Filed Under: "record covers"

Just released by Euclid Records, a new 45 rpm single by Terry Adams & the Whole Wheat Horns whose sleeve features a Jim Flora musician montage. The chaotic combo, which incorporates cartoonish players from numerous Flora 1940s and 1950s sources, was created by Barbara Economon and yrs trly for our second book, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora. The calamitous crew evolved from a trio to include as many as eleven figures, until our…

Jason Bradshaw: “My girlfriend Lisa and I decided to take up bookbinding. We’re starting off doing passport sized blank notebooks. We’ve been using printer paper for the insides and card stock for the cover. I took some Jim Flora album cover prints and made a small pile of mini sketchbooks which I intend to give out to a couple of friends.”

Our friend Takashi Okada of Tokyo has become the pre-eminent Floraphile in Japan. Besides being an avid customer of Jim Flora fine art prints, Takashi recently designed the Daisy Holiday CD package, which adapts Flora’s 1947 Green Mansions resort brochure illustration (licensed from the Flora estate). Additional Flora elements appear on the jewel case inlay and in the booklet. Here’s a Tokyo record store display flush with Flora. If you don’t live in that part…

When composer-arranger Bill Finegan passed away last week at the age of 91, a New York Times writer (on the recommendation of a mutual friend and Flora admirer) contacted me for some background on the music legend. I confessed that, in all honesty, I knew less about what Finegan did for Glenn Miller, Nelson Riddle, and Tommy Dorsey than I do about what Jim Flora did for Bill Finegan. Flora gave Finegan two right arms,…

Sundazed Records, one of the world’s foremost boutique rock reissue labels, offers a new limited edition T-shirt emblazoned with a Jim Flora space-age pan-galactic starship. The original 1958 illustration (from the back of a Billy Mure LP) was black & white. Sundazed offers two colorized editions, the mustardy-cheesey: And the aqua & salmon tinted:

UPDATE 4/25: Two prints sold. Now available via JimFlora.com. The Incredible Flutist is an uncirculated 1953-54 record cover illustration by Flora that was intended for a 7-inch RCA Victor EP. Jim Flora Art LLC is offering two fine art prints on eBay at a launch price. According to a purchase order discovered in the Flora archives, the illustration was commissioned by RCA in late 1953, but there’s no indication the work was finished, accepted, or…

7″ EP, 1954 (probably not released on LP)

Cover detail, Morton Downey Sings Songs You Love (Camden CAE 245), 1954

Sketches for RCA Victor LP cover, 1955; final design below:

Quartet San Francisco’s 2007 CD, Whirled Chamber Music, has been nominated for a Grammy in the category Best Classical Crossover Album. This might be the first-ever album with a Flora cover to earn a Grammy nod.

Almost. The Flora pretzel-ized trumpet that graces the cover of this rare RCA Victor Living Stereo “cartridge magazine” originally appeared in 1958 on the back cover of the LP Portrait of Shorty Rogers. The illustration was recycled by RCA Victor’s art department on this 1960 Esquivel package, whose format was the (failed) forerunner of the cassette. The LP version of this classic album by the Mexican maestro had a completely different photographic cover. RCA also…

Floraphile Shannon Wade, of Portland, isn’t content to admire Flora art in books, on album covers, or displayed on walls. It’s not enough for her to wear it. She wants to BE it. Shannon combined elements from two of Flora’s more well-known album cover illustrations—the Pete Jolly Duo and Mambo for Cats—into some nifty skin art. Design-in-progress (at right), with color added (below). Shannon writes: “This was my first tattoo, and it was done in…