FROM:  The New York Times ~
By Steven Heller

Burt Goldblatt, a prolific designer of moody jazz LP album covers for
artists like Herbie Mann, Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae and Charles Mingus,
died on Aug. 30 in Boston. He was 82.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his wife, Katherine Holzman
Goldblatt.

In the early 1950's, after the introduction of the LP, the most progressive
American cover designs were created for jazz albums, and Mr. Goldblatt was
among the pioneers in establishing the cool-jazz style. It encompassed
black-and-white portraits and studio photographs, inspired by film noir, as
well as gritty street scenes, often abstractly overlaid with flat colors,
evoking a sense of urban night life. Expressionistic line drawings of
performers in action were also in vogue.

One of Mr. Goldblatt's earliest covers, from 1950, was a bootleg album by
Holiday for the Jolly Roger label. Like his contemporaries Bob Jones, Reid
Miles and David Stone Martin, he alternated between using photography and
drawings, always focusing on emblematic details of the trade. A series of
distinctive covers shows close-ups of musicians blowing their instruments.
He also mastered a wide range of methods, including collage, montage and
even X-rays.

Mr. Goldblatt's early covers strove for visual simplicity. He eliminated
long lists of song titles, one of the medium's more obtrusive conventions.
When he failed to get the desired result from a photograph, he made drawings
of musicians using a scruffy serpentine line style, which was shared by
other record cover illustrators at the time.

While variations in weight from thick to thin marked the drawings as
distinctively his, "it is his original use of unusual perspectives that
distinguishes Mr. Goldblatt's line drawings from others of the same period,"
said Angelynn Grant, a design historian who specializes in record albums.

Burt Goldblatt was born in 1924 in Dorchester, Mass. He served in the Army
in the Pacific during World War II, then studied at the Massachusetts
College of Art. After graduation he worked in a printing plant, where he
learned the craft, from stripping negatives to plate-making. He taught
himself photography.
After freelancing as a commercial artist in Boston, he moved to New York.

From 1953 to 1955 he worked for CBS Television, designing promotions and
credit crawls for Red Skelton, Edward R. Murrow and Jack Benny as well as
for the hit shows "Rawhide" and "Bachelor Father." He also began
specializing in album-cover design and created about 200 covers in 1955
alone.

Although he worked for Decca and Atlantic, Mr. Goldblatt designed most
prodigiously for small labels, including Savoy, Jolly Roger and Bethlehem.
He became known for abstracted caricatures and distorted portraits, but his
photographic cover designs for Bethlehem helped define the genre by
combining evocative photos with restrained yet lyrical typography.

Mr. Goldblatt was a denizen of recording studios and nightclubs, where he
shot untold numbers of images, some of which he later used for cover
designs.

"He was accepted by the musicians and, in fact, was friends with many," Ms.
Grant said. The pianist Bud Powell named a tune for Mr. Goldblatt, and Chris
Connor scatted lyrics in his honor.

Mr. Goldblatt continued designing covers, including some for gospel and pop
albums, into the 1960's, when changes in style brought about by rock 'n'
roll ended that part of his career. He moved on to become a co-author of 17
books, as diverse as "Mobs and the Mafia," "Starring Fred Astaire" and
"Baseball's Best." He also compiled books of his jazz photography.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughters Heather Blake of
Pennsylvania and Leslie DeNunzio of New York City; two grandsons; and his
sisters, Selma Cohen of Florida and Barbara Trieber of Boston.

LP Covers:
http://shaded-dog.de/IMAGES/covers600/1106694.jpg

http://www.etapes.com/magazine/e116/1161.jpg

Photos by Burt Goldblatt:
http://www.jazztimes.com/columns_and_features/web_exclusive/sonny_rol...
(Sonny Rollins)

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/pic200/drp300/p346/p34653werll.jpg
(Sonny Stitt)

http://www.nejazz.org/HallofFame/Images/Burns(591x600).jpg
(Ralph Burns)

http://i.biblio.com/b/673m/38125673-0-m.jpg
("Starring Fred Astaire")

He was great.  So many of those jazz photos that people love
are Burt Goldblatt's.

