Blue Note Albums with CTI-Like Cover Art that Later Received Period-Appropriate Cover Art

[Teasing the Korean]

Is there a definitive list of previously unreleased Blue Note Albums that were released circa 1980 with CTI-like cover art, but that later received period-appropriate cover art with later reissues?

Edited August 14, 2021 by Teasing the Korean

[JSngry]

Cover ART or  cover DESIGN?

I assume you're referring to the LT series, which was pretty much the anti-CTI of design.

CTI was all about indulgent extroversion, calling attention to yourself. LT was all about just trying to get out alive before the bloodhounds got the scent and the bullets started flying.

[felser]

12 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Cover ART or  cover DESIGN?

I assume you're referring to the LT series, which was pretty much the anti-CTI of design.

CTI was all about indulgent extroversion, calling attention to yourself. LT was all about just trying to get out alive before the bloodhounds got the scent and the bullets started flying.

Which happened plenty soon enough.  Great vault work by Cuscuna.

 

[JSngry]

"period appropriate'... WTF? does that mean, oh, this record gets made and sits in the can until either people die or go off into a totally different career direction, in the meantime, this record goes nowhere because they already got enough of that already and/or it's not quite what we want, so...

What "period" is being neglected and forgotten?

I'll tell you what period it's not - a period of oh wow, here's a new Blue Note record, look, everybody's happy and thoughtful and making another great record...like, yeah, forget about those 40 years you spent in a cage in the basement.

There is no truth in those revisionist covers, unless Father Knows Best represents truth 

[Chuck Nessa]

Ah yes, the Rainbow Series.

[Teasing the Korean]

So it looks like all of the albums I have with the inappropriate cover art were in something called the "Blue Note Classic" series, which is not a helpful phrase, as they are using that same phrase now.  

Here is a list.  I would like to know if most or all of these albums later received period-appropriate cover art. 

https://www.discogs.com/label/66004-Blue-Note-CLASSIC

Edited August 14, 2021 by Teasing the Korean

[Teasing the Korean]

So it looks like I have some of these albums on CD, for which they created period-appropriate cover art, but I still have lots of these on vinyl with the appropriate cover art.  

[felser]

54 minutes ago, JSngry said:

 

There is no truth in those revisionist covers, unless Father Knows Best represents truth 

Fiction is oft times not without aesthetic value!  I think Patrick Roques did Miles Reid even better than Miles Reid did, though without the authenticity.

Edited August 14, 2021 by felser

[JSngry]

If it was truly "period-appropriate" to the period in which it was recorded (I goes that's what you're thinking) it would be actual Reid Miles design or an actual Reid Miles forgery, not some nostalgic "homage " or some other mental marketing handjob behind the dumpster type crap 

The LT series, those records, those musics, their purpose was not to please you in any way. They existed solely for the purpose of popping up just long enough to prove that they existed before the whole species was exterminated.

This is no metaphor or exaggeration We almost lost Blue Note, seriously. Lion escaped Hitler, but Blue Note's escape from Capitol was much more harrowing 

Never Forget.

[felser]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

If it was truly "period-appropriate" to the period in which it was recorded (I goes that's what you're thinking) it would be actual Reid Miles design or an actual Reid Miles forgery, not some nostalgic "homage " or some other mental marketing handjob behind the dumpster type crap 

The LT series, those records, those musics, their purpose was not to please you in any way. They existed solely for the purpose of popping up just long enough to prove that they existed before the whole species was exterminated.

This is no metaphor or exaggeration We almost lost Blue Note, seriously. Lion escaped Hitler, but Blue Note's escape from Capitol was much more harrowing 

Never Forget.

Have not forgotten. The advent of the CD era helped a lot.

[JSngry]

Helped to forget...

[Rabshakeh]

5 hours ago, JSngry said:

4 hours ago, JSngry said:

 The LT series, those records, those musics, their purpose was not to please you in any way. They existed solely for the purpose of popping up just long enough to prove that they existed before the whole species was exterminated.

This is no metaphor or exaggeration We almost lost Blue Note, seriously. 

LT was all about just trying to get out alive before the bloodhounds got the scent and the bullets started flying.

