Jazz

Some books arrive with a personal echo. I grew up immersed in the music and visual worlds of Blue Note Records, Motown and the Philly Sound. The typography, photography and spare elegance of those record covers became part of my visual memory long before I became a designer.

Finn Slumstrup’s manuscript carried that same deep love of jazz. It was knowledgeable, generous and full of enthusiasm — and from the beginning, I wanted the design to let that affection come through.

My first instinct was to make the interior vibrate with the energy of the music itself — something rhythmic, expressive and full of movement. A graphic echo of the way Matisse brought jazz into his cut-paper illustrations.

But the photographs changed the direction. They were too good to compete with: musicians caught in moments of concentration, humour, warmth and presence. A louder layout would only get in their way.

So the layout stepped back and let the format do the work. The book is large, square and printed on heavy paper. A square page is harder to handle than it looks. The traditional formats hand you a direction for free — a tall page already leans, a wide one already spreads — but a square leans nowhere. Everything has to be built from margins, spacing and composition.

It does give you one thing for nothing. At that size, a square page reads as an LP sleeve before you have done anything at all.

The captions carry the beat. I set them enormous, but in a condensed grotesque — partly to tie the pages back to the cover, partly because the spreads needed one element strong enough to give them a rhythm of their own.

The jazz is not in the decoration. It is in the proportions and the timing.