Getting through a 500-page book about jazz seems as futile as describing a spiral staircase without gesturing. Lucky for us, Jazz Covers shows more than it tells. Beginning with 1940s be-bop and extending to the fusion-tinged ‘90s, hundreds of the ‘most celebrated and rarest jazz album covers’ of all time are rendered in their colourful glory.
Jazz Covers manages to sum up the genre with the thoroughness of a scholarly essay. Vivid photographs are accompanied by pithy back-story write-ups of the jazz artists and album designers.

We learn, for example, that David Stone Martin’s Dali-esque cover for Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s Bird and Diz captured the last time the two horn legends recorded together. We realise that Walter Coleman’s cover for Stan Getz’s Focus – eerie green and orange ribbon-like strands streaming in the ether – echoes the spare, flowing beauty that was Getz’s sound.

Released by the art book publishing house Taschen, Jazz Covers boasts other treats, such as interviews with industry heavies like producer Creed Taylor and top-15 favourite album lists from leading DJs Michael McFadden and Gerald Short among others. In sum, this volume is a coffee table’s trophy if ever one existed.

Bong Miquiabas