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Miles Davis – In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, Complete album art

Contributed by Axl Gamez González on Oct 30th, 2016. Artwork published in
circa 1961
.
    Miles Davis – In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, Complete album art 1
    ℗ 2003 Sony Music Entertainment Inc. License: All Rights Reserved.

    Photograph by Leigh Wiener of Davis with his soon to be second wife Frances Taylor
    Miles Davis at the Blackhawk,℗ 2003 Sony Music Entertainment Inc.

    Recorded in 1961 and reissued in 2003 on a four disc collection, this cover art is the same of the first released two albums.

    Miles Davis – In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, Complete album art 2
    License: All Rights Reserved.

    Typefaces

    • Microgramma
    • Eurostile

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    3 Comments on “Miles Davis – In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, Complete album art”

    1. This seems to be a bit more complicated than it sounds. First up, the A-Z of Type Designers dates Eurostile’s release to 1962, so my first thought was this might actually be Microgramma Bold, even though the weight in this image looked slightly out compared to a metal type sample. But I was wrong about that too.

      According to Wikipedia and this blog, this album, a recording of a concert, was only published in this format (“complete”) as a box set in 2003, though it had been published before in separate highlight editions. Here’s a picture of the two LPs from 1961 in an edition from the Dutch Fontana Records apparently for the UK market (the website also shows original CBS covers and they’re the same, but according to source have aged worse so they don’t scan so well). My guess is that the original used Microgramma Bold, and the cover shown above is a reconstruction in Eurostile (or Microgramma).

    2. Album art is often reissued or recreated by fans, so thanks so much for keeping on this, Blythwood!

    3. Blythwood, thanks for the commentaries and the help on this case, I was wrong about the date and the description of the cover, I’ve mixed the original version with the reissue. I agree that the 1961 version used Microgramma (Bold). For the reissue, I suppose they have used Eurostile, because I can’t find a digital version of Microgramma Bold, only the Medium and Bold Extended. The other Microgramma weights probably were made obsolete with the release of Eurostile.

      Here are some specimens of Eurostile and Microgramma.

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