Description

On the cover of Blue Train, John Coltrane looks lost in thought, head lowered, hand raised to his mouth. Fans long assumed he was holding a saxophone reed. He was sucking a lollipop. The picture was taken by Francis Wolff at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, around the session of 15 September 1957, in one of the quiet moments between takes that Wolff spent his career catching.

Wolff was a Jewish photographer from Berlin who escaped Nazi Germany on one of the last boats to America in 1939 and joined his childhood friend Alfred Lion at Blue Note. Because the label paid musicians to rehearse before recording, Wolff could move close and shoot while the tape was off, often from below and with a hard flash. The same session produced a similar picture of Lee Morgan, hand near his face, which became the cover of Morgan's The Cooker.

Reid Miles turned the photograph into a Blue Note classic: the image washed in a cool blue duotone, the title in heavy type at the top, the band names in small print. Miles designed roughly 350 covers for the label and, by his own account, preferred classical music to jazz, working from Lion's descriptions of the sessions. Blue Train, released in January 1958, was Coltrane's only album as leader for Blue Note, and its cover has become shorthand for the look of the label itself.

Credit

Photography by Francis Wolff; design by Reid Miles