Blue Note Records ― co-founded in 1939 by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff ― celebrates seventy-five years dedicated to recording the greatest musicians in jazz history.

One hundred of the musicians who defined the premier jazz label are celebrated in photographs by Wolff. These photographs, taken from 1948–1969, catch the stars in action: performing onstage, in recording sessions, or cutting stylish silhouettes around town. The powerful images were used to illustrate the label’s iconic album covers, and this curated selection features jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Dexter Gordon, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, and many more.

Lion and Wolff shared a lifelong passion for music and an unwavering commitment to record quality albums by innovative musicians, even in the face of economic crises and changing musical trends. They witnessed the greatest jazz acts of all time and Wolff’s photographs bring to life their most intimate and exciting performances. Each photograph is identified by subject, session or album being cut, and date; and the featured artists are indexed for easy reference.

This volume ― enriched with one hundred intimate and candid photographs ― recounts the label’s dazzling saga.

Bands and Blues. The ultimate evocative jazz trip through time

In 1960, photographer William Claxton and noted musicologist Joachim Berendt traveled the United States hot on the trail of jazz. Through music halls and marching bands, side streets and subways, they sought to document this living, breathing, beating musical phenomenon that enraptured America across social, economic, and racial lines.

The result of Claxton and Berendt’s collaboration was Jazzlife, much sought after by collectors and now revived in this fresh TASCHEN volume. From coast to coast, from unknown street performers to legends of the genre, this defining jazz journey explores just what made up this most original of American art forms. In New Orleans and New York, in St. Louis, Biloxi, Jackson, and beyond, Claxton’s rapturous yet tender images and accompanying texts examine jazz’s regional diversity as much as its pervasive vitality and soul. They show the music makers and the many spaces and people this music touched, from funeral parades to concert stages, from an elderly trumpet player to kids who hung from windows to catch a glimpse of a passing band.

With images of Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters, Gabor Szabo, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and many more, this is as much a compelling slice of history as it is a loving personal tribute.

Vinyl mania. The greatest in Jazz LP art

Part design history, part trip down musical memory lane, this anthology of Jazz album artwork is above all a treasure trove of creative and cultural inspiration. Spanning half a century, it assembles the most daring and dynamic Jazz cover designs that helped make and shape not only a musical genre but also a particular way of experiencing life.

From the 1940s through to the decline of LP production in the early 1990s, each chosen cover design is distinct in the way it compliments the energy of the album's music with its own visual rhythms of frame, line, text, and form. To satisfy even the most demanding of music geeks, each record is accompanied by a fact sheet listing performer and album name, art director, photographer, illustrator, year, label, and more.

About the series:

Bibliotheca Universalis — Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!

Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together more than 100 of our all-time favourite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.

Bookworm’s delight — never bore, always excite!

Over 300 of the most sought-after examples of poster art created between the wars are included in this definitive volume.

This cavalcade of international poster design is organized by subject: aviation, communication, fashion and many more. Featuring rare and even unique examples by masters of the art form, including Nizzoli, Cassandre and Beall, each poster – carefully re-photographed – is accompanied by an extended caption that addresses the aesthetic, social, economic, and/or political context of the image.

Posters were by their very nature ephemeral: on a billboard or tacked to a newsstand, they lasted only a few weeks until advertisers issued another argument for a soap or an ocean voyage. While few contemporary observers understood the richness of their design or appreciated the ingenuity of their unsung creators, they are now highly prized by collectors.

Introduced by Art Deco specialist Alastair Duncan, The Art Deco Poster is an essential book for all interested in graphic design, Art Deco, and life and culture in the Jazz Age.

About the Authors:

William W. Crouse is the author of Grand Prix Automobile de Monaco Posters: The Art, The Artists and the Competition 1929-2009.
Alastair Duncan is the author of many books on the Art Deco period, including Art Deco Complete, American Art Deco, Art Deco and Art Deco Furniture, Art Deco Furniture: The French Designers

Swinging Gotham. Big City, big bands: New York’s jazz scene of the 1920s

It’s the Roaring Twenties, and New York is exploding with jazz fever. Crowds flock to the nightclubs and dance halls in Harlem to see the likes of Louis Armstrong with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra playing at the Kentucky Club, or Duke Ellington at the Roseland Ballroom or the world-famous Cotton Club. Designed, illustrated, and edited by Robert Nippoldt, this award-winning book pays homage to this exceptional era, via an entertaining blend of illustrations, facts, and amusing anecdotes presenting 24 leading lights of New York’s jazz scene in the 1920s, complete with a CD containing some of their best tunes. The texts, contributed by Hans-Jürgen Schaal, give a vivid account of the club scene and the “band battles,” as well as the legendary recording sessions. A splendid read, a groovy CD — and not strictly for jazz fans only!

