1970s BN Rainbow cover LPs vs. Japanese King LPs

[michel1969]

That 83023 is killing me ! I had the occasion of buying it in Paris at bargain.. i did not. The King cover are not all in the Ried Miles vein, but at least they will not become old fashioned.

[JSngry]

Personal preference/taste, however, is all it is. But I still maintain that althought the full covers of the LT series were "quaint", no doubt due to budget constraints, the actual photos used were usually very good, appropriate, and, often enough, provocative.

But maybe you had to be there.

Be where?

Presumably, at the record stores when the LT's were released.

Yeah. You gotta remember that Blue Note was all but dead by the late-70s, even as a "pop=jazz" label. Those LT albums were like almost supernatural "messages from beyond" or some such for those of us on the first wave of what's now a full-fledged cult - people who were/are too young to have caught it while it happened but picked up that there was something special happening with that particular label.

Those LT sides came out fast, and went even faster. As noted above, the last series or two must have had really small pressing runs, because a couple of them I only saw as promo copies. One, Thinking Of Home, I only found about 5 years later at a mall record shop in Roanoke, Va. And I had been looking...

Point is, you just got the feel (later confirmed) that this stuff was being issued on-the-fly, almost as if nobody was looking. The somewhat generic general cover design seemed to have been created to not call attention to itself, to make one side look like the other so that nobody "important" would think that there was a relative shitload of stuff coming out in a relative short amount of time on a label that for all intents and purposes was no longer functioning.

But like any good coded communication from the underground, there was always something there for the people who were hip to what the real deal was. And that was the photos. And I still maintain that far more often than not, those photos were more than a little fitting for the music, if also a bit "coded" at times (you might wonder what the hell a shot of a cue ball & pool stick have to do with either Grant Green or the tune "Solid" unless you were ever in an inner city pool hall that had a jazz-oriented jukebox, and then it would make perfect sense).

So yeah, maybe you had to be there. But I'd like to think that with a little bit of background knowledge, those LT covers could be spared the simplistic dismissals that I sometimes see. No, they're not Reid Miles, not by any stretch of the imagination, but they're as much a part and place of the time that those albums were first released as Miles' covers were.

[sidewinder]

Yeah. You gotta remember that Blue Note was all but dead by the late-70s, even as a "pop=jazz" label. Those LT albums were like almost supernatural "messages from beyond" or some such for those of us on the first wave of what's now a full-fledged cult - people who were/are too young to have caught it while it happened but picked up that there was something special happening with that particular label.

Yep, that's exactly how I recall it. They came and went in an instant - and some of those titles in the later (US-only) issues were just 'fiction' to me for many years. I only got chance to pick some of them up (e.g. 'Mother Ship') as people started off-loading vinyl to 2nd-hand stores when the Conn CD issues came out. Similarly Stanley T's 'Aint No Way'.

Those Mobley's ('Third Season', 'Slice Of The Top', 'Thinking Of Home') remain a particular favourite.

Same deal with the earlier 'brown sleeve' twofers. The only BN LP I had actually seen up to about '75 was a Donald Byrd 'Places and Spaces' and a couple of blue-label Liberty cutouts. Then in about 1976 I see a specialist shop window display with UA publicity blurb and folded-open copies of those US import twofers with Jazz Crusaders/Wes Montgomery/Gil Evans/JL Ponty/Booker Ervin/Andrew Hill etc. I thought I'd gone to heaven..

Edited November 12, 2006 by sidewinder

[michel1969]

From someone that was NOT THERE, yes the two previous threads are very interesting. And the argument are quite valuable. I've frequently noticed that you often meet "somebody" that was THERE (means = before you) when you are interested in Jazz. And that "somebody" often has a different point of view. In fact, the photos of Rainbow are very good. Its the general design that has become out of date... Till the time when it will be considered as soooo cooool, by another generation.

[JSngry]

Same deal with the earlier 'brown sleeve' twofers. The only BN LP I had actually seen up to about '75 was a Donald Byrd 'Places and Spaces' and a couple of blue-label Liberty cutouts. Then in about 1976 I see a specialist shop window display with UA publicity blurb and folded-open copies of those US import twofers with Jazz Crusaders/Wes Montgomery/Gil Evans/JL Ponty/Booker Ervin/Andrew Hill etc. I thought I'd gone to heaven..

