If you want to start one of those pub arguments that rage all night and continue over a carry-out in someone's front room, ask for opinions on the best album cover ever.
Someone will say Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - someone always does - while other choices may include Never Mind The Bollocks or Dark Side Of The Moon or maybe something by New Order. If anyone mentions Fleetwood Mac, call them a taxi.
Ask a different question, however - which label has consistently produced the best, the coolest, the most copied and most iconic album covers? - and the debate will last only as long as it takes to open another bag of crisps. That's because the correct and only answer is Blue Note Records, the label founded in New York in 1939 by German-Jewish immigrant Alfred Lion and named for that ineffable tonal kink which characterises the music it represents: jazz.
That design dominance continues to the present day. Examine Blue Note's 21st-century releases and you'll find records by artists such as Gregory Porter, Terence Blanchard and the Robert Glasper Experiment whose covers are every bit as eye-catching and gorgeous as their illustrious predecessors.
The label celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and to mark the occasion it's undertaking, among other things, a vast vinyl reissue of remastered classics from its back catalogue. But it hasn't forgotten its visual legacy either, and in Uncompromising Expression, the first official illustrated history of the label, written by Richard Havers, it celebrates that too.
So marching alongside Blue Note's roster of recording greats - people such as John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis - comes a procession of other less well-known names from the back rooms. Artist Martin Craig, for instance, who was asked by Lion to design a logo for the label and told to give him "something modern", which he duly did. Or Madison Avenue ad man and jazz nut Paul Bacon, who designed the first album covers in the early 1950s.
But centre stage in this part of the Blue Note story is graphic designer Reid Miles. He more than anybody else was responsible for the bold and unique aesthetic of the label's sleeves. A man with little interest in jazz who was paid just $50 a time and often knocked out designs at home on Saturday afternoons, Miles created hundreds of covers for a glorious decade that ran from the mid-1950s to 1967. Current Blue Note boss Don Was describes his work as "timelessly hip" and it still seems startlingly fresh in every aspect, from its use of colour and typography, to the trademark blue and red washes given to the photography.
Even the images themselves still thrum with energy. These pictures, usually taken in a live setting or during the recording process, were initially shot by Blue Note co-founder Frank Wolff. But increasingly Miles took up the camera himself in order to get the extreme angles he wanted or to allow him the tight crops he liked to use.
Herbie Hancock's 1962 debut Takin' Off and Like Someone In Love by Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers (from 1960) are just two that featured cover images Miles shot. For Donald Byrd's 1963 album A New Perspective, meanwhile, he uses a startling, grey-brown image shot along the length of sports car - around half the cover is bonnet and headlight, with Byrd far away in the background, slouched over the driver's door. The sans-serif typeface is used lower case throughout. The colours are plum and orange and brown. Timelessly hip it certainly is. It still screams cool.
When he had too much work on, Miles sometimes farmed it out to struggling artists he knew - which is how Andy Warhol enters the Blue Note story. Over a decade before his screenprinted banana came to grace the cover of the Velvet Underground's first album, Warhol found himself designing the sleeve for a 1956 Kenny Burrell record. He even signed it.
So while Blue Note taught generations of music lovers about jazz, it also taught generations of musical entrepreneurs about the value of strong branding and bold design as the long-playing record became the dominant form from the mid-1960s onwards. But the three labels which understood the lesson better than any others were founded far away from New York - and two of them had precious little to do with jazz. They were Munich-based ECM, founded in 1969 to release new music that includes work by jazz musicians, and British post-punk independent labels Factory Records and 4AD.
Each had their Reid Miles. For ECM it was founder Manfred Eicher, who's fond of quoting Gertrude Stein's "Think of your ears as eyes" when talking about his approach to choosing his label's extraordinary cover art. For 4AD it was graphic designer Vaughan Oliver, and for Factory it was Peter Saville, who created striking covers for Joy Division and New Order (probably the ones our notional pub argument throws up, in fact). He also took Blue Note's idea of using catalogue numbers as an integral part of the cover design and extended it so that even the label's famous nightclub, The Hacienda, was given a number: Fac 51.
In his book on Factory Records, author Matthew Robertson acknowledges the source, citing Blue Note as "an archetype of the succesful marriage of music and design". In a preface to the same book, label founder Tony Wilson puts it all more simply: "Why was packaging important to us? Because the job was a sacred one ... Does the Catholic church pour its wine into mouldy earthenware pots? I think not."
Today, that marriage between music and design is no longer just a jazz thing - but only because Blue Note made the necesary introductions.
Blue Note: Uncompromising Expression by Richard Havers is published by Thames & Hudson, priced £48
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article