Light's Out! is a jazz album by the Jackie McLean Quartet, with help from Donald Byrd and Elmo Hope, and was released in 1956 by Prestige Records.

Haymaker Cartoon is used for the main title, with supporting roles from Filmotype Homer and what looks like a somewhat squeezed Filmotype Hemlock or similar with a few alternates. The condensed casual sans is unknown [edit: it’s Hand Lettering 3920 or a version of this design, see comments]. In general, despite the album art’s use of Haymaker Cartoon, the design isn't as “out of place” as Gil Mellé's Miles Davis cover from the same year.

The back cover is much simpler, pairing Tempo with the similar Vogue.

No designer credited. The cover photography is by Esmond Edwards (1927–2007).

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From Wikipedia:

The Soul Brotherhood is an album by organist Charles Kynard which was recorded in 1969 and released on the Prestige label.

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Source: www.popsike.com License: All Rights Reserved.

This curious sleeve doesn’t fit in with the rest of the mid-1950s cool jazz aesthetic. Duotone photography was commonly used in the genre, but that’s where the familiarity ends. The lime green color (later issues were blue); the large, brushy title, set dead center; and the bleak scene of arthritic trees along a nondescript canal – it’s all a bit mysterious. It gives off similar vibes to Marcus Keef’s spooky cover for Black Sabbath. The only sense I can make of the image choice is that Miles Davis’ quintet recorded this session in the fall (November 16, 1955).

Source: oa.letterformarchive.org Image: Letterform Archive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Haymaker Cartoon from Photo-Lettering’s One Line Manual of Styles, 1971

The typeface is Haymaker Cartoon, an extrabold sign painter’s or showcard writer’s “casual” that appears in Photo-Lettering’s 1965 catalog, but must have been available a decade earlier to be used here.

Source: www.popsike.com The Jazz Tome. License: All Rights Reserved.

While the back cover (set almost entirely in Vogue) doesn’t include attribution, Discogs credits the design to Gil Mellé, a musician and painter who created a handful of 1950s covers for Blue Note and Prestige featuring dynamic abstract art. While I love Mellé’s work, this minimalist oddball stands out, and that charms me.

Thanks to Gary Hornseth for bringing this gem to my attention via the lovely Jazz Tome website!

Don Schlitten was a fond user of Benguiat Interlock, and specified it for a number of albums, including the second of three volumes of Eric Dolphy in Europe. Dolphy, the jazz multi-instrumentalist from Los Angeles who played with Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and others, recorded it in September 1961 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The album wasn’t released until 1965, one year after Dolphy had died in West Berlin, probably due to undiagnosed diabetes.

LondonJazzCollector comments:

The cover is […] a beauty, with classic laminate and a superb picture of Dolphy smoking a pipe. How very bohemian and utterly against today’s Health and Safety culture. But since Dolphy was dead by the age of only 36, that hardly seems to matter. Guess the pension plan turned out a poor investment.

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Front cover of a remastered stereo release. The line at the top is added in bold italic caps from Venus.

Back cover with liner notes by Chris Albertson, set in News Gothic.

Gene Ammons’ jazz album Late Hour Special was originally released by Prestige Records in 1964. Shown above is a 1990s CD rerelease by the same company for their Original Jazz Classics series, which essentially uses the same artwork for the front cover.

The name of the musician is the normal style of Benguiat Interlock, shown here with half a billion eccentric, interlocking ligatures. The fonts used for “Late Hour Special” and the track listing are more constrained, though; the former uses Franklin Gothic Wide, and the latter uses News Gothic Bold. Both faces were relatively recent (i.e. 1953 and 1958, respectively) additions to Morris Benton’s decades-old families by John L. Renshaw.

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The original vinyl release from 1964

Source: www.hhv.de License: All Rights Reserved.

Roy Haynes is an American jazz drummer born in 1925 and active since 1942. His Cymbalism album was recorded in 1963 for New Jazz, a sublabel of Prestige Records.

For the cover typography, Don Schlitten (b. 1932) worked with Benguiat Interlock. Announced in 1959, this design by Ed Benguiat was Photo-Lettering’s first interlocking release, and, maybe together with Filmotype’s series, probably one of the earliest fontifications of such a lettering style.

