Honourable mentions to Barbara Wojirsch, creator of the house style of the ECM Scandi jazz label, which is a cleaner descendant of some of the 50s styles.
Also Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson of Hypgnosis, who created a long line of definitive covers for artists from the 70s and 80s, including Pink Floyd. (I met Thorgerson once. He was notorious for being a complete arse - and so it proved. Unique talent though.)
This is great and has a lot of early historical perspective that I had never seen chronicled before.
But it is necessarily limited in the amount of album covers it can feature from what many would consider to be their heyday, the 1950s through the 1970s.
If you just want to feast your eyes on a lot of great album covers from that period, pick up a copy of the "Album Cover Album" [1] or one of its six (!) follow-ups. Designers Storm Thorgerson (who worked with Pink Floyd) and Roger Dean (who worked with Yes) created these incredibly lush books, with album covers printed nice and large in vivid color, organized in a really insightfully thematic way. A bit more speedy than your average used book, but not by much. Highly recommended, good for hours of reverie.
Thorgerson and Powell ran Hipgnosis, which made a large number of the craziest and most memorable covers of the 70s/80s, not just PF. There are only three days left to watch the great documentary that Anton Corbijn made about them: https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81721595
Gotta admit: Yes's wild album covers drew me in so that their sound could get me hooked on Prog Rock so long ago. Creative album covers seem to be one of the many victims of today's single-focused and streaming-focused music landscape.
From the article, in regards to Blakey, Monk, Bird, Dizzy, and Trane: “…because of their drinking, drug use, and frenetic schedules, labels wouldn’t work with them.”
Is this claim documented somewhere? (All but one of the footnote links are dead for me)
author here! sorry for the broken footnote links, i fixed 'em.
There's a lot of documentation of those players' heroin and alcohol use. Miles Davis' autobiography has a list in it somewhere of all the players that were abusing substances; a lot of it had to do with their need to play gigs back-to-back through the night to make a living. As for the schedules, I think it was Miles' book, but I can't find it exactly ... because they played all night, and rehearsed early in the morning after the clubs closed, it was hard to keep a group on a predictable recording schedule. The majors wanted big names with well-known hit songs, and the loose ensemble nature, original compositions, and unpredictable improv of bebop was pretty much the opposite of commercially viable at the time.
Scott DeVeaux's The Birth of Beebop is a great source, too.
I enjoyed the article, but I think this particular part is sloppy writing and connecting two things without proof. Despite substance abuse issues, it doesn't necessarily track that that's why majors avoided them. It could just as easily be because of these artists not being well known enough at the time. Or even other factors. If you're going to make such assertions about these people, I'd have the citations to back it up.
Plus, Bird had many labels release his music, including Savoy, Columbia, and Mercury. Dizzy was notoriously straight-laced, especially because of what happened to Bird. He lectured musicians about this all the time. He also preferred dealing with independent labels as opposed to the majors (although Bluebird was a subsidiary of RCA).
I know you don't include Miles in the list of people that labels avoided, but he didn't exactly have a reputation of being easy to deal with, and he signed with Columbia in 1955.
As for Trane, if I recall correctly, he was constantly panned by critics in the earlier years. He was signed to Atlantic in the late 50s before Giant Steps was released. They were certainly a major, no?
https://ecmrecords.com/
Also Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson of Hypgnosis, who created a long line of definitive covers for artists from the 70s and 80s, including Pink Floyd. (I met Thorgerson once. He was notorious for being a complete arse - and so it proved. Unique talent though.)
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/hipgnosis-lif...
And of course Factory Records and Pete Saville, especially this infamous classic "sample" from an astronomy paper.
https://f.media-amazon.com/images/I/81T-loBJ40L._SL1291_.jpg
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