Reid Miles: The Designer Who Created The Blue Note Look
By several accounts, Reid Miles and Francis Wolff used to scream at each other. Two men in a small New York office, one the label's co-owner and staff photographer, the other his art director, fighting over where a word should sit and how much of a photograph to throw away. What came out of those arguments was the most composed run of record sleeves ever made, several hundred covers for Blue Note, and one of the most distinctive visual identities of any record company in all of music.
Miles was not really a jazz man. He preferred classical music, worked largely from spoken descriptions of records he mostly never listened to, and was paid a measly fifty dollars a sleeve. And yet, in the space of ten years he gave the label, and jazz more broadly, a design language so iconic, a look so instantly recognisable and cool that 70 years on, his work remains hugely influential.
From Long Beach to Lexington Avenue
Miles was born in Chicago on the fourth of July, 1927. After the 1929 crash his parents split, and his mother took him and his younger sister west to Long Beach, California, where she found work in a canning factory. He joined the Navy out of high school, and after his discharge enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, the school that fed a good deal of mid-century Californian design and animation.
New York came next. In the early 1950s he worked for the painter and designer John Hermansader, spent time at Esquire, and did a stint at Margaret Hockaday's advertising firm. Hermansader mattered most. He was one of the designers, alongside Paul Bacon and Gil Mellé, who had already sketched the outline of a Blue Note house style on the label's 10 inch releases. Miles was his assistant. When Blue Note moved to the 12 inch LP format in the mid 1950s, co-founder Francis Wolff hired Miles in his own right, around 1955 or 1956 depending on which account you trust, and asked him to carry the design across to the larger canvas.
He did more than carry it. He totally rebuilt it.
One of his first jobs was reworking BLP 1509, Milt Jackson with the Thelonious Monk Quintet. He would keep going for roughly a decade. The cover counts vary, from about 350 by careful tallies to close to 500 by looser ones.
Type as rhythm, photography as melody
The constraints were real, and Miles turned every one of them into style. Blue Note was a tiny operation. Lion producing, Wolff shooting the sessions, Rudy Van Gelder engineering at his studio in New Jersey. The print budget stretched to two colours, sometimes three. Miles made a virtue from this necessity, turning scarcity into the look. He set type as if it were sound, swelling a single word to fill half a sleeve or shrinking it into a corner, rotating it, repeating it, letting it run clean off the edge. He mixed cases and typefaces without apology, going from Bodoni to News Gothic and back again, and never settling into one house style. He loved white space and hard asymmetry.
Wolff's photographs did the rest. Shot at the actual dates, in concentration and dramatic light, they gave the covers a documentary weight. Miles would crop them in unusual ways, extremely close or to mere fragments, hands on a guitar or a face pushed to the margin, hunting through a contact sheet for the perfect frame that would leave room for the type. Now and then he did the most confident thing a designer can do and left a photograph alone. That combination, and the friction between two stubborn people making it, is why the covers feel alive rather than merely tasteful. Miles himself reckoned album sleeves gave him a freedom that advertising never did.
There is an interesting footnote to his story. Before he was famous, Andy Warhol illustrated for Blue Note, sometimes turning Miles's rough concepts into finished drawings, most memorably on Johnny Griffin's The Congregation. The two were friendly. The story goes that Warhol once gave Miles one of a handful of handmade art books, and Miles, who cut up magazines on reflex, cut that up too. Not out of spite. It was simply what he did.
The covers that made the look
Miles loved a visual pun and a cover that thought. On Donald Byrd's A New Perspective (1964) he shot the trumpeter himself, standing small and easy in the distance while the bulbous nose and headlight of a Jaguar E-Type looms in the foreground, the low angle making the title land as a joke. For Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch! (1964) a shop window, a "Will Be Back" card and a clock with too many hands creates a sharp visual gag. And on Joe Henderson's In 'n Out (1964), Miles cropped the artist's photograph down to a single dot and used it as the tittle over the letter i.
Sometimes he barely needed a picture. Dexter Gordon's Go! (1962) is dominated by two enormous capital letters with the saxophonist's profile a small square in cool blue, and it does not need to be anything more. Vertical bars, like piano keys, fill Freddie Hubbard's Hub-Tones (1962) with the trumpeter's image and the stacked type not much more than accents. Then there is Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder (1964), probably the most copied Blue Note cover of all, Wolff's shot of Morgan mid-phrase pinned by a slab of blocky horizontal lettering, a template you can still see echoing through album covers today.
On Sonny Clark's Cool Struttin' (1958) Miles cropped a Wolff photo down to a woman's legs mid-stride on a New York pavement. The woman was Ruth Lion, Alfred's wife, and the image became so tied to the label that Blue Note later spun a Christmas sleeve out of it. But the covers were not always brash. Horace Silver's Song for My Father (1965) is quieter. A sepia portrait of Silver's own father with lettering in analogous colour is restraint personified, all in the service of feeling.
He worked this way across the whole catalogue. Herbie Hancock's debut Takin' Off (1962), Art Blakey's A Night in Tunisia (1961) with its riot of colour, Grant Green's hushed Idle Moments (1964), Jackie McLean's raw Let Freedom Ring (1962), and Hank Mobley's No Room for Squares (1963), still cited as one of the best sleeves he ever made. Each different, but each strangly the same, clearly from the same hand and restless intelligence.
The million-dollar second act
Alfred Lion retired in 1967, and Miles's Blue Note run ended with him. He had been drifting toward photography for a while, and by 1971 was back in Los Angeles, where he became one of the most sought after commercial photographers in America.
His speciality was warm, staged Americana, like Norman Rockwell, rebuilt as a photograph and directed like a film, assembled with the same cut and paste instincts he always had. In 1975 he photographed the cover for Bob Dylan and The Band's The Basement Tapes, and shot sleeves for Chicago and Kenny Rogers along the way. He was reportedly paid a million dollars a year for creating Coca-Cola ads. The fifty-dollar man no more.
He kept working out of his Hollywood studio until his death in February 1993. By then his style had changed so completely that few people connected the ad man to those iconic album covers on their shelves. In 1985 he stood on stage at a Blue Note reunion in New York, between Lion and Van Gelder, one of the quiet architects of the label, with a contribution no less important than either of his former colleagues.
The Reid Miles look outlived the label's golden era because it was never really about jazz at all. It was just good design, and in that way it was timeless. It was about doing a great deal with almost nothing, two inks, one photograph, one word of type placed with total confidence. The audacious simplicity, and the beauty of those simple forms, became a permanent part of our visual vocabulary. Nearly every record sleeve that treats type as the hero owes Miles a debt, whether the designer knows the name or not.
And most people do not know his name. Reid Miles remains one of the great unsung, but his impact on how modern music looks today is unrivalled. The man who made a stack of hard bop records feel vital and important, and certainly the coolest objects in any room.
