Gilles Peterson

Stuart Baker

Collects bossa nova record cover artwork from the 1960s and looks at the political, social, and cultural history of Brazilian bossa nova music.

Original Cover Art

Bossa Nova and the Rise of Brazilian Music in the 1960s

This is a unique collection of cover artwork of revolutionary Jazz releases in the USA in the 1970s, a time of great political and social importance for African-American artists. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and John Coltrane loom large as self-determination, economic power and musical freedom led to artists finding new paths both musical and economic. Away from the mainstream, many of these musicians chose to take control of their economic worth by recording, releasing and distributing their own material. Thirty years later and these artefacts are a striking reflection of the time; pre-desktop publishing, pre-internet these small-run (sometimes as low as 500 copies), self-made sleeves are as iconic and historically important as the revolution of D-I-Y culture that sprang out of Punk. Soul Jazz Records have produced many releases relating to this music and this book is the first ever collection of this amazing artwork. The book comes with a large introduction contextualising the music and artwork and relating how the music came about along with interviews with many of the people involved.

Revolutionary Jazz Original Cover Art 1965-83

Freedom, Rhythm & Sound

Spanning Cuban music from rumba to salsa, and graphic styles from socialist realist to geometric abstraction, this volume of Cuban record cover art traces a musical form in constant revolution. The first ever book about Cuban record sleeve design, compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker, Cuba: Music and Revolutionfeatures hundreds of rarely seen vinyl records from the start of the Cuban Revolution at the beginning of the 1960s up until 1985, when Cuba's Special Period, brought about by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of Russia's financial support for the Cuban government, led to the demise of vinyl-record manufacturing in Cuba. The artwork here reflects both the cultural and musical depth of Cuba as well as the political influence of revolutionary communism. Over the past century, Cuban music has produced a seemingly endless variety of styles--rumba, mambo, son, salsa--at a dizzyingly fast rate. Since the 1940s a steady stream of Cuban musicians has also made the migration to the US, sparking changes in North American musical forms: bandleader Machito set New York's jazz and Latin scene on fire, and master drummer Chano Pozo's entry into Dizzy Gillespie's group led to the birth of Latin jazz, to name just two. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the new government closed American-owned nightclubs and consolidated the island's recording industry under a state-run monopoly. Out of this new socialist agenda came new musical styles, including the Nueva Trova movement of left-wing songwriters. The 1980s saw more experimentation in modernist jazz, salsa and Afro-Cuban folkloric music. Generously illustrated with hundreds of color images, Cuba: Music and Revolutionpresents the history of Cuban record cover art, including many examples previously unseen outside the island itself.

Original Album Cover Art of Cuban Music: The Record Sleeve Designs of Revolutionary Cuba 1960-85

Cuba: Music and Revolution

Compiled by Gilles Peterson, Stuart Baker.

Gilles Peterson

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