Ah, the ultimate cool style. What’s more classic than a Blue Note musician in a perfect suit? Such raw sounds coming out of a modern dressed man. Here’s a great read, an essay on the style of these guys from Blue Note: Album Cover Art The Ultimate Collection by Graham Marsh, a really great little book filled with the best Blue Note LP’s.
on the clothes…
NO ROOM FOR SQUARES
“Consider the irony – the button-down shirt, which came to symbolize all that was hip about the Blue Note musician, was originally English. Polo players at the turn of the century were seen by John Brooks, of Brooks Brothers, to fasten their collars with buttons to keep them from snapping up in their faces.
This piece of sartorial history was of no concern to us, however; the mere fact that Hank Mobley, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, and other Blue Note luminaries were photographed wearing these shirts, on their respective album covers, was endorsement enough. Now I’m sure to those musicians it was just another clean shirt, but in the early 60’s , unless your taste was for homegrown, the importance of being imported applied to the clothes as much as to the records. It was an obsession; a friend of mine was not a happy person until he owned a striped button-down identical to the shirt Big John Patton wore on the sleeve of The Way I Feel.
cork grips 