Burt Goldblatt, 82, Album Cover Designer, Dies

[Brownian Motion]

The New York Times

Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

September 7, 2006

Burt Goldblatt, 82, Album Cover Designer, Dies

By STEVEN HELLER

Burt Goldblatt, a prolific designer of moody jazz LP album covers for artists like Herbie Mann, Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae and Charles Mingus, died on Aug. 30 in Boston. He was 82.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his wife, Katherine Holzman Goldblatt.

In the early 1950’s, after the introduction of the LP, the most progressive American cover designs were created for jazz albums, and Mr. Goldblatt was among the pioneers in establishing the cool-jazz style. It encompassed black-and-white portraits and studio photographs, inspired by film noir, as well as gritty street scenes, often abstractly overlaid with flat colors, evoking a sense of urban night life. Expressionistic line drawings of performers in action were also in vogue.

One of Mr. Goldblatt’s earliest covers, from 1950, was a bootleg album by Holiday for the Jolly Roger label. Like his contemporaries Bob Jones, Reid Miles and David Stone Martin, he alternated between using photography and drawings, always focusing on emblematic details of the trade. A series of distinctive covers shows close-ups of musicians blowing their instruments. He also mastered a wide range of methods, including collage, montage and even X-rays.

Mr. Goldblatt’s early covers strove for visual simplicity. He eliminated long lists of song titles, one of the medium’s more obtrusive conventions. When he failed to get the desired result from a photograph, he made drawings of musicians using a scruffy serpentine line style, which was shared by other record cover illustrators at the time.

While variations in weight from thick to thin marked the drawings as distinctively his, “it is his original use of unusual perspectives that distinguishes Mr. Goldblatt’s line drawings from others of the same period,” said Angelynn Grant, a design historian who specializes in record albums.

Burt Goldblatt was born in 1924 in Dorchester, Mass. He served in the Army in the Pacific during World War II, then studied at the Massachusetts College of Art. After graduation he worked in a printing plant, where he learned the craft, from stripping negatives to plate-making. He taught himself photography.

After freelancing as a commercial artist in Boston, he moved to New York. From 1953 to 1955 he worked for CBS Television, designing promotions and credit crawls for Red Skelton, Edward R. Murrow and Jack Benny as well as for the hit shows “Rawhide” and “Bachelor Father.” He also began specializing in album-cover design and created about 200 covers in 1955 alone.

Although he worked for Decca and Atlantic, Mr. Goldblatt designed most prodigiously for small labels, including Savoy, Jolly Roger and Bethlehem. He became known for abstracted caricatures and distorted portraits, but his photographic cover designs for Bethlehem helped define the genre by combining evocative photos with restrained yet lyrical typography.

Mr. Goldblatt was a denizen of recording studios and nightclubs, where he shot untold numbers of images, some of which he later used for cover designs.

“He was accepted by the musicians and, in fact, was friends with many,” Ms. Grant said. The pianist Bud Powell named a tune for Mr. Goldblatt, and Chris Connor scatted lyrics in his honor.

Mr. Goldblatt continued designing covers, including some for gospel and pop albums, into the 1960’s, when changes in style brought about by rock ’n’ roll ended that part of his career. He moved on to become a co-author of 17 books, as diverse as “Mobs and the Mafia,” “Starring Fred Astaire” and “Baseball’s Best.” He also compiled books of his jazz photography.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughters Heather Blake of Pennsylvania and Leslie DeNunzio of New York City; two grandsons; and his sisters, Selma Cohen of Florida and Barbara Trieber of Boston.

[Jim R]

previous thread