Juiced by the modest coffee clatch going on over at the Dexter Gordon review to the lower right & keeping with the current theme of the Bags front page, I thought it might be interesting to limn what attributes constitute a *great* album cover. It’s always been a contentious issue, but especially so in the cd era. The reality of shrunken miniature-type face booklets supplanting the glorious and gilded gatefold LPs of old certainly complicates things. So does the penny-pinching finances of most creative music labels. Then there are the peculiar, strictly-policed precepts, like the one insisted upon by Delmark’s Bob Koester that all of that label’s covers contain portraitures of the musicians. In typical dictum-deriding fashion he chose a prosaic shot of himself washing the dishes for his Delmark debut (see Mamet above, now available for $3.49).
All of this feeds as fodder for healthy preference-posturing. Some folks love Hatology’s grayscale & often obliquely angled/cropped photography or the minimalist red & black print on white backdrop of the HatNow series; others despise it. Some embrace ECM’s austere arctic landscapes; others are bored to tears by them. So in the spirit of the retired Uncle Walto’s grand unification theory of music criticism (glossing all the whys and where-fors and distilling down to a reliable ‘sucks/rocks’ continuum) I’m wondering what the readership here deems exemplary in the way of covers & by proxy what criteria goes into their appraisals? The sample below is one that I’ve been grooving on of late (Richard Hull’s oil & wax on ground linen), though it admittedly suffers in the compressed format. The music it serves as candy wrapper for is pretty nice too.
[addendum 2/17: looks like we hashed this topic 18 months or so ago, right down to my Fields’ anecdote (wow, funny to ponder that Bags has been a web-presence-- albeit a niche-within-a-niche-within-a-niche one -- for over two years), but what the hell? Let’s bring it up for air, since hopefully we’ve garnered some additional readership in the interim.]
In my experience, the cover images that present the least visual information are the most memorable ones: the bare light bulb on the front of Low's LONG DIVISION, the giant pen-stroke swoosh on Hank Mobley's THE TURNAROUND, HOWLIN WOLF's empty rocking chair and abandoned guitar.
Leave room for the listener's imagination, I say.
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at February 17, 2005 7:36 AMI've enjoyed the Cynthia Dahlia covers for the Thirsty Ear Blue Series.
Posted by: Jason at March 3, 2005 8:56 AM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................