Here's an interview he did:  There's a lot more information.

http://angelynngrant.com/writing/GoldenAge.html

The following interview took place in July 1998, at his
comfortable home and studio, filled with art and books and
sunlight.

AG: Did your parents encourage your interest in art?

BG: My father encouraged me to draw because he used to draw
a little himself. He didn't have the money to give me
drawing paper or the wherewithal, nor did he know what would
be good for me. He worked in the construction business and
they were tearing down a school, so he went in and he took
the whole slate from one of the schoolrooms and brought it
home for me, this thing must have weighed about a thousand
pounds, just so I'd have something to draw on. I wanted to
draw. I would draw on everything and anything. I had no
training. They used to pack fruit in wooden crates; I used
to draw on the crates. I became very friendly with a Chinese
laundry man on Blue Hill Avenue, a sweetheart of a guy, who
used to paint watercolors himself. He never showed me
anything, but he knew I was needy and he would take out a
stack of shirt cardboards, one side was very white, the
other side was brown or cardboard, and he would give them to
me. He never asked for anything. And then there was
Garfinkel's furniture store across the street, and they had
these huge corrugated packing cases. And I was dragging
these home just to have something to draw on.

When I was in the army in WW2, I used to decorate the
envelopes for the other men. The officers censored the mail
and here they had some voluptuous woman on the front of the
envelope. I found it was an easy way to make some money
because the guys liked what I was drawing and paid 15 cents
or a quarter. But the officers more than anybody else wanted
me to do this because it would titillate them.

AG: How did jazz enter into your world? Was it the radio?

BG: No. I loved to Lindy, I loved to dance. And we used to
go to the Raymor-Playmor, near Symphony Hall. I could be
there the whole night. I loved to dance.

I wanted to meet musicians, not as just entertainers, but as
people. I got very jealous when I used to go backstage at
Symphony Hall when they let me in occasionally, and I'd see
these people and they were going in and out of the dressing
rooms. And I said, "I want to do that." All the camaraderie.
I loved the way Coleman Hawkins played, I loved the way Pete
Brown played, Johnny Hodges, whoever. But I wanted to get
access. I started to do caricatures of the musicians during
the concerts and I would take them backstage. I did one of
Big Sid Catlett, who I consider the finest drummer of all.
He wrote on it, "To a fine artist. Big Sid Catlett." Another
time, he gave me a set of his brushes, and I made a mobile
out of them.

AG: I read a story how you got to hear Lester Young while
you were based in Alabama . Did you get to hear much music
while you were in the army?

BG: Yes. I would go to the PX and as soon as I would put my
foot over the threshold, I would hear this tune called "The
Birmingham Special" by Erskine Butterfield, a pianist. Very
catchy. As you would come into the compound, these black
kids would try to sell you sweet potato pies. Walking into
the PX, you would see an old fashioned jukebox with all the
colored lights whirling around. As you looked out of the
window, you saw these little black kids staring up at this
jukebox. And you'd finally figure out that this was the most
beautiful thing they ever saw in their life. This camp, like
all the other basic training bases, was segregated. There
was a black section and a white section. The blacks did not
go into white areas, they didn't go to white PX or anything
else. I heard there was good jazz in the black section.
Nobody ever bothered me, I was very lucky, I heard Prez,
playing with a small rhythm section and he sounded good, he
really sounded good. And I wish I had been able to devote
more time there, but we were going on a 25 mile march the
following day and I couldn't stay very long.

AG: When you got out of the army, you went to Massachusetts
College of Art on the GI bill. What were you going to study?
Painting? Were you aware of commercial art?

BG: No, I wasn't aware of anything. I knew I wanted to draw
and I wanted to paint. But I didn't know what direction I
wanted to go in. Long-playing records were just starting to
come out at that time, and, the covers were very crude. I
remember I was very impressed with Alex Steinweiss, not
about the content of what was on the cover, that didn't
impress me. He did photograms, where you lay objects on
photo paper and you develop it.