Yeah, UA was all behind the reissue series at first, but their interest wasn't sustained. The two-fer series raised eyebrows amongst us young stonednparanoid folk over here when the last release (Blakey, Corea, Turrentine, & McLean) came in slick covers, which seemed less high quality than the "paper bag" covers of previous issues. They certainly wore out a lot faster, that's for sure. I had ringwear on Hipnosis in about a year.

There was a moment or two of silence, and then the LT series started hitting, with all those covers that all looked all the same unless you cared enought to look closely. And that was really what some of us thought, that these albums were being put out only for people like us who cared enough to look closely enough to tell the difference between one album & another. They felt like secrets that could safely be placed in the public eye because nobody would notice except the people who were supposed to.

In a sense, I still think that. There was no advertising for these, only some of them got reviewed, and the whole series had a "Psssst.... Hey Buddy - you want some unissued Blue Note from the vaults? Come on over here outta the way and let's talk" feel to it.

So yeah. I'm a fan.

[sidewinder]

Yeah, UA was all behind the reissue series at first, but their interest wasn't sustained.

At least then just a little of the proceeds of Donald and Bobbie Humphrey etc. may have gone into the publicity coffers for obscure, middle-of-nowhere UK jazz twofer window displays before the suits finally woke up !

[Chas]

The British equivalent of the LT series was the LBR series. They had different numbers. My copy of "Sonic boom" (LT987) is LBR1020. The tiny print at the bottom says it was issued by Liberty/United Records (UK) Ltd, under authorisation. The reverse of the sleeves is the same as the US issues, but the front is different. The pic is the same but the series is called "The jazz file" and is made out to look like a filing system.

MG

For those who haven't seen them , the Jazz File series covers looked like this :

[Dmitry]

The King covers, however, look kinda cheap to me.

I see what you're saying, but I got to disagree, big guy. King's art directors were no Reid Miles, but I think they tried to do their best to keep the "feel" -

Help me out here... what is that Sonny Clark cover "keeping the feel" of?

By all means, let me help - I'll take this erzatz fake Blue Note off your hands.

Edited November 12, 2006 by Dmitry

[Dan Gould]

Has anyone ever asked MC about this series? I think it would be interesting to hear from him on the questions of:

How did the LT series get approved? Was it practically a "stealth" operation hardly meant to call any attention to itself?

What about the art direction and design? Was this part of the 'stealth' campaign, were pictures chosen randomly or with a serious consideration of the artist or album title?

*********************************

Jim, I certainly understand the way you describe the feelings these engendered at the time of their release, but there are so many of these covers that don't have any apparent connection to the content that it leads me to believe that

your connecting Grant Green and pool hall jukeboxes is like people "hearing" a message from beyond in white noise. You know, people making connections where none exist.

or

sometimes they decided to do something intelligible with a cover and other times, they just couldn't come up with something or ran out of time. Or they were working with a limited number of these photographs and it was up to the art department to find somethng that might be connected to the reissue and if they didn't, oh well.

I happen to have two LTs sitting under my desk waitng for me to find some time to do a CD transfer:

Stanley T's In Memory Of and Mr. Natural. Now, In Memory of shows a pile of rocks in the foreground of a desert landscape. Theoretically, this might be a grave marker, hence "In Memory Of".

On the other hand, Mr. Natural shows a footprint in sand, lit with a diagonal of sunshine and spruced up with a green leaf. "Mr. Natural"? I'm not feeling it.

Maybe it would help to hear or see a compendium of LT covers with commentary on what "works" and what doesn't make a damn bit of sense. The only other one I can think of that was evocative of the title was Thinking of Home because it depicted total desolation, so you could imagine someone being in such a place and "thinking of home".

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

What we know is that UA Records, which was part of a financial services (I think) firm, TransAmerica, was the subject of an MBO in the mid '70s.

Sweet Lou - Lou Donaldson (#259) was manufactured by UA Records Inc 1974

Stepping into tomorrow - Donald Byrd (#368) was manufactured by UA Music and Records Group Inc 1975

I don't have any BN (or other UA labels) vinyl between these numbers, so I don't precisely know when the changeover occurred.

