Filed Under: "instruments"

Columbia Coda, April 1952, listing 7″ discs featuring recordings of legendary jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, born this date in 1903. The page is crowned with a Flora horn. At the time this circular was published, Beiderbecke would have been a relatively young age 49—if he hadn’t died 21 years before (which was 17 years before the introduction of the 7″ disc). We wrote about Bix @ 106, chronicling his enormous musical significance as well as…

Illustration, Table of Contents pageColumbia Records Disc Digest, February 1946

Our Jim Flora “Plant You Now, Dig You Later” letterpress notecards are multi-purpose. One customer (whose name, forgive us, we’ve misplaced) had these 1950s jazz hepcats framed and sent us a snapshot. Others have used them as … notecards.

Illustration, Columbia Coda, November-December 1944. The pianist is … we’ll get back to you on that. The clarinetists and violinists, forced to perform incognito due to union regulations, were represented on the session by essential anatomical components attired in boots and bowties.

Nine Jim Flora illustrations, album covers, and details found their way into yesterday’s UK Telegraph Sunday jazz supplement (print edition). We were approached by one of the paper’s art directors two weeks ago and provided dozens of vintage Flora music images (several previously unpublished). Their selections give the finished layouts a visual syncopation. A pdf of the five pages can be downloaded here. (The pages will be online at Telegraph.co.uk shortly.)

Three jazz legends, stacked, in the July 1952 issue of Coda, Columbia’s new release monthly. From the top: Harry James (trumpet)Benny Goodman (clarinet)Art Tatum (piano) Each had a new LP that month: James with Soft Lights, Sweet Trumpet, Goodman’s Let’s Hear the Melody, and Art Tatum Concert. As art director, Flora launched Coda in 1943, and provided most illustrations for the (largely classical music) monthly until he was named Sales Promotion Manager in 1945. This…

Back in stock: letterpress-printed cards with cool 1940s and ’50s music and turntable illustrations by Flora. The cards were designed and printed by our friends at Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress, in Knoxville. Packaged in sets of four: Dig You Later, Stardust Moon, Deluxe-O-Tone, and Trees.

Dummy pages, Gene Krupa and his Columbia recording orchestra, demo booklet, 1941, part of a series of homemade samples prepared by Flora for the Columbia Records art department. Most pages from the booklets (which earned the artist a job at Columbia) were reproduced in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora; three of the above four pages were omitted due to space constraints. We posted another unpublished page from the series here and more Flora…

Here are two tempera illustrations discovered in an early- to mid-1960s sketchpad in the Flora collection. The more refined of the two works has a title: Bessie Smith, presumably a vignette of the soulful, bawdy 1920s and ’30s Empress of the Blues. The pianist (great hat!) is unidentified, and we can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of Smith performing with her nipples exposed: The second work, pages away in the same sketchpad, is untitled but…

Acrylic on canvas, 1992. Irving Milfred “Miff” Mole was a legendary American jazz trombonist who first came to prominence in 1920s hot jazz. Tommy Dorsey called him “the Babe Ruth of the trombone.” Amid the painting’s colorful details, pay special attention to this great freakin’ tree:

A draft and a refinement of a common theme. This barrelhouse piano player was roughly rendered for a series of demo booklets the Cincinnati-based Flora crafted in 1941 as a job pitch: “Columbia Records was reissuing old jazz records without much fanfare,” the artist (and jazz aficionado) later wrote. “I had the temerity to make these small booklets to try to point out the error of their ways.” His temerity paid off. In early 1942…

We’ve come to a belated acceptance, and in some cases respect, for Flora’s late-life work. We still prefer the bizarre jaggedness of his 1940s and 1950s illustrations and paintings, but occasionally the old Jim peeks through the new. The Tympani Five (referring to Louis Jordan‘s fun-loving jump band of the 1940s) isn’t a top-tier work, but the spirit of Jordan synergizes with the spirit of Flora in this 1988 pen & ink with tempera on…