What are these comments a reference to? Not asking to be arch. I genuinely don't know the history. 

[JSngry]

Blue Note was all but done as a label (even as a corporately controlled one)  and there was no guarantee that they would survive at all. The LT (aka "Rainbow" a cruelly ironic design choice) was a literally last-ditch/gasp effort by Cuscuna and Laurie to get  vault stuff out in the open before the whole thing folded...which it did.

Remember, there were no new artists releasing on the label at the time (Horace Silver was the last one, iirc), and the "reissue" series which gave us all that wonderful "brown paper bag" vault stuff had been discontinued. Remember- there was yet no Mosaic or anything, just this last gasp, And they seemed to (where I was, anyway) come out at random intervals and limited quantities),

And then they stopped. Blue Note, where it existed at all, existed as a very limited back catalog or "known quantities)...and I seem to remember dealers having a hard time getting those for a while.

And then Capitol bought it all up, and then there was...Applause. And it really did look like that was going to be it for going forth. In fact, I fully expected at the time that Mosaic was going to be the only place to get a real look into Blue Note,s historicity. The only place.

Fortunately, Bruce Lundvall moved in, and things got saved for a little while. That's when everybody thought it was safe to breathe again,, but it's never really safe to breathe, not this air.

Nothing short of a Cultural Genocide, that's what we were looking at. Might seem harsh, but only if you don't really value the culture that those records (all of them, the OGs and the vault records) were bringing to the public and the way it was being brought. If that doesn't matter, then all those things where they grab a picture and put all kinds of "homage" type covers to make it look like none of that ever happened, then, hey, enjoy that.

I mean, maybe those types of things don' matter to most people ok. But they matter to me, and I know for a fact that I'm not alone.

 

[Rabshakeh]

Thanks

[mjzee]

7 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

So it looks like all of the albums I have with the inappropriate cover art were in something called the "Blue Note Classic" series, which is not a helpful phrase, as they are using that same phrase now.  

Here is a list.  I would like to know if most or all of these albums later received period-appropriate cover art. 

https://www.discogs.com/label/66004-Blue-Note-CLASSIC

A huge task, but let's get started:

 In Memory Of was never released with updated cover art.

 Confirmation was never released with "period-appropriate cover art," but there was this:

[mjzee]

 New Time Shuffle has never had an updated cover.

 Not sure this qualifies as "Reid Miles style": 

I'll try to do some more later, unless someone else wants to take over.

[Teasing the Korean]

15 minutes ago, mjzee said:

 A  huge task, but let's get started:...

I'll try to do some more later, unless someone else wants to take over.

Beautiful, thank you!

The period-appropriate cover art makes these albums truly a part of the canon.  The cheap looking late-70s/early-80s covers made them feel like substandard sessions, like rejects.

I'm glad that Blue Note or EMI or whoever did the right thing.  

[JSngry]

They weren't (usually) substandard, but they were rejects. Which is exactly the point. Everybody says, wow it's hard to believe that THIS went unissued for so long. Well, no, it's not hard at all. This shit is a business, not a freaking public park. Not then, not now, not ever.

And UA did the right thing by looking the other way - if they were looking at all - while letting Cuscuna and Laurie put up the Have You Seen Me? milk carton records. Those really were record-industry guerilla warfare. Cuscuna was good at that back in those days, getting stuff out through  "major" labels before they figured out what he was doing. Between Freedom, Novus & Savoy, god only knows how much of Clive Davis' Arista money he (and partners) spent...

Those revisionist Smiling POW "period appropriate" covers don't look real, any of them, because they aren't real.

When the King Japanese vault reissues started coming out, I LOL-ed at how they absolutely flaunted how UN-"real" they were. They didn't even try, because they knew how disrepectful that would be. So they did some really weird shit, LOL weird.

Canon? Please. Canons are bullshit. Canons are for people who don't want to know what really happened. Canons are for people who want to be told what somebody else wants them to think happened. Canons are for people who believe that civilization should be "upheld" rather than allowed to evolve. Canons are the height of unnatural thought and behavior.

 

[mjzee]

15 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

I'm glad that Blue Note or EMI or whoever did the right thing.  

