When you turn on the title track of the album Moanin’ by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, you feel intimately connected to the performers. It’s more than being a fly on the wall; you can hear the air slipping out of the horns as they blow, the sizzle reverberating from every strike of the cymbal. It’s like recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder synthesized a wormhole directly to the small room in his Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey studio where the session took place. This music wasn’t generated, and it didn’t come out of nowhere. It was composed, arranged, rehearsed and performed — it was created. You can hear that and feel it when you listen to Art Blakey or any of the hundreds of musicians who recorded for the Blue Note label during the hard bop era.
Since its inception, Blue Note has always sought to record and showcase the best jazz musicians America has to offer. And by all accounts, they’ve succeeded consistently for nearly a century. But the label’s high point of cultural relevance has always been their output from the 50’s and 60's. During this period, Blue Note released music that was catchy but complex, soulful and rhythmic but equally intricate and analytical. The sophisticated nature of the music was reflected in its album covers, most of which were a collaborative effort between photographer/Blue Note co-founder Francis Wolff and graphic designer Reid Miles. Van Gelder connected listeners to the musicians through his recording techniques while Wolff and Miles did so through their visual and aesthetic sense of invention.
But where Miles’ designs captured the sophistication and vibrancy of the music with their bright color schemes and eye-catching typography, Wolff’s photography centered the musicians themselves, candidly portraying them in the act of creation. Artists are shown playing their instruments, thinking, listening to playbacks or scribbling notes. Sometimes, as is the case with Dexter Gordon’s album A Swingin’ Affair, the subject is displayed leaning back in his chair laughing at a joke. Nothing that happened in the studio was off limits for use on a cover, so long as it matched the spirit of the music.
Each record, and therefore each record cover, had its distinct tone, but the spirit of Blue Note, and of jazz as a whole, was creativity. Jazz is a music of individuality, but also of communication and understanding. A music of spontaneity and invention, but also of collaboration and care. A small group of musicians playing together can make magic when they understand each other, and at Blue Note sessions, they always did. Wolff was always present, determined to document that magic on camera the way Van Gelder did on tape. By the time Miles was hired as art director in 1955, Wolff had developed a keen eye and signature technique, having shot recording sessions since the label’s founding in 1939. His style involved the use of black and white film and heavy contrast between the brightly lit subject and a pitch-dark background. (Interestingly, the black and white photos themselves contrasted in fascinating ways with Miles’ use of color)
A Blue Note record was a work of art that could be enjoyed both sonically and visually. This visual accompaniment to jazz music reflected the way art was changing and evolving across different mediums at the time. From Jack Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness writing style to Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings — imprints of the chaotic shape his paint took when he hurled it at the canvas — the spontaneity of jazz seemed to be affecting art in all its forms. Artists worked in ways that centered the act of creation at least as much as, if not more than, the final product itself.
A friend of mine, a painter and collage artist who runs Calico Flower Studio in Los Angeles, recently made a short video after the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union joined the Writers’ Guild of America on the picket line in their ongoing fight for, among other things, protections against AI. In the video, she discussed her thoughts on the place of art in modern society, saying, “what makes art so powerful — so moving and healing — is knowing that another person did this thing.” That knowledge enhances her sense of connection with other people, and I think it does so for all of us even if we don’t realize it.
When you listen to a record like Grant Green’s Feelin’ the Spirit and look at Wolff’s photo on the cover, you can’t help but realize it. His expression conveys an almost otherworldly transcendence, and you can hear that feeling through his guitar playing as well. As with Art Blakey’s Moanin’, you’re transported to Van Gelder’s studio, witnessing this spiritual event as it occurs. That’s something that a computer can’t make on its own. Chord charts can be learned, melodies copied and aesthetics echoed, but the spirit, the thing lying underneath all of it, can’t be replicated.
