The Art of Creed Taylor

Rudy

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I always wondered why they thought it was a good idea to make all the album covers in a similar design. Not that it probably hurt sales any (or helped) but it does kind of rob the albums of some of their individuality.
Sam Antupit created this white framing for the series to give the label an identity, and also to convey a sense of an art piece due to the "matted" Pete Turner photos. Take that away and the covers lose their impact. There are a few that don't work quite as well (like the two albums I posted above, where it's the photography effect that is awkward) and the Antupit frame goes away on an album like Quincy Jones' Walking In Space and Gula Matari, both of which featured closely-cropped head shots of Q.

I kind of miss this on the later CTi albums once Taylor left A&M--a few still present some kind of framing, but others seem to get a bit crowded. Like this one of Turner's famous "bubble" photo:

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I feel the frameless design works better for his photography when the photo is simpler (unlike above where there's "clutter" above the bubble):

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Deodato 2 returned the frame concept:

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In case anyone thought A&M/CTi had a lock on weird cover photos (the Tamiko Jones and Richard Barbary covers specifically), Blue Note also had a dubious entry in that series:

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Without seeing the liner notes, I don't know who the photographer is. (I don't know if Pete Turner did any covers for Blue Note....but that idea certainly was the same!)

I still can't look at that Tamiko Jones cover without it creeping me out! It looks like she's bent in half, backwards...until you open the gatefold to see the entire photo.
 
In case anyone thought A&M/CTi had a lock on weird cover photos (the Tamiko Jones and Richard Barbary covers specifically), Blue Note also had a dubious entry in that series:

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Without seeing the liner notes, I don't know who the photographer is. (I don't know if Pete Turner did any covers for Blue Note....but that idea certainly was the same!)

I still can't look at that Tamiko Jones cover without it creeping me out! It looks like she's bent in half, backwards...until you open the gatefold to see the entire photo.
You got me curious enough to look it up, Rudy. Reid Miles did both the photgraphy and the design for the Lou Donaldson LP. There is one link though—-Rudy Van Gelder was the engineer.

The Donaldson LP was one year before Tamiko—-1967.
 
...and I’m embarrassed to say I had not heard of Reid Miles. But now that I’ve looked him up, he’s a legend:

 
You got me curious enough to look it up, Rudy. Reid Miles did both the photgraphy and the design for the Lou Donaldson LP. There is one link though—-Rudy Van Gelder was the engineer.

The Donaldson LP was one year before Tamiko—-1967.
Reid Miles was the graphic artist at Blue Note (approx. 1958-1967) and designed nearly all their LP jackets (once Blue Note was sold to Liberty in '65, some of the covers were from Liberty, which was based in LA). Al Lion, the original co-owner, permanently left Blue Note in JUL 1967, and Reid also appears to have left a couple months after that. Most of the Blue Note cover photos were taken by Francis Wolff (the other co-owner...), which are some of the well known photos of Miles, Trane, Monk, Blakey, etc; however, when Reid wanted a staged shot (typically with models), he was normally the photographer. For the Donaldson LP cover, he utilized a double exposure -- flipping the film holder (or camera!) 180 deg for the second exposure. Back in the '90s, during the '50s/'60s jazz CD reissue boom, a number of nice coffeetable books were produced featuring both Francis' photographs and Reid's LP jackets.
 
Reid went on to make one million dollars a year as the photographer of that series of Coca-Cola ads in the 1960s and 1970s that looked like real-life Norman Rockwell paintings. Other ad business put him well over that.

Reid also did album covers, but moved beyond jazz. Chicago IX (Greatest Hits) is his:

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As was Harry Chapin's LIVING ROOM SUITE:

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And Bob Dylan and the Band's BASEMENT TAPES:

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...which, it turns out was shot in the basement. Not the basement where the tapes were recorded-----but the basement of the YMCA in Hollywood.
 
Sam Antupit created this white framing for the series to give the label an identity, and also to convey a sense of an art piece due to the "matted" Pete Turner photos. Take that away and the covers lose their impact. There are a few that don't work quite as well (like the two albums I posted above, where it's the photography effect that is awkward) and the Antupit frame goes away on an album like Quincy Jones' Walking In Space and Gula Matari, both of which featured closely-cropped head shots of Q.

