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 bootleg record
operation; they would find clean copies of 78s, record them,
assemble them as an album. They would ask me to do the
covers. That's how I cut my teeth, learning, They had no
budget. You were forced to use one color or two colors, or
whatever.

AG: But the constraints gave you more freedom?

BG: Yes, right. You do a number on yourself up here [taps
head], so you say, "Well look, I don't have a million dollar
budget, how am I going to do this thing?" And I sat down and
I would do it.

AG: What made you leave Boston and go work in New York?

BG: I worked for a while with some little advertising agency
and I said, "I'm going nowhere if I want to go into the
music business," although I did some very nice things for
Storyville. But I said "New York is where I want to end up."

AG: Once in New York, did you try to get cover design jobs?
Did you have other kinds of design jobs?

BG: I tried to get whatever I could possibly get to do the
work that I wanted to do. I think I did covers for so many
people, that's why I've said I've done over 3000 covers, so
that if you asked me to sit down and say, "I did this and
this and this," I can't.

AG: You say you did covers for Savoy, and that label had
some beautiful covers, but they usually didn't have a design
credit on them.

BG: No, I always signed my Savoy covers. But Savoy did
pitifully bad covers, they did awful covers, because Herman
Lubinsky, the owner had to be the "designer" more or less
and he didn't know beans. He was a horror, that guy. I
always signed my name and he never objected. This wasn't
like doing work for Columbia or one of the major labels
where the ego of the art director was so uptight that they
wouldn't let anybody sign any of the covers. But I always
signed them. I'm always surprised to see covers that I did
that I've completely forgotten about.

AG: This Don Byas 7" cover on Savoy is a perspective drawing
of him. Did you stand on a chair while you drew him because
he's viewed from above.

BG: Well, I was always sketching and always doing those kind
of things.

AG: So, this "Holiday in Sax" 10" EP on Emarcy is also drawn
from a perspective this time looking up. But you didn't have
to get in that position to draw this, did you? You drew from
memory? It wasn't always like the time you had George
Wallington come over your place and lie down so you could
draw him as though from below the keyboard, right?

BG: Right. The reason I had George Walllington lie down that
way was that I tried to rent a piece of glass that would
support someone standing on it and I found out it would cost
me something like $2000 to rent it. I couldn't do that, so I
did the next best thing.

AG: But more often, you drew from memory and imagination.

BG: I drew from in here [taps head].

AG: When you did this cover of Don Byas, you not only have
this great drawing in perspective, but also this interesting
white shape with the yellow background. Now, you chose all
of this, right: the typeface to put "Don Byas" in, these
lines here, all of it?

BG: The whole thing. No one did any of that for me, I did
that.

For Savoy Records, I would work the whole night. I would do
three or four of these in one night, bring them over to
Market Street, he had a store and above it was his office.
And, he'd give me a check right away, and I'd grab a
sandwich and go home and sleep.

AG: Would you show a sketch first?

BG: I always dummied it up. What I used to use were the gels
they used to use to project light in nightclubs. I would
have file drawers filled with those because it was cheap.

AG: Did you get to know Don Byas.

BG: Yes, yes. A wonderful musician, I'm sorry that he ended
up living in Paris and I never really got to spend much time
with him. I was at rehearsals of his. And, he was a fine
musician. It's not one of my better drawings.

AG: Oh, I think it's great. Now, that's a tenor sax and I
read that you kept instruments around so you could render
them with authenticity.

BG: I did. In fact, one of my closest friends was Pete
Brown, the great alto saxophonists. I ended up giving him a
clarinet, I ended up giving him an alto, also. And, to this
day, I kid Cecil Payne who studied with him. I say, "Cecil,
are you still using rubber bands to give a little more snap
to your keys?" And he breaks up when I say this because he
learned that from Pete, to add a rubber band to certain keys
so that the valve closes quicker or opens up. Or he would
safety pins. It gave him a certain sound. Pete was
wonderful.

AG: On "Holiday in Sax," these are such firey colors.

BG: Now you see, this kind of treatment here, that would be
the kind thing that I would find when I would pull apart
those two glued illustrations boards. You get this rough
texture. Somehow it worked.