However, the first of the twofer reissues was this

BN356H2. This was the BN issue immediately preceding "Steppin' into tomorrow", so the odds are pretty long that it was issued by the firm after the MBO. There are no previously unissued tracks on this compilation.

Gokudo has a complete set of BN LP sleeves up to 945 ("Sterling silver"), the last BN before the Rainbow sleeves Jazz Classics series, which starts at 987 ("Sonic boom") here

http://www.gokudo.co.jp/Record/BlueNote5/index.htm

(It takes ages for the page to load.)

I greatly regret that Gokudo hasn't included the LT series.

There seem to have been 3 types of cheap sleeves: the (horrible) coloured dots on black; the brown paper bags; then the rainbow issues.

Charles Lourie (now one of the partners in Mosaic, I think) was running BN at the time and MC approached him with a business plan for reissues, which evidently went ahead after the MBO. The business plan obviously required cheap sleeve design. No big surprises there!

MG

Edited November 12, 2006 by The Magnificent Goldberg

[JSngry]

Cuscuna's on record somewhere as saying that the LT series was pretty much a matter of putting out as much as they could before anybody caught on. That's a paraphrase, but not too much of one.

As for what anybody "sees" (or doesn't) in those photos, that's entirely subjective. The cover for Mr. Natural works for me - footprints in the sand (reverse footprints actually, they stick out of the san instead of go into it, other than one mysterious indentation in the right big toe), a green leaf, a little bit of sunlight, hey - it conjures an image to be of some semi-mysterious "nature boy" going along the beach. Mr. Natural indeed!

Now, the Solid cover, that one was indirectly confirmed for me when a college buddy of mine, a hardcore Houstonian "ghettoite" (Fifth Ward), whose only goal in life was to play like Red Garland, first heard Ike Quebec & recognized a kindred soul by exclaiming, upon seeing the cover to Heavy Soul while listening to it, "Man, this is a pool hall motherfucker!"

I rest my case.

Seriously, what very few few of those photos have is a sense of literalness, so yeah, you gotta be inclined to go there in order to get there. But that's how I am anyway, and for almost all of them, I can get there. I remember Dmitry(?) saying that he didn't get the LT cover to Mother Ship. Well hell, that one was one of the more obvious ones for me - it looks like a power grid for some extraterrestial craft. No problem there!

Another thing they all share is a sense of loneliness, desolation, abandonment, whatever, and most of it either at night, or in the shadows (that's a real "vibe" connection to the tinted B&W "classic" BN cover photos, I think. Think about how odd the full color cover of Mosaic looks in comparison to the other BN covers w/photos of the artist on front). No people, no faces, just remnants of things left behind. That too was very much in keeping with how the music inside was coming across in terms of the time it was being released. Remember, this was at the time of the end of BN, and the sense of the "overness" of this music was very real at the time. Those photos conveyed that spirit.

Now, what I don't know (and don't really care about) is if those photos were consciously taken for that purpose. I seriously doubt that they were. But whoever chose them either had a feel for what was going on with this series, or else was that type of a freak naturally. Either way, they work for me, even if only by "implication". Usually, not always.

And I still say that the photos for Dancing With Death & Etcetera are about as good a combination of album title & cover photo as BN ever did!

[JSngry]

MG - Charlie Lourie's dead now. Has been for a few years. RIP.

That series with the "(horrible) coloured dots on black" (shades of Indestructable gone horribly wrong!) was short-lived. It was the introductory run of "The Blue Note Re-Issue Series", and other than some cuts on the Turrentine, was comprised entirely of previously released material. Pretty disposable, then and now.

This was when Prestige (and soon Milestone, and soon Fantasy) was lighting up the jazz world w/their 24000 series of "two-fers". This was Blue Notes first attempt at such, and it was soon aborted in favor of the "brown paper bag" series, which soon turned into being primarily a source for unissued sessions, although not completely. That was when the fun really began!

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

MG - Charlie Lourie's dead now. Has been for a few years. RIP.

That series with the "(horrible) coloured dots on black" (shades of Indestructable gone horribly wrong!) was short-lived. It was the introductory run of "The Blue Note Re-Issue Series", and other than some cuts on the Turrentine, was comprised entirely of previously released material. Pretty disposable, then and now.

