ST33

Let’s Get Acquainted With Jazz …For People Who Hate Jazz!

Put on your night-dress and you too will understand jazz. I couldn’t resist adding it to the site, even though I don’t own it. What a mad combination of ideas, although featuring a woman in a night-dress on an album cover could hardly be classed as a new idea. The drooling Fifties idiot, fixated for some reason by a pair of court shoes, probably didn’t take too long to get into character, while Bud Costello gets the credit for putting it all together. Though it wasn’t a career starter, and turns out to be the only sleeve he ever did by the looks of things. I do like the cheesy box of flowers dropped on the floor at random too. It was recorded by The Jimmy Rowles Sextet in Supersonic Sound (even though the back cover suggests mono) and issued in the US in 1957. Tampa Records were an L.A. based jazz outfit who specialised in reissuing budget albums through into the later Sixties.

Scanning some vintage music paper a while back I wasn’t sure what or where the Fair Deal music venue was, though the address seemed familiar. It turns out this was the first go at running the old The Brixton Astoria as a music venue. It opened in 1981 under the distinctly uncatchy name of “Fair Deal” – which you might think was a budget supermarket!

These adverts are for shows there in March 1982, and quite a decent variety of music on offer. UB40 at the heady price of £4.00; The Blues Band and Alexis Korner (with Jools Holland, though you can always arrive late!) in aid of Solidarity; a sixties package tour with the Tremeloes, Troggs, etc and finally a soul night with Wilson Pickett, Sam ‘n Dave, Carla Thomas, and Eddie Floyd.

Sadly for the owner, the venue closed later in 1982 due to debts. In 1983 though it re-opened it as the Brixton Academy. We did go down for a few shows there (acts which refused to come up north!) and it was a pretty good venue in terms of being able to get a good view wherever you were. Though as we used to drive down it was a gamble whether your car would still be around when you got out!

There is a pretty good article on the history of the venue on the web here:

/https://travellondon.guide/2023/04/18/brixton-academy/

I have added a gallery of ten of my favourite Atlantic album sleeves to the site, all from the fifties to the seventies. Here’s one to get the ball rolling which didn’t quite make the gallery! A Quartet Is A Quartet Is A Quartet by the Modern Jazz Quartet came out in 1964 and features a typically interesting cover by Marvin Israel. Combining hand-drawn text and early phototypsetting, I particularly like the torn paper effect which reveals the latter. Also neat is the way the label logo has been lost in the art, when it would normally have been dropped into the white space at the bottom of the cover.

It’s interesting how an advert like this takes you right back to the Eighties (1982 in this case), and the height of the cassette boom. At the time a vinyl album was around £4.00 in Smiths (pre-recorded tapes about 50p more), and you could get two albums (“whatever you’re recording” as the text coyly puts it!) onto a C90, so it was no wonder blank tapes were the bane of record labels. Don’t ask me what the difference between the two types was, I was confused at the time by all the differences and worried about wearing my tape heads out if I used the wrong formula!). And we’ve just lost W H Smiths to the marvels of rebranding too.