Arts: It's hip to be square

Blue Note did more than sell modern jazz. It created sleeves that are classics of 20th-century design.

In the whole history of design, form can rarely have followed function to finer and funkier effect than the sleeve art of Blue Note Records. From 1951, when the New York-based jazz label's switch from 78s to 10in albums meant that special covers had to be designed in order to identify their contents, Blue Note's packaging became a high-point of mid-century modernism in the applied arts; the cardboard equivalent of a Charles Eames chair or a Florence Knoll sofa.

For two decades, the company's covers defined the cutting-edge of graphic design. Even Andy Warhol, then an obscure illustrator of ladies footwear, had his Blue Note period, when his drawing of a reclining woman decorated both volumes of Kenny Burrell's Blue Lights in 1958. Although a takeover by Liberty Records in 1965 signalled the end of this great, heroic period of innovation for both the sleeves and the products they contained, the Blue Note trademark retained a distinctive visual style that still continues today under the ownership of EMI.

Yet despite the endurance of the Blue Note name, a new exhibition at London's HMV poignantly documents the world we have lost. Entitled The Cover Art of Blue Note Records, and timed to celebrate the label's 60th anniversary, the exhibition is a testimony to the intense confidence and vigour that both jazz and graphic design shared in the Fifties and Sixties. It is also a moving memorial to the pioneering spirit of Blue Note's late founders, the German Jewish emigres Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, two fans of hot jazz who fled Nazi Germany to end up running the best jazz record company there has ever been.

Inevitably, it's also a tribute to Blue Note's most influential designer, Reid Miles, who joined the label in 1956 and stayed until 1967. Miles's designs, which often used the photographs of Francis Wolff , created a new visual language that suited the modish hard bop and soul jazz of the label's repertoire perfectly.

Though Lion and Wolff's preferences in jazz were almost always for the "hot" rather than the "cool", and generally favoured black artists rather than white, Reid Miles imbued the albums with a space-age Futurist aesthetic that was hipper than anything cool-school specialists such as the West Coast Contemporary label could come up with. By cropping photographs of artists into extreme close-ups, and then positioning them away from the centre of the cover in rectangles bounded by acres of pure graphic space, overlayed with colour and surmounted by bold, minimalist typography, Miles developed an instantly recognisable corporate identity that has since become a design classic.

The graphic language of the designs also contained a powerful social message. At a time when many jazz labels preferred to advertise their wares the Playboy way, with covers of busty models smouldering come-hither looks to the camera, Miles and Blue Note showed black men looking good and wearing the sharpest of threads. The Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts (who worked as a graphic designer by day while playing jazz at night) once told me that he remembered not only admiring Hank Mobley's new album, but coveting the shirt he wore on the cover, too. In a brief essay entitled "No Room For Squares", in the book The Cover Art of Blue Note Records, published by Collins and Brown in 1991, Graham Marsh recalls the sartorial fetishism invested in the latest Blue Note releases by London mods in the early-Sixties, and the inevitable struggles to obtain an identical striped button-down shirt to that worn by "Big" John Patton on the sleeve of The Way I Feel.

Although some of Reid Miles' greatest covers, such as Go! by Dexter Gordon, In 'n' Out by Joe Henderson, and Unity by Larry Young, are almost pure graphics, with the clean lines of the design and the bold typography often displacing the image of the artist entirely, the tight cropping of photographs is probably what Miles is remembered for above all. It therefore comes as a great irony to find out that Francis Wolff - whose photographs were most often those that Miles cropped - was not always a willing accomplice to the process. Wolff's nephew, Dr Kenneth Wolfe, remembers Uncle Frank on family visits to England complaining angrily: "They've cut the heads off my pictures again!"

"He was very proud of the covers," says the Dr Wolfe, 60. "He said that the classical world was too old-fashioned, too baroque. Jazz belonged to a new world, and that's why the covers had to look different. He was committed to understanding black music, driven by it you could say. The first time I saw him was in 1947, when he took me to a cinema in Essex to see The Third Man. He was a very quiet man who smoked all the time - even between courses at dinner, which shocked us - and he had this flashy camera which he looked down into. On his visits he would always bring us some records."

Dr Wolfe's memories of his uncle underline strongly the Jewish background of both Wolff and Alfred Lion. "The reason he came to England was to find out about his family, who had been rounded up in 1943 by the Nazis. It took my father and Frank years to discover for certain that their father and mother had disappeared."

Alfred Lion - who had fallen in love with jazz when he heard Sam Woodyard and his Chocolate Dandies in concert in Germany in 1925 - left for New York in 1938, where Wolff joined him in 1941. "Jews weren't permitted to live in family homes any more and Francis lived in a flat owned by the chief buyer for Macy's in New York, who loaned him the money to catch the last boat out," Dr Wolfe says. It was partly Lion and Wolff's experience of anti-Semitism that led to their sympathetic identification with the music of black Americans, a sympathy that can almost be seen as an act of love. Both came from well-to-do Jewish families who sent them to the English School in Heidelberg in the Twenties. Its anti-Semitism led them to run away together.

When Lion founded Blue Note in 1939, he ensured that his artists were always treated fairly. The boogie-woogie pianists Ammons and Lewis, who recorded the first ever session for the label, were so flattered by Lion's care and attention - which included providing ample quantities of their favourite food and drink - that they improvised for longer than the norm. This meant that their tracks had to be pressed on to the 12in 78rpm discs normally reserved for classical recordings rather than the 10in format usually employed for jazz. A concern for clarity of sound, fair dues for the musicians (Blue Note paid for rehearsal-time while labels such as Prestige didn't), as well as the care taken over design, remained the hallmarks of the label.

The example of his uncle, and that of his father, Henry, whose patent for self-sealing envelopes led to a family saying that Henry went into paper while Frank went into plastic, has influenced Kenneth Wolfe deeply. "This whole anti-Semitism thing that is built into Western culture so basically, begins to come home with father and Frank," he says. "Here is a Jew working with blacks; here is a Jew presenting black culture in a way that was not only positive, but actually aggrandising it, celebrating it. This quiet man..."

The Blue Note story shows that there's far more encoded in the breezy style of these wonderful album covers than a few funky fonts.

HMV, 150 Oxford Street, London, to mid-June, then tours to Birmingham and Edinburgh