Happy birthday, Mary Lou Williams! A lovely illustrated homage to the great composer, jazz pianist, and trailblazing woman of color.
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Happy birthday, Mary Lou Williams! A lovely illustrated homage to the great composer, jazz pianist, and trailblazing woman of color.
For Billie Holiday’s 100th birthday, William Gottlieb’s gorgeous vintage photographs of jazz legends.
For Langston Hughes’s birthday, his little-known and wonderful children’s book about jazz
Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, born on this day in 1961, on what makes music so magical
For Ella Fitzgerald’s birthday, William Gottlieb’s gorgeous photos of jazz greats
The real question, of course, isn’t whether creativity is combinatorial and based on the assemblage of existing materials — it is. What Ellington did was simply follow the fundamental impetus of the creative spirit to combine and recombine old ideas into new ones. How he did it, however, was a failure of creative integrity. Attribution matters, however high up the genius food chain one may be.
Compiling as a creative act – what Duke Ellington’s unabashed remixing reveals about genius, plagiarism and originality.
Remix genius: Homeland reimagined as vintage jazz album covers by designer Ty Mattson.
Complement with some great actual vintage jazz record sleeves. And, lest we forget, we have Alex Steinweiss to thank for the invention of the album cover.
Happy birthday, legendary jazz composer Dave Brubeck! Celebrate with this wonderful layered-paper portrait by Berlin-based illustrator and graphic designer Katrin Rodegast.
The bio of a jazz musician traditionally goes like this:
- Achieve complete mastery … over a period of about 50 years
- Forget it all and be one with the universe
- Profit
500 years ago, or even 50 years ago, this was a totally reasonable approach. The problem with this formula nowadays is that the world completely flips on its head every one or two years, especially in [creative field]. So we need to revise the schedule:
- Achieve complete mastery
- Lunch
- Be one with the universe and the people on your afternoon call
- Resume complete mastery
In his short and excellent Creative Mornings talk, jazz-musician-turned-iOS-developer Larry Legend considers the evolving requirements of genius. Full video below:
First we learn that Andy Warhol illustrated children’s books, and now that he designed album covers for jazz greats – is there anything the man couldn’t do? Oh, right.
Complement with how Alex Steinweiss invented the album cover.
William Faulkner’s little-known, swanky Jazz Age drawings, with a side of literary derision from his classmates
For Black Music Month, beloved poet Langston Hughes‘s little-known and lovely 1942 children’s book about the history of jazz.
A sociogram of jazz recording sessions in the 1920s.
Happy birthday, Miles Davis! Celebrate with this illustrated portrait by Jorge Arevalo.
Legendary jazz pianist, composer, and arranger Mary Lou Williams, born May 8, 1910 – a remarkable woman in a then-man’s world – in William Gottlieb’s portraits of jazz icons.