AG: So this was when you were at Mass College of Art, you
were starting to notice somebody's name on these covers.

BG: Right, but I think it has finally seeped into my brain
that, in a way, Mass Art was helpful to me because of their
inability to teach me anything, they didn't teach me the
mechanics of how you prepare a piece of art for
reproduction. They didn't teach me how to hand letter
something, or how to "spec" type, or how to do any of the
nuts and bolts. And because of that inability of them to do
it, when I was suddenly pressed out with a degree, what the
hell was I going to do? A friend helped get me this job at
the printing press. I knew nothing about printing. That's
where I learned the nuts and bolts. I trained to do
stripping, where you take pieces of film which are going to
be used in different layers and they have to be cut very
precisely with razor blades. And that's how I learned to
cut. And that's where I learned how to coat plates to put
them on a press.

AG: While you were at Mass Art, you started making sketches
of album cover designs?

BG: Yes. You had to prepare a portfolio. What is everyone
else doing? They were doing cigarette ads, they're doing
renderings of ice-cold drops running down the side of a
bottle of Coca-Cola. That was not my shtick. I did just
album covers.

AG: Did they have hints of your later style?

BG: Yes, one thing that I did learn at the printing plant,
when they photographed something for position on a job, they
would take a photograph and before they screened it, they
would shoot it as line. Then, you would cut it in, and when
you finally got the half-tone and you would cut out the line
and eliminate it. But I liked the line, you see. So that
gave me ideas, like I could take things like this and
utilize them in some way. And it went on from there.

I had a friend, Stanley Schwartz, who was a nut-case, he
loved jazz. He used to take care of all the jazz musicians,
he was a dentist in Boston. Took care of Duke Ellington's
teeth, took care of all the musicians' teeth. While he was
working on them, he was playing jazz. We used to fool around
with his x-ray machine. That's where I got my idea about
x-raying musical instruments. We were quite stupid to even
mess around with x-rays without taking the proper care about
wearing the lead apron. But, when I wanted to do things like
that, I would take it over to an industrial x-ray lab and
let them make the x-ray. It helped because later one of the
major advertising agencies in New York liked the fact that I
had won a few medals with the New York Art Directors show
and they told me that they wanted me to design something for
an IBM typewriter. I took the IBM typewriter, this was a
handmade version of it, and I had them x-ray it. Seeing one
key laying on top of another key, you know, you get all
kinds of things are going on, crazy things. But, the main
thing is that you were looking at it freshly, you weren't
looking at it the way anybody else looked at it, you were
looking at it your own way. And, it was exciting to do this.

In adversity you learn some hard lessons. When I started to
do covers, a lot of these people had no budget for
photographs, they had no budget for illustrations, which
meant that I had to do everything. And I was glad I had to
do everything, because it was all mine. I didn't have to
call up some photographer and tell him, "I want you to shoot
a picture from this angle and light it that way." I did it
myself.

I noticed that when I pulled two pieces of glued
illustration board apart, that there was a beautiful pattern
of the cement that was left there. I would photostat that
pattern, and I would end up shoving it in a file and I would
say, "I'm going to use that one of these days" and I did.
These were the things that I was forced to utilize in order
to express things the way I wanted to express them.

Before I got to New York, I picked up the Boston Globe one
day, and lo and behold, there was an ad: Columbia Records
wanted someone to design covers for them. They were still
located in Bridgeport. And I took my portfolio of all the
dummies that I had done. It impressed the art director.
(this was around '51) and he like me enough so I did a John
Kirby cover. I don't know who the art director was them,
strangely I don't remember the name. I never approached him
to do more work because, by that time, I had made enough
contacts with the musicians. Like, I knew Stan Getz and Stan
was recording for Roost Records at the time, so he would
say, "Burt, why don't you do some covers." Or, Savoy
Records. As a matter of fact, 142 West 46th street was where
I was living, where I had my studio, and on the 2nd floor
was Jolly Roger Records. Jolly Roger was a ...

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