It’s Time! Album Art

Here’s another homework assignment from my Basic Graphic Arts class. We had to pick an album with horrible artwork and design a new cover. The professor wanted us to design a cover based on how the music made us feel. Then we’d present our ideas and designs to the class and listen to a song from the album.

Naturally, this was a very entertaining project for me! As much fun as it was to work on my own design, it was great to see what albums other people chose, and to listen to a wide range of music. The funniest cover someone chose was the Beach Boys Pet Sounds. It’s a picture of the Beach Boys feeding a bunch of goats. Quite terrible. A classic album of all time, though. Influenced by the Beatles Rubber Soul, only to then influence Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Another album someone did was Paul Simon’s Graceland, which I love. I do like the album art, but I suppose the meaning is a bit obscure. …that makes it sound like I know what it means. I do not know what it means!

I immediately wanted to accomplish two things with this project: redesign a 1960’s Blue Note album, and redesign a Jackie McLean album. This era is also when Jackie really found his own voice, breaking free of imitating Charlie Parker, exploring the avante-garde, and brilliantly applying his cutting tone to lots of wonderful sessions. The album I chose It’s Time was part of my Complete Blue Note Sessions 1964-1966 box set that lived in my CD changer for six months straight in the spring of 1995. Blue Note album covers are practically a genre of their own. There’s even a book of them. This Jackie McLean album is NOT a prime example. It’s basically exclamation marks with a markedly unflattering picture of Jackie:

The assignment had us focus on how the music makes us feel. Having studied with Jackie for four years, I can’t even begin to explain how his music feels, let alone capture it in a 12cm x 12cm piece of art. Instead, I focused on his sound. Jackie’s voice on the alto saxophone is instantly recognizable, perhaps because he plays it like a tenor with fire and passion. There’s a sense of urgency, and a feeling that his horn is about to burst at the seams. I chose to capture this urgency by rendering "It’s Time!" as a saxophone time bomb:

With the second hand only a tick away, it’s definitely time! From what I gather, the actual meaning of this album has to do with the fact that it was recorded just after Jackie had served a six-month sentence for a narcotics offense. So "It’s Time!" meant jail time. In a sense, I felt like the time bomb also symbolizes Jackie’s addiction, which would have cut his life short had he not gotten clean a few years later. In a roundabout way, that hints back to the original concept. I would have loved to ask Jackie himself about this album, among many other things had I realized It’s Time!