I kind of miss this on the later CTi albums once Taylor left A&M--a few still present some kind of framing, but others seem to get a bit crowded. Like this one of Turner's famous "bubble" photo:

1604673506616.png

I feel the frameless design works better for his photography when the photo is simpler (unlike above where there's "clutter" above the bubble):

1604673637996.png


Deodato 2 returned the frame concept:

1604673701989.png
Don't know why it took 2+ years for me to realize this, but new CTI went back to the frame earlier than that---in black for Hubert Laws' AFRO CLASSIC:

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And a couple of albums later, in white, for George Benson's BEYOND THE BLUE HORIZON:

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I'm just looking at our past few AOTWs and there are variations on the framing...like the one-sided framing (bordering) of matching red for Joe Farrell Quartet. Which still sets off the photo, while adding a color accent.

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Last week's Sugar also had a black frame, but with varying typefaces.


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Taylor used a similar aesthetic for the Kudu albums too. But, they used a skinny colored border in addition to framing the main image off to one side. Here's a handful of the early Kudus put side by side.

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For a run of three (four) albums, the album covers were bordered in black, and painted rather than using photographs, like these, giving the albums an "art gallery" appearance.

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Spoiler for next week's AOTW...it was originally released as Kudu-12 and Kudu-13 separately but shared the same cover painting, but were soon combined into one 2-LP set, shown here.

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Honestly though, I'm not sure if the repackaging was done after Motown took over the catalog, as the typeface certainly is unlike Taylor used. The original Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 were in identical packaging (the poor quality photos here don't reflect how much alike the covers are--they look the same save for the yellow title/artist at the top, and the list of songs):

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I'm just looking at our past few AOTWs and there are variations on the framing...like the one-sided framing (bordering) of matching red for Joe Farrell Quartet. Which still sets off the photo, while adding a color accent.

1673457204667-png.8220


Last week's Sugar also had a black frame, but with varying typefaces.


1673461397046-png.8226

I almost mentioned SUGAR, but it breaks format by not having the photo wrap around to the back,.
 
I almost mentioned SUGAR, but it breaks format by not having the photo wrap around to the back,.
There is still a "framing" motif with the cover. Back at Verve, there was a similar framing with the handful of album covers with the Olga Albizu paintings (the Stan Getz bossa nova LPs, Bill Evans' Trio '64, etc.).

The bold, in-your-face cover presentation goes as far back as Creed Taylor's days at Impulse! Records, where he got to call the shots with the packaging along with the music. But he was only with the new label for its first six albums before leaving to run Verve.

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One thing I'm wondering about the CTI releases. If you look at Afro-Classic (last week's AOTW) and Straight Life (this week's), they are both similarly laid out, with the same background, same framing, same typeface for artist/title. As Taylor sometimes tried to release his albums in batches, it makes me wonder if there was a conscious effort to design each release batch similarly. Even going back to the Tamiko Jones and Richard Barbary pair (which had the weird double-exposed cover photos) and the two foil-overlaid titles (by Walter Wanderley and Nat Adderley), they tended to follow one another. The three Kudu titles above which were portrait paintings could have similarly been in a group of releases, either simultaneously or very close in date. It's almost like saying, "Here's the Spring collection from Creed Taylor. Three new albums for your enjoyment."

An interesting tidbit I picked up from an interview--Taylor insisted his signature appear on his productions. Not for ego, but for marketing--he wanted buyers to feel as though someone had personally supervised the entire project and had signed off on it.
 
I chopped these posts out of an existing thread mainly so we could highlight Taylor's influence on the packaging used on the albums he produced.
 
One thing I'm wondering about the CTI releases. If you look at Afro-Classic (last week's AOTW) and Straight Life (this week's), they are both similarly laid out, with the same background, same framing, same typeface for artist/title. As Taylor sometimes tried to release his albums in batches, it makes me wonder if there was a conscious effort to design each release batch similarly. Even going back to the Tamiko Jones and Richard Barbary pair (which had the weird double-exposed cover photos) and the two foil-overlaid titles (by Walter Wanderley and Nat Adderley), they tended to follow one another. The three Kudu titles above which were portrait paintings could have similarly been in a group of releases, either simultaneously or very close in date. It's almost like saying, "Here's the Spring collection from Creed Taylor. Three new albums for your enjoyment."

