Vintage Album Covers

Private collections, public perceptions, and all that jazz.

We love jazz. We love album cover art. And we love vintage design. So we’re incredibly excited to bring you three fantastic collections of vintage jazz album and LP cover artwork.

VINTAGE VANGUARD

Vintage Vanguard may be an obscure Japanese website, but it’s brimming with remarkable cover designs of classic and rare Western jazz albums from the iconic Blue Note record label.

LP COVER LOVER

LP Cover Lover is both an archive of “the weird and wonderful world of record covers from the golden age of LPs” and a social bookmarking platform where anyone can submit a cover and everyone votes on the artwork. And while we wish the collection were browsable by rating, it’s still an absolute treat for musicologists and vintage design junkies alike.

BIRKA JAZZ ARCHIVE

In 1938, Columbia Records hired designer Alex Steinweiss who, at the age of 23, invented the concept of the album cover. Until then, records came in plain brown paper wrappers. Steinweiss’ idea was not only a pivotal moment in packaging history, but also a monumental shift in the relationship between music and art which, through the introduction of illustration, typography, vivid color and bold graphics, completely revolutionized the record industry.

Columbia Records’ Birka Jazz Archive houses rare and beautiful album covers by Steinweiss and other iconic designers from the golden age of jazz — some from private collections not previously available to the world. Sorted by label and country, the artwork also features fascinating historical notes about the labels, designers, photographers, and the music itself.

Explore this incredible cultural gem and, if you find yourself fascinated by the history and heritage of jazz, we recommend the Jazz + Culture course on iTunes U, a free podcast from Arizona State University. While it may lack the charm and production value of a TED talk, the course is a densely informative and captivating journey through the evolution of a cultural movement much grander than its musical foundation.

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2008 in Album Art The year’s best cover art — from albums that actually didn’t suck. All too often we see killer album artwork, only to find it covering a total musical let-down — perhaps banking on the trite notion that people will indeed judge a book, or in this case an album, by...
The History of Jazz, Animated in Shadow Art A brilliant animated short film from SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, outlining the history of jazz in a virtual shadow art museum....
Vintage Russian Ads What Dostoevsky has to do with sausage art and bicycles....
Retro Revival: Vintage Posters for Modern Movies Helvetica, Hitchcock and what Saul Bass can teach J.J. Abrams about mystery. The retro revival design trend has been around for a while, but over the past few months we’ve seen one particularly interesting and wonderful niche manifestation — vintage-inspired, retrostalgic posters for modern television and film. Here are seven...
Music-Inspired Art: The Hype Machine Zeitgeist 50 talented visual artists to create original pieces depicting the 50 best artists/albums of 2009, based on their blogosphere popularity...

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 10:40 am in art, culture, design, music and was tagged art, cool, culture, design, history, illustration, music.