When I did these things, I stumbled a lot. But a lot of
times, when you stumble, you learn. When you do lettering,
people don't realize that it is not only the weight of the
letter itself, but it's the space in between that is just as
important as the weight of the letter. And a lot of people
don't understand that, but you do have to pay attention to
it. I didn't do an illustration and then put in type as an
afterthought. It has to go with it, otherwise it's not where
I am coming from.

AG: Tell me about this cover on Bethlehem for Johnny
Hartman, "Songs from the Heart."

BG: That was taken right at the session. He was a nice guy.
He died too young.

AG: The juxtaposition of the lines, the soft line of the
script type and the and the hard line of the block type.
Were you exposed to the typography of the Europeans like Jan
Tschichold?

BG: No. I tried to make these things fresh. I didn't want to
get into a bag where everyone who saw a cover of mine would
say, "Oh, that's a Burt Goldblatt cover." I didn't want
that. I wanted a freshness.

AG: Did you take a lot of photos at recording sessions?

BG: Oh, I always did. When I went to these recording
sessions, number one, I liked the music. I got to know the
musicians. I didn't know specifically whether I was going to
use it on the cover or what. No one paid me to go to these
rehearsals or recording sessions. But I enjoyed it and I
felt like I was a part of what was being put together.
Sometimes they would give me a tape or a dub when I got
through and I would take it home. And while I was designing
the thing, I was actually listening to the music. I was not
just a graphic designer trying to outshine anybody or
anything. I wanted to get a feeling for what was taking
place at this recording session. That was very important to
me. It wasn't going to be like what Lee Wiley once asked me
to do. She came up to my studio on 46th street and said,
"You know, Burt, I'm part Indian." And I said, "I know that,
Lee." She said, "How about if we rented an Indian costume
with a headband with a feather and you had me beating on a
drum?" I said, "Well, Lee, I don't think so." Whenever I did
try to keep my distance from the musicians, it was when I
didn't want them to tell me what to do. I would tell them,
"I don't tell you what songs to record or what group you
should have. Why should you tell me what the graphics should
say?"

I loved the music. It was very important to me. It wasn't
background music to me. The way I had clamored to go
backstage to meet the musicians at Symphony Hall when I was
just a kid, I felt like I was part of the music. I felt very
honored when I recently found out that Chris Connor recorded
an album for Atlantic on which she recorded "Everything I've
Got Belongs to You," and she scat sings my name in the song.
She sings, "I've got cartoons by Burt Goldblatt."

AG: You went to recording sessions and rehearsals to
photograph the musicians. Did you photograph at clubs too?

BG: Oh sure. I became friendly with the owners of Birdland.
And there were always a lot of "hoods" standing at the door.
But they let me in, didn't cost me a cent. I would go to
what we called "the bleacher section." You weren't sitting
at a table, you were sitting in a row of seats that were
right on top of the band. And I had my Hasselblad camera,
and I had a couple of telephoto lenses. I could take what I
wanted. I used available light because I didn't want to
bother the musicians. They never knew I took these pictures.
I also have motion pictures that I took of many of the
musicians. I've got motion pictures of John Coltrane. I've
got the only motion pictures of Pete Brown. Unfortunately,
they don't have sound. I've got dozens of musicians that I
photographed: Dizzy Gillespie, Cecil Payne, Art Farmer.
Black and white, with a very good 8 mm camera. I probably
have half a million pictures, negatives and color slides.

AG: Tell me how you photographed Teddy Charles covered by
stripes on the cover of Teddy Charles Tentet on Atlantic.

BG: I took a screen with lines, horizontal lines, close
together, in my enlarger, sat him right underneath my
enlarger, raised it up and turned the light on from it and
then photographed him.

AG: With the white and green type treatment, were you
reflecting the stripes?

BG: No, I wanted to break up the lettering so it didn't jump
out as much.

AG: Did you have any preferences among the typefaces?

BG: If I could, I preferred sans serif faces because in
those days I didn't have the right to go down to the press
to supervise a job on press and say, "lighten up here" or "a
little more red." They just did it. You never knew what the
final result was going to be, until you saw the finished
job. They couldn't mess it up too much if it was sans serif.

AG: Your cover for "Bud Powell Trio Plays" on Roulette is a
memorable cover.

