From the buoyant gospel of ‘Better Git It In Your Soul’ and the mournful grace of ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ to the caustic protest song ‘Fables of Faubus’, on Mingus Ah Um the double bassist and redoubtable bandleader Charles Mingus produced one of his most diverse and accessible albums.
Mingus Ah Um was recorded over two sessions on 5 and 12 May 1959, as Mingus carved out his first album for Columbia Records. The site was the celebrated Columbia 30th Street Studio in New York, where Miles Davis had just wrapped work on Kind of Blue, and which served as home base for so many of the greats of the jazz and blues, from Davis, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk to Billie Holiday and Mahalia Jackson.
Mingus gathered some of the members of his jazz workshop, a rotating group of familiar faces which on this occasion included John Handy on alto saxophone, Booker Ervin and Shafi Hadi on tenor, Horace Parlan on the piano, Dannie Richmond on drums, and Willie Dennis and Jimmy Knepper sharing trombone duties.
Mingus Ah Um was released to critical acclaim on 14 September 1959, and has been referred to in The Penguin Guide to Jazz as ‘an extended tribute to ancestors’. Mingus pays homage to Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and the recently departed Lester Young, while ‘Fables of Faubus’ drew inspiration from the Little Rock Nine, with excised lyrics directed against the segregationist governor of Arkansas.
The iconic cover art for Mingus Ah Um was designed by S. Neil Fujita. Born in Waimea, Hawaii to Japanese parents, the young Sadamitsu Fujita adopted the name Neil while attending boarding school in Honolulu. He progressed to the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, but his studies were cut short in 1942, when in the aftermath to the attack on Pearl Harbor he was forced to relocate to an internment camp in Wyoming. The following year he enlisted with the 442nd Infantry Regiment, made up of Japanese-American volunteers, which by the end of World War II had become the most decorated unit in American military history.
Fujita completed his studies after the war, and joined the Philadelphia advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son, where his experimental designs soon brought him to the attention of Columbia Records. Fujita was hired by Columbia in 1954. Previous design work at the label invariably passed through the hands of Alex Steinweiss, the pioneering figure in album cover art, who had become the first Art Director at Columbia back when he was appointed to the position in 1938.
As Steinweiss branched out and began to work for other companies, Fujita was tasked with building on what he had created. Heading a team of designers at Columbia Records, Fujita strove to compete with some of the innovative cover art then coming out of the leading jazz label Blue Note.
Many of his best-known album covers suggest the commonalities between modern jazz and modern art. With a background in painting, Fujita stretched beyond the illustrative style previously adhered to by Steinweiss, introducing popular music to abstract expressionism. The geometric shapes and blocks of mixed colour in his own pieces share less with the all-action canvases of Jackson Pollock, instead calling to mind Arshile Gorky and the Bauhaus-era style of Wassily Kandinsky.
Together with his photo edits, through his designs for Columbia from the middle of the 1950s, S. Neil Fujita managed to encompass all of the outpourings of bebop: from the relaxed tempos of cool jazz and the blues and gospel-inspired flurries of hard bop, to the shifting patterns of the avant-garde and free jazz with its emotional peaks and stunning breakdowns.
In addition to Mingus Ah Um, Fujita painted the covers for Time Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Far Out, Near In by Johnny Eaton, and for Glenn Gould’s 1959 recording of piano sonatas by Berg, Schoenberg, and Krenek. His photo montage for the first studio album by the Jazz Messengers documented Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd, and Doug Watkins amid the swells and lulls of performance. And for ‘Round About Midnight, Fujita edited a photograph taken by the leading photojournalist Marvin Koner, to show Miles Davis bathed in red light, coy but resolute behind sunglasses.
The designer Milton Glaser said of his colleague:
‘He had superb taste and was one of the early art directors in the field who distinguished himself by having a rigorous design objective. It was a kind of synthesis of Bauhaus principles and Japanese sensibility.’
While reminiscing on his time at Columbia, Fujita recalled:
‘When I got to Columbia, there was the beginning of some idea of album cover art but it was still just type and maybe a photo of the artist and some shapes arranged in an interesting way. That was the first concept of album cover art. Actually the first examples of album art that I can remember were on children’s records, because they might have included a painting or something else to illustrate the idea. But I think that I was the first to use painters, photographers and illustrators to do artwork on album covers.’
After a brief sojourn in 1957, in 1960 Fujita departed Columbia Records for good in order to establish his own design practice. By 1963 he had joined the public relations firm Ruder & Finn, where he created the division which would become known as Fujita Design.
He turned his attention towards book jackets, and designed the covers for the short story collection Pigeon Feathers by John Updike, for Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, and for Mario Puzo’s crime epic The Godfather. Fujita later taught at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan.
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Quite interesting, thanks. You could have mentioned Paul Klee as an influence too.