cover, for Time Further Out, is by a hero of modern art, the great Spanish surrealist Joan Miró. Miró's playful sense of biomorphic abstraction offers a perfect visual counterpart to Brubeck's lyrical and elegant compositions within. Where Miró's forms seem to adhere to an underlying sense of figuration while transgressing it, so too do Brubeck's tunes offer the listener a calculated asymmetry.
These album covers have become part of the experience of Brubeck's work from this period (indeed, it's great to look at them while listening), and they help solidify the connection between modern jazz and modern art in the middle decades of the 20th century.
Here's the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing their most famous composition, "Take Five," with Paul Desmond demonstrating his fantastic lyrical approach to improvisation. There is a real cool elegance in the way he develops his melodic lines:
One of my favorite instances of this convergence is to be found in two of the signature albums of Dave Brubeck: Time Out and Time Further Out. Both present a starkly modern approach to jazz, which Brubeck was exploring at the time, and both offer wonderfully expressive visual parallels in the cover art.
The first cover image, for Brubeck's most famous album, Time Out, is by a relatively unknown artist, S. Neil Fujita, who served as Art Director/Designer for Columbia Records from 1953-57 and 1958-60. Bathed in a brushy blue atmosphere, Fujita's composition explores an implied tension between geometric order and organic chaos, in a manner that brilliantly mirrors the nature of the music within.
By contrast, the second album cover, for Time Further Out, is by a hero of modern art, the great Spanish surrealist Joan Miró. Miró's playful sense of biomorphic abstraction offers a perfect visual counterpart to Brubeck's lyrical and elegant compositions within. Where Miró's forms seem to adhere to an underlying sense of figuration while transgressing it, so too do Brubeck's tunes offer the listener a calculated asymmetry.
These album covers have become part of the experience of Brubeck's work from this period (indeed, it's great to look at them while listening), and they help solidify the connection between modern jazz and modern art in the middle decades of the 20th century.
Here's the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing their most famous composition, "Take Five," with Paul Desmond demonstrating his fantastic lyrical approach to improvisation. There is a real cool elegance in the way he develops his melodic lines:
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