BG: He named one of the tunes on it after me, "Burt Covers
Bud."

AG: Talk about the cover for "Bud Freeman" on Bethlehem,
which won the gold medal from the New York Art Directors
Club. The saxophone makes a perfect mustache.

BG: He was a nice guy. A gentleman.

AG: Why the cars for the Mel Tormé on Bethlehem?

BG: He loved sports cars; he collected them, so I got a
collection of sports cars, cut them out and did a caricature
of him. Because I had done two or three other covers for him
before and none of them were like this.

In this album cover for "K.+J." (Bethlehem), that is Kai and
JJ. They came over to my studio on 46th street. I had a
sheet of background paper. They sat right in front of it. I
had the bell of a mellophone, which was a bigger bell than a
trombone. And I had it propped up on a stand. They sat,
playing their own trombones. Well, it took me awhile to
figure it out how to photograph it because I didn't want to
be in the picture. I got behind the paper background, cut a
hole in it, shoved my camera lens through and took the
picture.

AG: How did you get to know Stan Getz?

BG: I go way back with Stan. I knew Stan for about 40 years.
He and I were very tight. He was an oddball dude. Stan was a
womanizer and he was a ballin' cat.

I'll show you movies that I have of him. He's at a recording
session and he's barefoot, nothing seemed to go right at
this session. He would call me up like three o'clock in the
morning, "Come on down, Burt. I have a gig for Norman
[Granz]." And Norman would let him record anywhere that he
wanted to. So, I go down, and he went through three or four
pianists, three or four trumpet players, three or four bass
players, nothing seemed to coalesce at this session. But I
got something interesting there: I was shooting an 8 mm
movie and he grabbed my movie camera and took movies of me
taking pictures of some of the other musicians.

The musicians felt comfortable with me. But I never pushed
myself in front of them or said, "Would you please stand on
your head?" or "Do this" or nothing. Mingus once said to me,
something I feel very good about: "You know, Burt. I like
you. You come into to a session, you take pictures. I never
even know that you're there." And that was the most
flattering thing that he ever said. I never asked anyone to
pose. The closest to a pose was that K + J thing, and that
was a reflection. But I never asked musicians to pose. I
like the fact that I could go over to Billie Holiday's
house, who lived right beside Central Park West, and say,
"Let me get you away from these people here." And we walked
right down the street, we crossed into Central Park. She sat
down on the grass and I took the pictures. I didn't ask her
to do a thing. Or the time she was in the backyard and my
two year old daughter came over. And she made a grab for her
and put her on her lap. My daughter said, "When I got
through sitting on her lap, I had a little splinter and she
was trying to comfort me because it hurt. And she took me in
the house. She had a collection of ivory elephants on a
wall. And she said, 'Leslie, go over and take any one that
you want.'" She still has that ivory elephant. Billie was
very giving in this way. A few days later I was going to
take Billie out to dinner, and she called me and told me
that she couldn't do it. Why? Her husband, that son of a
bitch, hit her over the head with the telephone receiver.
And I saw her a few days later and her head was all in
bandages.

AG: You knew Duke Ellington quite well?

BG: I tell you what I have that no one has ever seen. I have
a movie of Duke at the recording studio, the Columbia
recording studio on 23rd Street which used to be a church.
The band had cleared out, they were on a break. And Duke was
sitting at the piano rewriting charts. And I took my stills
and then I took out my 8mm movie camera and I started to
shoot. I would never do these things to annoy. If he had
said, "stop," I would have stopped. But he didn't mind. And
you see a piece of Duke that no one has ever seen. You know
what he did? You can read his lips. He says, "Oh! I'm in the
movies." And he picked up an empty cigarette pack from the
piano and he starts juggling. You would fall on the floor it
is so funny.

AG: Do you think, perhaps, that you are too critical of your
own work? That perhaps you are holding back things that
others would consider good?

BG: I'll tell you something, when I do something, I
sometimes feel like Monet going over to the Louvre where he
has a painting hanging, with a little palette and a brush,
and he's correcting it. He actually did that, you know, and
they had to arrest him a couple of times because he was
correcting his own paintings. I'm always doing that. I say
to myself, "Why didn't I do this?" I'm never satisfied.