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Ornette Coleman Double Quartet – Free Jazz album art

Contributed by Rob Hudson on Jun 12th, 2015. Artwork published in .
Ornette Coleman Double Quartet – Free Jazz album art 1
Source: fanart.tv License: All Rights Reserved.

1961 album that gave the subgenre that would come to be known as ‘Free Jazz’ its name. Typical of the controversial reception, Down Beat magazine published a special double review, with one critic awarded the album Five Stars, and the other Zero Stars.

The original gatefold cover incorporated a cutout that revealed a detail of Jackson Pollock’s 1954 painting The White Light.

The inside of the gatefold cover, with the cutout at the left revealing a portion of the Pollock painting on the front cover.
Source: londonjazzcollector.files.wordpress.com License: All Rights Reserved.

The inside of the gatefold cover, with the cutout at the left revealing a portion of the Pollock painting on the front cover.

Back cover.
Source: www.kompaktkiste.de License: All Rights Reserved.

Back cover.

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  • Akzidenz-Grotesk

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5 Comments on “Ornette Coleman Double Quartet – Free Jazz album art”

  1. The name of the designer, Loring Eutemy, is shown on the left side of the gatefold spread in your second slide.
  2. I always thought that this album design has been so clearly hommaged by Pharoah Sanders’ final release, the stunning collaboration with Floating Points, Promises. Not only is the general typographic, color and visual design a nod to this legendary album, it’s also a cut out cover that gives view to a work of modern art. And it makes sense, it being the last album of one of the (at the time of the release) last living Free Jazz legends.

  3. Yes, that’s striking. Thanks for the pointer, Miro. The design for Promises is by Paul Diddy (with cover art by Julie Mehretu). He worked with Helvetica instead of Akzidenz-Grotesk.

    By the way, I spotted your Saint Omer poster in the Big Screen exhibition recently – congrats!

  4. Oh yes, I meant to mention the type choice, but I had already pressed “submit comment” at the moment I realized that haha.

    And thank you for the kind words :) I did actually have another bigger scale poster there too, “One of These Days” in the festival section of the exhibition. I feel very grateful for having been part of this, I felt out of place among so many legends.

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