Source: archive.org Internet Archive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Print ad announcing Benguiat Interlock and Opus, “two new designs created by Ed Benguiat”, in Art Direction, Vol. 11, No. 3, June 1959

Without having access to a complete glyph set, it’s difficult to say to what extent the letterforms seen on the album cover come directly from PLINC’s film negative, and to what extent they were touched up. As the name implies, Photo-Lettering’s process was a hybrid one: the settings were based on prefabricated (i.e. typographic) letterforms stored on photographic film, but could be modified and elaborated on by one of their lettering artists on staff. What’s certain is that Benguiat drew a boatload of alternates to allow for a hand-rendered look with nicely interlocking pairs. The partial glyph set reproduced in Alphabet Thesaurus Vol. 2 includes a staggering sixteen different forms for the letter A, eleven for E, eight for S, seven for R, and still five for Y.

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Source: www.hhv.de License: All Rights Reserved.

The liner notes by Vin Haynes on the back cover are set in Spartan. This Futura copy is distinguished by its alternate double-story a that was used here.

My Life in the Blues is a double album containing an interview with country blues musician Samuel “Lightnin’” Hopkins (1912–1982), conducted by Samuel A. Charters, as well as a number of live recordings.

Cover design by Don Schlitten, vice president and art director of Prestige Records, with an illustration by Irwin Rosenhouse. The main typeface is Quaint Roman. Originally designed by Gustave F. Schroeder for the Central Type Foundry in the early 1890s, it was revived by Photo-Lettering, Inc. in 1962.

The small blue line uses Stymie Bold Italic and the text in the angled red box is in Filmotype Quiet. These two faces were likewise available from Photo-Lettering, the latter under the alias Cargo Stencil Bold.

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Gatefold with liner notes

Back cover

Libra (1938) is an uncial typeface by Dutch designer S.H. de Roos. As an interpretation of uncial scripts as used from the 4th to 8th centuries, it has a single case only: to our modern eyes, some letters look like they’re capitals (B, R), whereas others have forms that follow the minuscule construction (a, h, m, n).

When “unicase” typefaces became fashionable in the 1960s, Don Schlitten picked Libra for the cover of an album with Appalachian folk music. The “songs, reels and child ballads” on Cumberland Moonshiner were sung by Tennessee musician Hamper McBee (here misspelled as MacBee), accompanied by Guy Carawan. The album was released in June 1964 by Prestige Folklore, a spin-off of Prestige Records.

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PLINC Halloween in use for Red Garland Live!, a live album by Red Garland (1923–1984), recorded at the Prelude Club, New York, on October 2, 1959, and released on Prestige’s New Jazz label in 1965.

The design is by Don Schlitten, with cover art that appears to be an uncredited appropriation of Bridget Riley’s Op Art, see her Fall painting from 1963 (cf. this book cover from 1966).

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Fonts In Use reader Jay Mellor recently found out that Halloween is an adaptation of an alphabet by lettering artist A. Bardi, reproduced as La Boule in Publicité Vignettes Lettres Chiffres Monogrammes et Rehauts Modernes (Les Editions Guérinet, Paris, 1931). It was adopted by Photo-Lettering before 1960.

Back cover with liner notes by Michael Gold, set in News Gothic or similar.

Chwast Art Tone in relatively early use for the cover of Soul Food by jazz pianist Bobby Timmons (1935–1974).

Don Schlitten’s design packages the soul jazz in a can, making a tongue-in-cheek reference to “canned music”, a derogatory term for pre-recorded (as opposed to live-performed) music. Art Tone’s bottom-heavy letterforms are shown with some perspective distortion, to match three-dimensional illustration. Such “circoflair techniques”, as Photo-Lettering, Inc. liked to call them, had become possible with phototype, and were realized with optical lenses. The specific variant is listed as “Dip Plumb Curve” in their Alphabet Thesaurus, Vol. 2 from 1965.

Seymour Chwast developed this peculiar typeface from a single letter a drawn for Artone Ink at Push Pin Studios in 1964. According to Steven Heller’s Design Literacy it was expanded into a full alphabet for the client and released by Photo-Lettering in the same year. It’s not yet shown in their 1965 catalog, though.

