A primer on the subject of my project

I’m interested in exploring the aesthetic and political evolution of jazz music through the lens of its album cover art. 

I’m working with the entire collection of album covers from Prestige Records, one of the most popular and wide-ranging jazz labels whose run of recordings from ~1950-70 represent a snapshot of post-war jazz during a transformational period, as it exploded in popularity and expanded into new sounds. The album covers from this era reflect this exploratory spirit while also at times revealing the prejudices of the majority-white record label owners and cover art designers.

Prestige had a remarkable cast of characters designing their album covers, from painter Prophet Jennings to Esmond Edwards (one of the very few Black recording executives of the era) to a then-mostly-unknown artist named Andy Warhol.

My digital project will tell the story of Prestige’s album art and its artists while exploring what the label’s aesthetic decisions tell us about the contemporary understanding of jazz musicians and music in America. The digital format will allow me to simultaneously explore large-scale aesthetic choices (color palettes, typography, subject matter, etc.) and small-scale stories of the (often-invisible) individual artists behind these covers. 

To achieve this, the project will incorporate a range of media — from album art to photographs to the music itself — as well as digital tools like an interactive timeline.

Below, I’ll cover my expected project timeline; the tools I’ll need, the decisions I need to make, and any pain points; and what my final deliverable will be in May.

Timeline

Here’s what I’m envisioning for the week-over-week progress of my project through presenting an MVP (minimum viable product) during our final class session.

What tools I think I’ll need and/or decisions to make / pain points

I’m currently struggling with a few issues relating to selecting tools and other decisions:

• Which platform to use for hosting? I’d like some level of flexibility / customization (including the ability to inject my own code), as well as the option to display different types of media. I at first considered building the project from scratch, but that’s not reasonable (given our timeline) and isn’t really in the spirit of building on top of existing DH tools or in concert with communities of researcher-builders. So, I’m leaning toward using Omeka, Scalar, or Drupal. Would love advice/recommendations if anyone has experience with these platforms.
• Copyright — How concerned should I be about using images of album covers sourced from online archives that don’t contain any statement of copyright or any attribution requirement?

In terms of other tools and data sources:

• To track down album art from the Prestige Records archive, my best options thus far are Birka Jazz (a repository of album covers and metadata gathered by a record store owner) or maybe Spotify (via its API). JazzDisco also has a comprehensive list of Prestige Records’ albums but without the cover art.
• In addition to the content management systems / site hosts mentioned above, I’ll likely use TimelineJS to build the interactive timeline, Tropy to catalogue images and keep track of metadata, and potentially Google Vision API for analyzing images at scale.

What will be my final deliverable (what can I realistically deliver by May)

I’m going to focus on telling a digital story (or multiple stories) built on my own analysis interspersed with reflections/writings from others and non-textual media like artwork/photographs and music. The goal would be to allow readers to move easily from a bird’s-eye view of this period in time (e.g., the timeline showing all 250+ album covers) all the way down to the personal (the lives of specific graphic designers). Something along the lines of a linear digital story (see The Pudding’s recent exploration of romance book covers) or a looser collection of media and words that play off each other (see Newest Americans).

If you made it this far…here are some album covers 🙂

Prophet Jennings’ cover for “Out There” (1961)

Andy Warhol’s cover for “Trombone By Three” (1956)

Linked Jazz — a network visualization of jazz defined by the relationships between musicians. Here is the project documentation.