I didn't know that, Jim. Sorry to hear it.

The Turrentine is the only one of those I've got. I'm not disposing of that unless the two other wise unissued sides are issued as a double conn with "New time shuffle".

MG

[sidewinder]

MG - Charlie Lourie's dead now. Has been for a few years. RIP.

That series with the "(horrible) coloured dots on black" (shades of Indestructable gone horribly wrong!) was short-lived. It was the introductory run of "The Blue Note Re-Issue Series", and other than some cuts on the Turrentine, was comprised entirely of previously released material. Pretty disposable, then and now.

I didn't know that, Jim. Sorry to hear it.

The Turrentine is the only one of those I've got. I'm not disposing of that unless the two other wise unissued sides are issued as a double conn with "New time shuffle".

MG

That Turrentine 'Dotty' twofer is a real keeper. A fine Duke Pearson-led session on that one.

Yes, I think the precedence of that Prestige (RCA in UK) 24000 series might have spurred BN into action on this series.

Charlie Lourie (God rest his soul) deserves enormous credit along with Mr Cuscuna for getting this stuff issued at a hugely non-sympathetic time for this music.

Edited November 12, 2006 by sidewinder

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

at a hugely non-sympathetic time for this music.

That's just where you're wrong, Sidewinder. It's a British perspective. I had the same view myself.

However, between 1975 and 1979, 462 jazz albums got onto the Billboard pop or R&B charts. That's the best performance of jazz albums since the late '50s. OK, very few were straight ahead jazz; the vast majority were disco or rock/fusion albums. But many of the charting musicians had been BN regulars like Stanley Turrentine, Wayne Shorter, Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Smith, Freddie Hubbard, Gene Harris, Blue Mitchell and Lonnie Smith, not forgetting the Jazz Crusaders, who had a reissue on the BN paper bag series, or people like Bobbi Humphrey, Ronnie Laws and Earl Klugh, who were having hits on BN.

Cashing in by reissuing earlier material of a successful act is a time-honoured way of making cash in the record business. And there was PLENTY of scope at that time.

MG

[Parkertown]

I love that Prestige 24000 series! The Milestone 47000 series as well.

[Jim R]

I greatly regret that Gokudo hasn't included the LT series.

As we used to say in the 70's, "Pull your head out, dude!" Those covers have been on the site for a couple of years, although I think the pages have been re-arranged once or twice. Right now, they're located on this page, following the longest, most anal collection of 78 rpm labels you could ever hope to see.

edit: For anyone who's still on a dial-up connection, I wouldn't blame them for not finding everything at Gokudo.

Edited November 12, 2006 by Jim R

[JSngry]

Hey...

[JSngry]

Hey...

[JSngry]

Hey HEY!

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I greatly regret that Gokudo hasn't included the LT series.

As we used to say in the 70's, "Pull your head out, dude!" Those covers have been on the site for a couple of years, although I think the pages have been re-arranged once or twice. Right now, they're located on this page, following the longest, most anal collection of 78 rpm labels you could ever hope to see.

edit: For anyone who's still on a dial-up connection, I wouldn't blame them for not finding everything at Gokudo.

I never thought of looking on THAT page! Why didn't he put them with the other BNs?

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Jim - I never saw any of those before. I see what you mean.

MG

[Jim R]

I greatly regret that Gokudo hasn't included the LT series.

As we used to say in the 70's, "Pull your head out, dude!" Those covers have been on the site for a couple of years, although I think the pages have been re-arranged once or twice. Right now, they're located on this page, following the longest, most anal collection of 78 rpm labels you could ever hope to see.

edit: For anyone who's still on a dial-up connection, I wouldn't blame them for not finding everything at Gokudo.

I never thought of looking on THAT page! Why didn't he put them with the other BNs?

MG

Originally, I think he did, but as I say I think he's rearranged things at least once. Also, it seems there are a few "brown paper bag" covers that are separated from the rest of the group. Anyway, I agree... odd to stick them below all of those 78's. If I were still on a dial-up, I'd probably never get down to the LT's.

[JSngry]

The lights are on, but nobody's home (in the clubhouse):

[JSngry]

The car covers live!

(But the car's abandoned now...):