It was Pete Turner who suggested Sam Antupit (1932-2003) to Creed Taylor, Turner having worked with the designer at Esquire magazine. Even though Antupit had no experience designing album covers, he “hit it off with Creed,”1 who recognized the rare gifts of utilitarian simplicity and austere sophistication this designer possessed.
Antupit’s background was in magazines – the epitome of graphic design in those days – such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Glamour and House and Garden. He graduated from the Yale School of Design and Architecture in 1954 and later studied with innovative designer Paul Rand and the great painter Joseph Albers (who designed several iconic covers for Command Records in the late 1950s).
In 1963, working at Milton Glaser’s legendary Push Pin Studios, Antupit came up with the prototype for The New York Review of Books, which is still in place today. From 1964 to 1968 Antupit was the chief art director at Esquire, where he contracted with many other artists, such as photographer Pete Turner. “He never imposed a personal style on his magazines,” as Antupit’s New York Times obituary noted, “but gave each one a distinctive persona.”
For CTI, Antupit developed a simple framing device that could be applied to any album in the series. Each album prominently featured one of Pete Turner’s distinctive photographs spread over a gatefold sleeve. The gatefold concept – a two pocket cover that doubled the album’s canvas, a conceit extensively used for classical records – was brought to jazz by Taylor himself back when he conceived the Impulse label.
Antupit “framed” Turner’s photograph, listing the musical artist’s name at the very top of the sleeve in “all-caps” Helvetica Bold type (to allow for easy spotting and quick reading when flipping through record stacks) with a semi-colon providing the album’s title on the next line in the same typeface and point-size. The point: the album is as important as the artist.
The A&M logo is prominently displayed on top and a first-version of the CTI logo appears below. The “frame” was white – a nice contrast to Pete Turner’s evocatively colored photos – for the initial issues but was alternated to grey for a few issues (Soul Machine, Betwixt & Between, Courage and Tell It Like It Is – the latter three even modifying the frame), mylar for a couple of others (When It Was Done, Calling Out Loud) and beige (Tide). These albums stood out in record stores, even well apart from their A&M brothers. No one could mistake these for anything other than the pristine Creed Taylor productions they were.
Considering Sam Antupit was not by nature an album designer, it’s amazing how influential his design for Creed Taylor’s A&M productions became. The clean, crisp presentation inspired any number of imitations, including a variety of albums issued by the Japanese Tact Jazz Series (late 1960s through the 1970s), Shungo Sawada and All Stars’ Fool on the Hill (1969), the Japanese issue of Dizzy Gillespie’s Cornucopia (1970), George Benson’s Bob Ciano-designed (independent) CTI debut Beyond the Blue Horizon (1971), Don Sebesky’s Full Cycle (1983), Cage the Elephant’s un-CTI-like Unpeeled (2017), Leonardo Marques’ Early Bird (2018) and the MPS compilation Snowflakes (1999 – a set featuring Pete Turner’s “Winter Trees”).
Producer, compiler and annotator Arnaldo DeSouteiro’s compilations A Trip To Brazil (1998-2005), which liberally sample many A&M/CTI sides, are equally invested with the same distinctive logic and eye-catching uniformity that made Antupit’s innovative work a first in packaging perfection.
Likewise, a number of DeSouteiro’s JSR covers honor Sam Antupit’s design panache; among them are Dom Um Romão’s Rhythm Traveller (1998) and Lake of Perseverance (2001) and Jorge Pescara’s Grooves in the Temple (2005 – featuring Pete Turner’s “Cloud World”). In 2002 and 2003, DeSouteiro worked on several Deodato reissues for the Italian Irma Records label that intentionally mirror Antupit’s individual design. Then in 2014, DeSouteiro produced Rodrigo Lima’s Saga, whose cover sported Pete Turner’s “Doorways and Stairs.”
Endnote:
- Pete Turner, “Pete Turner Interview,” interview by Richard Warner, September 2002 (courtesy of the author). ↩︎