Could be. I always assumed Sam Antupit had a vision and occasionally tinkered. Looking at the covers in order, I still think that---but I think there's evidence the tinkering was out of necessity, at least at first.

CTI RECORDS: 3000 SERIES

The first eight A&M/CTi releases (A DAY IN THE LIFE through ISRAEL) all had identical cover formats---front cover photo that wrapped around the spine to the back, some white space between and a portrait-style photo or silhouette of the artist on the left back cover.

He broke that for TRUST IN ME, doing a full wraparound of the front cover photo---but given that it was an uncredited Herbie Mann album, the artist photo couldn't work there.

He followed that with the Richard Barbary and Tamiko Jones albums, and since those were artist photos, he did the double-exposures and a full wraparound.

After that, he returned to the original format for ROAD SONG, SAMBA BLIM, SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME and SUMMERTIME. SUMMERTIME was the last album to do the original format (white frame, wraparound Pete Turner photo, artist portrait on left back cover) with no alteration.

Next was a severe break with format---BETWIXT & BETWEEN, a portrait-oriented front photo centered on the front cover and a portrait-oriented artist photo centered on the back. Was that because the Pete Turner original photo (a car through a rainy windshield surrounded by tall buildings) could only be done in portrait mode?

He returned to the original format for CALLING OUT LOUD, but in foil, which was trendy at the time (The Monkees' HEAD, The Rascals' FREEDOM SUITE).

WHEN IT WAS DONE is the oddity to me. Foil again (okay, fine)---but the cover photo is in landscape and looks like it could wrap around. Instead, he centered it and the artist photo on the back.

COURAGE and TELL IT LIKE IT IS break format by being the first A&M/CTi albums apart from Tamiko Jones and Richard Barbary to feature an artist photo on the front cover. But these are portrait-oriented shots centered on the cover. Both covers are different shades of gray. The back covers feature centered, small, square abstract photos. TELL IT LIKE IT IS is the first to have song titles listed on the front, which will last for four consecutive albums.

MOONDREAMS gets close to the original format, but sacrifices an artist portrait on the back and goes for the first full wraparound since TRUST IN ME.

WALKING IN SPACE throws the format out the window., with a headshot of Quincy front and back, centered diagonally lower right to imply weightlessness, and the artist name horizontal and flush with the front right cover, the title then running vertically down (a motif repeated on the back, but with Quincy in the upper left and upside down.

FROM THE HOT AFTERNOON is another sorta-back-to-format, but the wraparound photo is of the artist (Paul Desmond) and there's white space on either side of the photo, so it's not a full wraparound like TRUST IN ME or MOONDREAMS.

STONEBONE goes back to a gray cover and does a wraparound with space on either side like FROM THE HOT AFTERNOON. It replaces song titles with featured players on the front cover, moving song titles to the back for the first time since COURAGE. There is no artist photo on the cover.

THE OTHER SIDE OF ABBEY ROAD, like FROM THE HOT AFTERNOON, has a wraparound of the artist (George Benson), with white space on either side of the photo and song titles on the back.

GULA MATARI dumps the format entirely, with a profile shot of Quincy on the front cover and a 3/4 shot of him on the back that actually fades over into the front cover. It's also the first and only time in the A&M/CTi series that colors other than black or white were used for artist and title.

And the last hurrah is TIDE, which like FROM THE HOT AFTERNOON and THE OTHER SIDE OF ABBEY ROAD, doesn't do a full wraparound and like MOONDREAMS and STONEBONE, doesn't feature an artist photo front or back.

So, I see where practicalities forced some of the breaks from format. I also have to think that over three years and 30 albums, the format's gotta get boring for an artist.

I'll take a look at the new CTI releases in a bit and see if patterns emerge there.
 
Looking at "new" CTI, different people are listed as art directors, and the focus (rightly) seemed to shift to presenting Pete Turner's photography without getting in the way as much as possible.

Creed's new art director more than a year into the new label was a guy named Bob Ciano, who says in a 2015 interview that Sam was moving on to other work with his own company and there was an opening. Actually, there was a considerable gap. Sam did only one of the new CTI album covers, Fats Theus' BLACK OUT in the 1000 series. Ciano started with the SUGAR album cover. In between Sam and Bob was Tony Lane.

