Book Report #75.5 - The Cover Art of Blue Note Records by Graham Marshand Glyn Callingham

As a companion to the Blue Note biography I was also leafing through a gorgeous coffee table book that collected the cover art of so many iconic Blue Note LPs.

The book was not about the music but about the striking imagery of Reid Miles who did much to create the look and feel of a Blue Note album.  Through his work and the photography of Francis Wolff Blue Note records had a unique look that just spoke of cool.

I found this book endlessly fascinating. Given that the work of Alfred Lion and Rudy Van Gelder was of such a high standard you can actually judge a CD by its cover.  Blue Note was the standard bearer of Hard Bop and you can pick up just about any disc and enjoy it.

I've discovered artists I have never heard of just from the images from this book.

It's a fun way to look a little deeper into the jazz of the 50's and 60's.

Book Report #75 - Blue Note Records, the biography by Richard Cook

For the past few months I've been thick in discovering the Hard Bop era of jazz from the 1950's and 1960's.

I've been buying dozens of CDs mostly from Blue Note.  I've also been listening to loads of jazz radio programs, through the DAR.FM cloud-based recoding service and listening to them on my iPhone while delivering the mail. 

It didn't take long before I started to search out books on the subject of jazz.  I picked up this copy at a used record store in Nanaimo while visiting my parents last spring.

I finally dusted it off and tore through it at a pretty steady pace.

I found the book very informative, I made a few CD purchases just from reading it.

Ironically I found the book bogged down at times when long passages were devoted to describing specific recording sessions.  Of course the book would delve into this; that's what Blue Note did - produced records.  But I was more interested in how Blue Note fit into the history of jazz records and how it coped with the advent of R&B, free jazz and rock.

Every time my eyes started to glaze over Cook would switch gears from describing sessions to deals Blue Note made, industry milestones and stories of the lives of various artists.  Cook's ability to keep the story moving on all these fronts kept me turning pages.

This was an important book to me and I will keep it on the shelf along with my tiny vinyl collection and growing CD collection.

Recommended.