Nina Simone – Folksy Nina album art
Rosenblum Chicamakomiko in early use for Folksy Nina, released by Colpix Records in 1964. The album by Nina Simone “includes live tracks recorded on April 12, 1963, at Carnegie Hall. The previous album, Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall (1963) uses songs from the same concert.” [Wikipedia]
Chicamakomiko was drawn by Richard Rosenblum and shown by Photo-Lettering in 1964, together with an outlined variant named Rosenblum Glockenheimer. Susana Carvalho digitized and extended the lively design in 2011. First made available from (the now defunct) photolettering.com around 2015, it’s now available from House Industries, as Plinc Chicamakomiko.
Found by John, who is currently tracking down Uses for some of the ten typefaces designed by Rosenblum.
For the stereo release, the art was moved down to make space for “Stereo” (in Century Expanded Bold) and the catalog number (in News Gothic).
3 Comments on “Nina Simone – Folksy Nina album art”
When albums were reissued in stereo, the existing art was typically pushed down so that the banner with the new selling point could be added prominently at the top. In some cases, this was done so ruthlessly that considerable parts of the cover art were cropped – as pointed out by Nick Shinn in a previous comment.
In the second image shown above, Simone’s neck got a few inches shorter, but Sid Maurer’s signature is still visible. In the copy shown below, it fell victim to the cropping, too.
This is the third example of a Rosenblum alphabet used for an album released by Colpix in 1964.
Sid Maurer takes credit for two more album covers for the label from that year, the Chad Mitchell Trio’s self-titled album and Jane Morgan’s The Last Time I Saw Paris. These feature related letter styles, but don’t match any of Rosenblum’s designs for Photo-Lettering.
It looks like Maurer – or one of his colleagues in the art department – tried their hands at such an animated style, too. The contoured lettering for the former is not unlike Zetzinkup, albeit less confident.
Interesting! What a lazy solution. The designer could’ve replaced the “HI FIDELITY” text (in the lower left on the mono release) with “STEREO” and preserved the integrity of the composition.