A bonus for those who want to discuss Jazz: The Tiki Room from MuskegonOnline.NET below: the artist's statement from my Xeric Grant awarded book Jazz: Cool Birth. This does a good job explaining my thought processes working in this new (for me) Modernist style.
Yes, this style is MEANT to look old. 50 years old, as a matter of fact.
Through study of album cover design, television program title artwork, and common illustrations used in everything from health booklets to instruction manuals from the '50s, I have attempted to pull readers into the late night jazz clubs of 1957, feeling the music through the visuals. Ignoring paint and ink magazine illustration, a left over style from previous decades, I concentrated on the combination of flat and painterly used by artists working with T-squares and triangles, tracing paper, ruling pens and brush, preparing work for rotary letterpresses and similar hands-on intensive printing methods.
Alex Steinweiss and Jim Flora, wonderful craftsmen working on album covers for Columbia and RCA Victor respectively, obviously had a great influence on Jazz: Cool Birth. Little known illustrator Lou Peters and Disney designer Tom Oreb deserve a mention, as well as the great Mark Rothko and the rest of the abstract expressionists. But the look of Jazz: Cool Birth comes, mostly, from unknown, uncredited artists working in a beat style in a decade where nearly every printed piece contained some kind of drawn graphic.
Then there's the typography. Hand drawn, or typeset and carefully kerned and arranged by hand, jazz album type fascinated me from an early age. I have managed to find a font, Hairspray Redhead from Christian Schwartz Design, that approximates the famous Steinweiss Scrawl appearing on so many beautiful '50s album covers. My Futura and Bodoni typefaces are passable, but, like typographers predicted with the rise of desktop publishing in the '80s, the typefaces don't have quite the grace and balance of their '50s counterparts.
My tools are modern and digital, but the process of pushing things around on the page remains the same as 1957. What I learned from studying craftsmen of 50 years ago is to never let the tools dictate where something lays on a page. The modern computer typesetter's practice of distorting type rather than adjusting the letter spacing and kerning is lazy, uninformed and unattractive. Typography is a line-by-line art.
The missing link in this book is, of course, the music. But Monk, Miles, Coltrane, Mingus, Rollins and others are there, in the back, listening, taking mental notes on licks and trends. They don't need bodyguards and an entourage to slip into clubs. This is 1957, when few musicians made more than enough for expenses, studio time was a cost prohibitive dream and, like Dean says, "You know musicians, no gravy, no grease."
Gary Scott Beatty, 2008
Editor and Publisher Gary Scott Beatty has been working in printing and publishing for over 35 years, including editing Muskegon's On the Shore magazine and typesetting Muskegon Magazine. In 2008 he won a Xeric Foundation Grant to publish Jazz: Cool Birth, a murder mystery in a 1957 jazz club with illustrations inspired by '50s album cover design. This and his other Aazurn Publishing books can be purchased through Amazon.com. Worldwide, he edits and publishes Indie Comics Magazine, 64 pages of the best story and art from today's independent comic book creators.
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