Jazz Album Cover Art and its Gloriously Mustachioed Beginnings (Episode 46)

When 78s were first sold, they were sold individually, with each
side lasting between 3 and 5 minutes. The records were relegated to
backs of furniture stores as if they were some sort of obscenity.
Mostly, the reason for this was the packaging. At that time,
records were wrapped in bland, blank paper like hooch or in
cardboard sleeves, and sometimes had the name of the producer of
the record or the store selling it. By the 20s, record albums
started appearing on the market. A record album then was basically
just a photo album: a book with empty sleeves that you fill with
your own records. That’s how the name record album came to be when
describing an LP. Records were pretty fragile and using the album
meant fewer records would break. Then, in the 30s, record companies
started selling record albums pre-filled. These would be sold by
artist or theme or genre. This was a great idea but they still had
no artwork to differentiate the albums so it was hard to find what
you wanted and often kind of confusing. Columbia, who’d been making
records for a while, hired a 23-year-old fresh out of Parsons
design school to handle their advertising and marketing. His name
was Alex Steinweiss. This was 1938. Steinweiss saw the album cover
as an opportunity to increase sales. If the covers stood out,
people would notice them. For his first album cover, he and a
photographer went to the Imperial Theatre on West 45th Street.
Steinweiss convinced the owner to let them change the marquee for a
few minutes on a night when the theatre wasn’t open. He swapped out
some letters, lit the marquee, and snapped a photo. This photo
turned into the first album cover art ever. The album was “Smash
Song Hits by Rodgers & Hart”. Today is the first of what we
hope to be a continuing series focusing on album cover art. For
this episode, we’re going to look at some of the coolest jazz
record covers of all time and talk about the people who designed
them. Many of these people, almost all men, go figure, created
styles and thematic art that’s still being copied today.
Unfortunately, a lot of these designers have been forgotten by
most. Those are the ones we really want to spotlight. Subscribe to
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