While it's clear in the first ten covers he did (SUGAR through OUTBACK) that Ciano was paying homage to the original Antupit A&M/CTI layout, he also experimented in color and font in ways that Sam didn't.

In the interview linked above, Ciano says Creed was always pushing for simplicity, that he had the advantage of artists "who weren't screaming to have their names in 120-point type" and that he'd "try to get a little personality in with (font) choices."

The KUDU logo is actually a Ciano original font---drawn with a compass and a nib.
 
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That's a good overview of the covers. 👍 The original wrap-around and artist photos made for a good gatefold package, although now that we're in the digital age, the covers still work well on their own. Many of the CTIs I have only seen as CDs or downloads, as I don't own very many of them on vinyl as of yet.

Speaking of the use of cover photos, so far I can only remember one where the original image was mirrored--Deodato's Prelude, where the green "tree" photo was reversed.

It's interesting how song titles or artists sometimes migrated to the front cover. Usually, pop music releases would feature song titles, where jazz tended to list the musicians instead. ECM was well known for that, sometimes putting all of the musicians in the same size and style of typeface, but coloring the main artist's type differently so we knew who the leader was. Or in cases where there wasn't a de facto leader, all of the artists were listed the same on the front. Blue Note was also well known for featuring artist names on the front, as many record buyers would follow a certain artist and buy a record whether that person was a leader or side musician.

For Kudu, the records skated a line between soul and jazz, so both artists and/or song titles tend to appear on those. One touch I've liked about Kudu is that the label name is always prominent on the cover, in the same colors, and with the catalog number in the same typeface next to it, almost like editions of a volume of work.
 
Speaking of the use of cover photos, so far I can only remember one where the original image was mirrored--Deodato's Prelude, where the green "tree" photo was reversed.
I'm not absolutely sure, but I think SKY DIVE may have been as well:

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I'm not absolutely sure, but I think SKY DIVE may have been as well:

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That does look like it was mirrored--I see a lot of repeated elements far left and far right. I may have to go back through Discogs and find all the CTIs again to check out the original cover art.
 
There's an interesting difference between two album covers. It makes me wonder if the change was made before Taylor left for Verve.

This is the original cover:

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Yet within a year, the record was repressed using a revised cover:

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The arrangements and compositions are all by Oliver Nelson, but the original front cover and record label did not specifically mention Oliver Nelson as being the group leader.

Based on a mono gatefold found on Discogs, the back of the gatefold:

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One side of the inner gatefold is an odd photo and track listing, with liner notes on the opposite:

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........
 
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....continued...

A stereo gatefold on Discogs, allegedly of the initial release, shows a revised inner gatefold. However, I don't really trust what was uploaded to Discogs. Why would a stereo first pressing have a different gatefold interior? I'm thinking someone may have bought a copy of the LP that had the jacket switched. Or, someone uploaded the inner gatefold images and rear image incorrectly to the entry for the first stereo pressing. Think about it, too...since Taylor insisted on his signature being present on the packaging, the revised version, reissued after he had probably left the label, does not bear his signature, something he would not have approved of.

So, until I see otherwise, an original pressing of the stereo version would most likely have the same contents as the mono I found above.

Interior gatefold of the repressed version:

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Note--no signature below:

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Back of the gatefold:

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Final question. Pete Turner is credited on the jacket for the color photo on the original pressing. His credit remains on the repressing with the altered cover, which was a different photograph (a blue-tinted photo of Oliver Nelson). So is this second version of the jacket a Pete Turner photo also, or was leaving his credit on the jacket an oversight?

I only explored this since I have seen the record released in recent years with the updated cover, yet the copy I bought in the Verve Acoustic Sounds Series has the original abstract cover. I wanted to find out which was the correct, original cover. Turned out to be a bit more of a mess than I thought.

Final note--the original Impulse! records from 1961 were credited as a product of Am-Par Record Corporation, the company that manufactured and distributed ABC-Paramount-labeled records, where a year later (December 1961), that name was dropped so ABC-Paramount Records became the sole name used until 1966 when it became simply ABC Records. Am-Par is seen on the rear jacket on the post above, where this repress shows ABC-Paramount.
 
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