The illustrator:

Robert Nippoldt is a German graphic designer, illustrator, and book artist. He is best known for his award-winning books Gangster, Jazz and Hollywood about America in the 1920s and 1930s. His studio is located at the very hip old depot of Muenster.

The author:

Hans-Jürgen Schaal, born in 1958, studied German philology, sociology, and dramatics. He works as a freelance music journalist for various magazines and has published numerous books about jazz.

Awards for the original German edition:

 - European Design Award, 2008, Stockholm
 - Institute for Book Arts: "The Most Beautiful Book of Germany" 2008, Frankfurt
 - Illustrative: "One of the Most Beautiful Books of Europe" 2007, Berlin

Vinyl mania. Jazz LP covers from the 1940s to 1990s

This volume features a broad selection of jazz record covers, from the 1940s through the decline of LP production in the early 1990s. Each cover is accompanied by a fact sheet listing performer and album name, art director, photographer, illustrator, year, label, and more.

Special features for jazz lovers include a top-10 favorite records list by leading jazz DJs such as King Britt, Michael McFadden, Gilles Peterson, Andre Torres, and Rainer Trüby, as well as interviews with legendary jazz personalities Rudy Van Gelder (sound engineer who recorded for many labels such as Blue Note, Impulse!, and Prestige), Creed Taylor (founder of many labels and one of the best jazz producers ever, credited also for bringing bossa nova to the US and fusing it with jazz), Michael Cuscuna (Blue Note jazz producer and catalog researcher, responsible for its most successful re-editions), Bob Ciano (designer at the CTI Label, founded in the 70s by Creed Taylor, and one of the greatest cover designers ever), Fred Cohen, (the owner of New York’s Jazz Record Center store with an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz music), and Ashley Kahn (writer, critic, and journalist for jazz whose books include A Love Supreme, Kind of Blue, and The House That Trane Built).

This new edition features 2 volumes in a slipcase.

The author:
Joaquim Paulo is a consultant for major labels and directs a number of radio stations in Portugal. He started collecting vinyl at 15, and flies to London, Paris, New York and São Paulo to enrich his collection of over 25,000 LPs. He lives and works in Lisbon and dedicates his free time to recovering old and rare recordings.

In 1960, photographer William Claxton and noted German musicologist Joachim Berendt traveled the United States hot on the trail of jazz music. The result of their collaboration was an amazing collection of photographs and recordings of legendary artists as well as unknown street musicians.

The book Jazzlife, the original fruit of their labors, has become a collector’s item that is highly treasured among jazz and photography fans. In 2003, TASCHEN began reassembling this important collection of material— along with many never-before-seen color images from those trips. They are brought together in this updated volume, which includes a foreword by William Claxton tracing his travels with Berendt and his love affair with jazz music in general. Jazz fans will be delighted to be able to take a jazz-trip through time, seeing the music as Claxton and Berendt originally experienced it.

Featuring photographs of Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters, Gabor Szabo, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and many more.

The history of jazz, which began at the start of the 20th century, is the story of artists who developed their music especially in big cities like New Orleans, Chicago or New York. The roads of jazz are marked by great names and they present different styles; they do not end in America but reach every continent.

6 CDs present the music of different jazz styles, from classic New Orleans jazz, swing and bebop up to cool and West Coast jazz. The recordings of creative innovators or of jazz musicians who were typical at a certain time demonstrate the development of the music.

"Jazz Icons" presents eight of the most successful jazz artists who have characterised the musical genre so decisively: Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and John Coltrane. The author guides us through the musicians’ lives with eight enjoyable portraits and illuminates the complex interactions within the jazz scene.

An impressive array of photographs and eight CDs featuring a representative cross section of the artists portrayed complete the musical experience of Jazz Icons.

This lavish volume invites the reader into the glamorous fashions of the 1920s.

Virginia, a renowned antique clothing shop in London, has been a go-to for fashion designers, models, stylists, and fashionistas for years. With its carefully curated selection of perfectly preserved heirloom dresses, coats, lingerie, and accessories, Virginia’s rare clothing is collected by designers for inspiration and by serious clothing collectors (both museum curators as well as celebrities).

This stunning volume highlights the best of the collection, scaling the heights of Jazz Age fashion with chapters on sequined dresses, cocktail wear, bridge coats, opera coats, evening jackets, and house coats. Through sumptuous still-life photographs of the clothes and opulent film-set interiors, Dressed to Kill invites readers into a magical world.

The rare and precious beaded dresses, feathered capes, and silky kimonos are beautifully documented, highlighting the craftsmanship and ornamentation of the pieces. Historical information is accompanied by guidelines for the care of antique clothing.

With essays by leading fashion authorities, this is a must-have book for collectors, connoisseurs, and those who believe in evening style.

