Sarah Vaughan – Sweet, Sultry and Swinging album art
Cool Face for cool jazz. Or is it hot jazz? Sweet, Sultry and Swinging appears to be a reissue of Sarah Vaughan’s 1950 album Hot Jazz, with a slightly modified selection and order of tracks. It was released in 1962 on Spin-O-Rama Records.
Sam Suliman designed the cover. For the name of the “Queen of Bebop”, he picked the same Lettera alphabet that he used for another cover design from the same year, see Dance Party. This time, the lowercase letters by Armin Haab’s Cool Jazz feature in unmodified form.
In 2020, Keith Bates of K-Type drew a digital typeface inspired by this album cover. Unaware about the origin of the letterforms, he assumed it’s custom lettering, and reverse-engineered the rest of the alphabet – plus capitals, numerals, punctuation, accented letters and more. Bates extended the design into three weights in upright and italic styles, and named the resulting family after the cover designer: Sam Suliman. The Bold weight is freely available for personal use.
Style overview for the Sam Suliman typeface family by Keith Bates (K-Type, 2020)
