Optic Nerve Beats

My editor at the Bulletin, preparing a story for an upcoming issue, recently asked my opinion of Marte Röling’s cover paintings for Fontana’s new-jazz LP series in the 1960s. I confessed I wasn’t a major fan; what was with those dainty lady hands at the keyboard, on the cover of Dollar Brand’s Anatomy of a South African Village? Still, it got me thinking.

No denying many Dutch LP and CD new-jazz covers are inventive and even collectible. As a prime example take Han Bennink’s custom-made art for the very first ICP LP, by Breuker and Bennink’s New Acoustic Swing Duo. Han made them by hand—three or four thousand, he once estimated—drawing on blank sleeves, pressing rubber stamps onto them, affixing little screws to the cardboard. He’d spread a batch on a floor like tile, ink his feet and walk on them. Eventually he discovered a gallery owner was buying up copies for resale on the Japanese art market.

Bennink still does cover art for mechanical reproduction, usually for records he appears on, and he’s done some beauties. Tobias Delius’s The Heron on ICP is a particular favorite, for the sheer swooping energy of outward-bound vectors, long bird bill and mysteriously whirling sailboat, but also because it’s reproduced so faithfully, the thick pencil lines reflect light like real graphite.

Ah, those beautiful old ICPs—like Willem Breuker’s “chocolate box,” two LPs in a round 12-inch carton, with credits under the lid and a peaceful photo of an Amsterdam Noord pleintje on the face. Much later he rhymed it with 1991’s Heibel, CD in a small balsa-wood cheese box. Willem’s collection of unreleased archival stuff, The Pirate, then extended the series—the hinged, thin, rectangular metal box looks made for small cigars, and boasts a Bennink painting to boot, an echo of their ’60s partnership.

Breuker’s BVHaast label had clever covers going way back, witness the 1979 recording Willem van Manen, where you could work the trombone slide photographed for the inner LP sleeve with the matching bell of the horn on the cover, letting you mime playing along as you listen. The Kollektief’s CD To Remain, released as LPs faded away a decade later, came peeking out of a - jagged hole in the front of a full-size album jacket. The theater music of Baal Brecht Breuker Handke arrived in a jewel box stuffed in a miniature burlap sack sporting a BVHaast shipping tag (a reprise of the elaborate packaging of the original Baal Brecht Breuker LP). It’s perfect, but why? A comment on the rough and ready music Willem made while finding his composer’s voice?

Some covers are easier to read, like Emo Verkerk’s cover for Guus Janssen’s solo piano LP Tast Toe. Against a blank background sit two orderly stacks of sticks, dark ingot-like ones on the left, and larger, notched white ones on the right. Make that ebony on the left, ivory on the right: they’re a piano’s worth of keys, “disassembled and reconstructed in a new way,” Fritz van der Waa once wrote: “the perfect metaphor for Guus’s music.” Jawel.

In that spirit, consider a later example issued on Janssen’s Geestgronden label: LOOS’s first album of atomized rhythms and harmonies, Fundamental. The cover of the jewel box is uniformly coated with yellowish green pigment, except for a half-a-Rorschach blob left blank in the middle, exposing a contrasting deep blue color field that covers the thick fold-out ‘booklet’ inside. Flip that outside cover 180 degrees, and the blob becomes South America. Fundamental is one of the few discs on my crammed shelves which must remain in the original bulky package: it’s undeconstructible. Defamiliarizing the familiar, it takes a little while to decode (and unpack)—perfect metaphor for LOOS music.

There are other such visual/musical analogues: drummer/designer Martin van Duynhoven’s op-art cover for his 1996 CD Uitkrant has brilliant pink smears vibrating—‘beating’—against a bright yellow background, in parallel to sustained polyrhythms shimmering within.

Martin’s brother Fred van Duijnhoven came up with a particularly ingenious concept. His 1997 Bellbird is a musical tour de force: birdcalls successfully played on the drum set. Shake the nondescript-looking jewel box, it makes a rattling sound of the kind that attracts small animals’ curiosity. Inside the clear plastic, trapped between the CD tray and the left hand spine, and exposed beneath that narrow vertical panel, are two miniature, bead-headed drum sticks, made by Fred himself. (So: the rattle they make is what Baby Dodds called “nerve beats.”) But those stokjes could also pass for the dowel perches songbirds alight on in cages. That’s better than a metaphor: a thing itself. Five years later, for the sequel Bird’s Nest, Fred produced tiny brushes. A third installment with mini-mallets is rumored.