The album was recorded on September 30 and October 14, 1966 [Wikipedia] and comes with liner notes by Peter Drew dated Dec. 1966. Most sources state that the album was released still in the same year.

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Two of Photo-Lettering’s “Circoflair” techniques, the “Dip Fan Curve” and the “Dip Plumb Curve”, as shown in the Alphabet Thesaurus, Vol. 2, 1965. See the full spread with more options in Nick Sherman’s Flickr photostream.

The back cover shows the title and the artist’s name in undistorted Art Tone, with track listing and liner notes set in News Gothic.

Nice blend of Victorian (and Victorian-inspired) typefaces on this album cover designed by Everton Mead in 1976, in Kingston, Jamaica.

The cover blends Bottleneck (inspired by Seymour Chwast’s Art Tone), Compacta, Davida, and Ribbonette, all of which were most likely photographically set.

King Tubby was a legendary pioneer of the Dub genre of music, a precursor to a lot of later electronic music production.

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The typography on the back cover is in Times New Roman, with roman caps for the track list and italics for the credits.

Setting the Pace is an album by saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Booker Ervin. It was recorded in Munich in 1965 and released by Prestige Records in 1967.

The tightly packed biform face appears to be Bailey Bold. A showing in the Letter-Fan (1969) suggests as much, except for the fact that Bailey is presented without any capital forms other than one alternate G. The capital/biform glyphs used here, for B D J K R V X, are neither included in Bailey Bold nor in California Caps, which was suggested by Lettergraphics as a matching uppercase companion.

[Edit: This isn’t Bailey, but Pacella Graphic Biform, drawn by Vincent Pacella for Photo-Lettering in or before 1965. See my comment to the post about Miles Davis – Greatest Hits.]

Don Schlitten did not only produce the album, he also takes credit for the photography and the design.

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The cover for Prestige’s album with greatest hits by Miles Davis appears to use Bailey for the title. Most letterforms match a showing of Bailey Bold Condensed in a Lettergraphics specimen from 1969. Differences include the flatter i dot and the t with a slightly shorter ascender, which would be easy customizations. The specimen presents four alternates: a and s with diagonal and rounded middle parts, t with a tail that ends at the baseline, and a G of capital form as seen here. Bailey didn’t have a proper uppercase. The D, R, and H and the wide v/V could either be additional biform alternates not shown in the specimen, or modifications. Or was there another, virtually identical face with more glyphs by a different manufacturer?

[Edit: Yes, there was. This isn’t Bailey, but Pacella Graphic Biform, see the comments.]

The album was produced and designed by Don Schlitten, with photography by Ray Avery. See also another album cover by Schlitten from the same year, for which he used a narrower style from the same typeface.

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Pressing by Victor Record Company, Japan (SMJX-10020), with a different order for the tracks.

Second album by saxophonist King Curtis (1934–1971), released by New Jazz Records (a sublabel of Prestige since 1958) in 1960.

The cover photography is by Esmond Edwards (1927–2007). The typography combines Filmotype Windsor (narrow) and Wave (wide), a pair of faces with tiny serifs much like Copperplate Gothic, but with horizontal stroke endings.

While Reid Miles’s signature is clearly on this cover, several sources also credit the design to Andy Warhol who worked on a few jazz covers in the 1950s during his career as a commercial artist. The disctinctive Warholian lettering is evidence that he played a role. But Warhol often asked his mother, Julia Warhola, to add her signature calligraphy to his work, and the lettering here is very close to her well-documented handwriting for The Story of Moondog. So you could make a case for crediting all three individuals for this great cover. Incidentally, several digital fonts seek to emulate the Warhols’ lettering. FF Pepe may be one of these.

“MONK” (likely wood or photo type) is perhaps Tempo, not Futura. The tip-off is that Tempo is clearly used on the reverse side of the sleeve — see the distinctive Heavy ‘K’. Vogue is used for text on the back. The two typefaces also have a long history on Blue Note records.

Spotted on the wonderful Typophonics blog. Design credited to the prolific and multi-talented jazz producer Don Schlitten (see a sampling of his design work on Discogs).

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Prestige Records No. 8202, ca. 1957.

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