About the Author:

Virginia Bates was an actress before opening her eponymous shop in 1972. She writes a regular blog for Vogue.com UK. Daisy Bates is an actress and Virginia’s daughter. Suzy Menkes is fashion editor for the International Herald Tribune. Stephen Jones is a haute couture milliner. Daphne Guinness is a fashion writer, muse, and collector of haute couture. Naomi Campbell is a model and collector of haute couture. Malcolm Venville is a photographer and director.

In 1957, Eugene Smith, a thirty-eight-year-old magazine photographer, walked out of his comfortable settled world - his longtime well-paying job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four children in Croton-on-Hudson, New York - to move into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue (between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets) in New York City’s wholesale flower district. Smith was trying to complete the most ambitious project of his life, a massive photo-essay on the city of Pittsburgh.

821 Sixth Avenue was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz - Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them - and countless fascinating, underground characters. As his ambitions broke down for his quixotic Pittsburgh opus, Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists. He turned his documentary impulses away from Pittsburgh and toward his offbeat new surroundings.

From 1957 to 1965, Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at his loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career, photographing the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians, among them Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Paul Bley. He recorded, as well, legends such as pianists Eddie Costa, and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart.

Also dropping in on the nighttime scene were the likes of Doris Duke, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Salvador Dalí, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, photography students, local cops, building inspectors, marijuana dealers, and others.

Sam Stephenson discovered Smith’s jazz loft photographs and tapes eleven years ago and has spent the last seven years cataloging, archiving, selecting, and editing Smith’s materials for this book, as well as writing its introduction and the text interwoven throughout.

W. Eugene Smith’s Jazz Loft Project has been legendary in the worlds of art, photography, and music for more than forty years, but until the publication of The Jazz Loft Project, no one had seen Smith’s extraordinary photographs or read any of the firsthand accounts of those who were there and lived to tell the tale(s) . . .

The great improvisational American jazz musicians of the mid-20th century inspired a generation of photographers to develop a looser, moodier style of visual expression.

Covering six decades of performers -- from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to John Coltrane and Miles Davis -- this unique collection is as much a comprehensive catalogue of jazz greats as it is a salute to the photographers who captured them. The images here provide a simultaneous look at jazz, photography, and America from 1935 into the 1990s with images of jazz legends such as:

Charlie Parker
Sonny Rollins
Dizzy Gillespie
Ella Fitzgerald
Louis Armstrong
Jon Faddis
Miles Davis
John Coltrane
Wallace Roney
Charles Mingus
And more!

About the Author:

Lee Tanner, a leading authority on jazz photography, has selected works -- by such noted jazz photographers as Herman Leonard, Bob Willoughby, Milt Hinton, and Bill Claxton--that are iconic, candid, explosive, and intimate.

In 2004, Tanner received the Lona Foote-Bob Parent Award for Excellence in Photography from the Jazz Journalists Association. In 2010, he was presented with the prestigious Lucie Award for Achievement in Documentary. The Lucie Awards are given annually to honor the work of master photographers. His curation makes this one-of-a-kind coffee table book of jazz photography a must-have addition to any jazz aficionado's library and the perfect gift for any fan.

This is the ultimate guide to two musical styles that have fundamentally influenced popular music. Divided into eras from the Early Years, then decade by decade to the Contemporary Era, learn about the development of this music from its 19th-century African-American roots up to the present day. Each decade has a Sounds &Sources discussion before introducing the Key Artists of the time and A–Zs of lesser artists. A section on Styles is also included, which covers jazz styles from Ragtime to Bebop and blues styles from Texas Blues to Rhythm &BLues. A section on instruments, a glossary and evocative photographs complete the comprehensive experience. Whether a fan of Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday or Ray Charles this is the book

109 black & white plates

Originally published in 1959, Jazz has become one of the most collectible photography books from the mid-twentieth century. Like William Claxton’s Jazzlife and Dennis Stock’s Jazz Street, Van Der Elsken’s entry in the niche of jazz photography was published just prior to the moment when rock’n’roll cemented its place as the popular music of choice for young people. This book is perhaps the most successful of numerous attempts to capture photographically the essence of jazz because it is more than just a succession of musicians’ portraits, or even a documentary record of performance, but a book that visually echoes the music itself. Other photographers, perhaps closer to the jazz community, have made books on the subject, but Van Der Elsken’s is the work of an authentic jazz fan and a maker of authentic photobooks.

John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman – some of the names that brought jazz out of the age of bebop and into the present.

As the medium matured in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, an intense flowering of new styles spawned almost as many forms as musicians – free jazz, West Coast cool, hard bop, modal jazz, fusion.

All these strains come together here to demonstrate that, with all the variety, one constant remains: jazz, the living art form, is alive and thriving.

Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white