In 1948, a sound engineer called Paul Goldmark perfected microgrooves, and the LP was born. One new medium begat another: the new long-playing records needed sleeve notes and cover art. Here was an interesting discipline for the graphic designer (in those days still styled as artisan "commercial artists"): how to convey persuasive meaning in a rigidly delineated square format. No one did it better than Blue Note Records.
The designer was Reid Miles (1927-1993), a rangy Chicagoan out of California. Cantankerously single-minded, Miles was all but unemployable until he met Blue Note's Alfred Lion. In Lion he found an indulgent patron happy to keep his hands off the work.
He also found a very specific market: jazz enthusiasts were keen to demonstrate their progressive modernism at any cost. Adventurous design effects which would not have got past a first-stage review in a mainstream record company were a positive benefit to a constituency which enthusiastically defined itself as outside the box. The other thing Reid Miles found at Blue Note was the house photographer, Francis Wolff.
Reid Miles and Francis Wolff were the Lennon and McCartney of sleeve art: perfectly complementary spirits who achieved more together than apart. Wolff's photography tended towards a grainy reportage, black and white in the early days, which aimed to capture the musician's personality. These photographs Miles would crop audaciously, bleed all over the page, consign to the margins, duplicate or tint. Thus made dramatically graphic, Miles would then moderate the effect with austere and clever modern typography: sometimes severe like a Swiss bank, other times whimsical and quirky. The limited available colour palette only enhanced the overall effect.
For myself, I can't even imagine a better bit of graphic design than Blue Note 4003 Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. A strikingly moody photographic portrait is brilliantly sauced by clean sanserif type with the words broken up so as to make a pattern in their own right.
The 1950s was a great period for American typography, and Reid Miles exploited the moment to the full: he revelled in the freedom of working outside buttoned-down commerce, but it is strange that while Blue Note's management culture was idiosyncratically averse to the corporate ethic, looking back you can see that the company style has a lot in common with the best US commercial graphics of the day, the sort of work Paul Rand was doing at IBM and Herbert Bayer at the Container Corporation of America. The sort of work which defines American Modern. People sneer about the Bauhaus, but here was its influence, pure and simple.
Blue Note was cool to the enth degree. Cool is a period label, all but discredited today. Still, you don't have to be a jazznik to find Blue Note's roll-call of names hauntingly emotive. Just to recite Ornette Colman, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins and Herbie Hancock is to open up a world of images and values whose longitude and latitude - hip, optimistic, bohemian, cool, Gitanes and polo necks - are defined by Miles's brilliant graphics. Never mind the music; Paul Smith and Agnes b. are fans.
I suspect that an element in Miles's prodigious creativity was simply boredom: working with hot metal print, using home-made photography, they explored everything on quiet days in the studio. The range certainly has its peaks and its troughs. Sometimes he tired of photographs and when he did the results were spectacular: who is to say whether Anthony Williams's Spring anticipates or reflects the colour field paintings of Ellsworth Kelly? It probably doesn't matter: it's superb sleeve art whatever the chronology. Sometimes it was pure typography, and Miles did things which would be daring today: oversize letterforms hit you right between the eyes. In 1958 a young commercial artist called Andy Warhol worked for him.
Between 1956 and 1966 Reid Miles designed more than 500 Blue Note sleeves, but his tenure could not be sustained after Lion sold the small business to big business. He began a new career as an art director at Es- quire, but soon found the constraints irksome. A friend told him: "Reid, maybe you belong in your own business." So he became one of the first people to work with the new Japanese 35mm single lens reflex cameras. He made a good living, but the only business Reid Miles ever really belonged in was Blue Note Records.
Stephen Bayley is an author and founder of the Design Museum