Different times, different circumstances.  The LT series was a relatively cheap and easy way to release a lot of albums in a short time span.  All covers used the same template, slap on a random photograph, and use cheap pressings.  The liner notes were great, but they could’ve used a proofreader.  Today, of course, it’s very different.  MusicMatters proved that people are willing to pay top dollars, so it makes sense to invest in better, more “appropriate” graphics.

[Chuck Nessa]

As one who purchased the "Rainbow" releases as they were released, they are the "real" covers for me.

[Teasing the Korean]

10 minutes ago, Chuck Nessa said:

As one who purchased the "Rainbow" releases as they were released, they are the "real" covers for me.

The aesthetes among us feel differently.  

[JSngry]

Oh, "to clarify", "period appropriate" and "Reid Miles" are not always the same thing.  If, say, Dance With Death was to have gotten a "period appropriate" look, they would have gone for an ersatz Forlenza/Venosa or Frank Gauna cover or something like that.

for pretty much (almost) anything that was released after the Liberty-to-UA era, a Miles-esque cover is NOT period-appropriate.

 

[Larry Kart]

16 minutes ago, JSngry said:

They weren't (usually) substandard, but they were rejects. Which is exactly the point. Everybody says, wow it's hard to believe that THIS went unissued for so long. Well, no, it's not hard at all. This shit is a business, not a freaking public park. Not then, not now, not ever.

And UA did the right thing by looking the other way - if they were looking at all - while letting Cuscuna and Laurie put up the Have You Seen Me? milk carton records. Those really were record-industry guerilla warfare. Cuscuna was good at that back in those days, getting stuff out through  "major" labels before they figured out what he was doing. Between Freedom, Novus & Savoy, god only knows how much of Clive Davis' Arista money he (and partners) spent...

Those revisionist Smiling POW "period appropriate" covers don't look real, any of them, because they aren't real.

When the King Japanese vault reissues started coming out, I LOL-ed at how they absolutely flaunted how UN-"real" they were. They didn't even try, because they knew how disrepectful that would be. So they did some really weird shit, LOL weird.

Canon? Please. Canons are bullshit. Canons are for people who don't want to know what really happened. Canons are for people who want to be told what somebody else wants them to think happened. Canons are for people who believe that civilization should be "upheld" rather than allowed to evolve. Canons are the height of unnatural thought and behavior.

 

It's Lourie, not Laurie.

[Teasing the Korean]

I just showed the before and after pics to Ms. TTK.  She said that the hideous late-70s/early-80s covers look like Windham Hill!  

I think they look like Pickwick or Springboard trying to be upscale.  

Edited August 15, 2021 by Teasing the Korean

[JSngry]

4 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

It's Lourie, not Laurie.

My bad.

4 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

I just showed the before and after pics to Ms. TTK.  She said that the hideous late-70s/early-80s covers look like Windham Hill!  

I think they look like Pickwick or Springboard trying to be upscale.  

I have no problem believing that.

20 minutes ago, mjzee said:

...slap on a random photograph...

Not as random as a casual look might suggest.

This:

is FAR more random - and non-esthetic - than this:

Doesn't that kittly look FRIENDLY?!?!?!

There's more of this that just that one, trust me.

There's a few themes running through all of them:

• No real, live people, ever.
• Even where there are signs of life, signs is all they are.
• A sense of abandoned space
• Often enough, a sense that nothing is there becuae of something that happened, and whatever it was, it wasn't pretty. Call it menace or whatever. Dance With Death, yeah, that other shoe...good luck finding that.

Overall, it's actually a pretty coherent esthetic, those photographs are.

And more than often enough, there's a meaningful tie-in to the title of the album.

I mean, this means...what, exactly?

Oh look! It's a picture of Hank Mobley, let's jsut use some "tasteful" graphic, he, we got a record! It could just as easily be called A Hank Mobley BLUE NOTE Record.

This, otoh, low-budget that it may be, this is DEFINITELY about "thinking of home"..the story that gets to that point...you tell me. But yeah, thinking of home, no doubt.

 

"Canon" is for people who don't want to think about shit. You tell me where the esthetics is in that. That sounds more like dilettante poseurism to me.