Art by Elsewhere

For many years, even before this website arrived almost 20 years ago, Graham Reid had been involved in art and design (CD, record and cassette sleeves, posters and illustrations). Here are some recent collages and art, with links to the Elsewhere articles they were for.

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Elsewhere Art . . . Passages

15 Jan 2024  |  1 min read

I have mentioned previously how, in 1984, I launched the ambitious -- so ambitious it was doomed -- magazine Passages: The Magazine of Jazz and Elsewhere. And how at one point the late Jim Langabeer and I imported a bunch of now very rare Soviet free jazz albums recorded illegally in Russia and other places behind the Iron Curtain. Those tapes were smuggled to Britain and an emigre Leo... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . David Sanborn

16 Nov 2023  |  <1 min read

For quite a while, saxophonist David Sanborn was quite a name in jazz and rock. When I interviewed him in the early 1990s I noted the number of Grammys he'd won but also his guest spots on Bowie's Young Americans, the Stones' Undercover album, Stevie Wonder's Talking Book and work with Roger Waters, Steely Dan, John Scofield . . . There were others namechecked in that interview and he... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Ray Brown

29 Oct 2023  |  <1 min read

When the jazz bassist Ray Brown died in 2002 he was such a great talent his passing deserved to be noted, so Elsewhere published this survey of life, humour and greatness. Brown was probably best known for his long association with pianist Oscar Peterson but he'd also played with Sinatra, Lester Young, Louis Armstrong, Anita O'Day, Quincy . . . Our tribute acknowledged that in the... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . some jazz women

22 Oct 2023  |  1 min read

For the life of me I can't remember any of the details of this collage other than I was presented with about half a dozen albums by women jazz singers  . . . and all of them presented themselves in a kind of sultry come-hither imagery. I get the idea of "if you got it, flaunt it" and that women get to decide exactly how they want to present themselves, but . . . I... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . an academic opines

20 Aug 2023  |  <1 min read

This was among a number of experimental pieces I made using plastic-coated paper through the photocopier, I liked the effect of the dappling coagulation where the ink didn't penetrate the sheet. I was just fooling around but then it occurred to me that if you presented this to some earnest academic who was looking at the world through the lenses of Barthes or some other French philosopher... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Vernon Reid

13 Aug 2023  |  <1 min read

This collage was very simple but oddly enough it took quite a long time to execute properly. It is of Vernon Reid from the band Living Colour and it accompanied a 2017 interview with him, the second time I had spoken with him (the first being back in 1993). He was articulate and sometimes quite righteousy fiery, as he had every right to be. As a black rock band Living Colour had... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Superbrew

8 Jul 2023  |  1 min read

In the late Eighties the saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Jim Langabeer helmed the innovative jazz group Superbrew which, as I noted in my piece about the 2010 CD reissue of their '87 Africa Aroha album, "was jazz which also possessed that conspicuously absent ingredient in contemporary forms: fun. "Africa Aroha includes their take on Nock’s sprightly In Out and Around;... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . The ACT label artists

4 Jun 2023  |  <1 min read

In 2010 I received a small package of CDs from the ACT label out of Germany, and their Signature Edition albums all came in generic cover art by Carl-Hendrik Wigren. What appealed to me wasn't just that I liked the "collect the series" aspect of albums in similarly designed covers, but that there was a bit of wit and lack of seriousness about them. Jazz is serious enough... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . studio boffins

30 Apr 2023  |  <1 min read

Sometime in the very late Eighties I spent a day in an Auckland studio with a very well known dance-pop band. It was one of the dullest days imaginable. They had recorded their instrumental parts previously and this day was set aside to watch sine waves on a screen, shift them around, repeat them, and so construct their songs from the invisible (and sometimes even inaudible) parts.... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . two jazz guitarists

9 Apr 2023  |  <1 min read

When considering a couple of albums by jazz guitarists Ralph Towner and John Abercrombie in 2017, I was struck by just how old they were: these were men now in their Seventies and yet I still thought of them as being maybe late Thirties or early Fourties. For some reason the idea of visual homage to older artists -- be they painters or musicians -- came to mind and Picasso's Three Musicians... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Rosemary Brown

2 Apr 2023  |  <1 min read

It seems the jury is still out on Rosemary Brown, the woman who said she was channeling the undiscovered works of great classical composers such as Chopin, Debussy, Beethoven and others who would talk to her and guide her hands on the piano. She would perform these works to some acclaim and a considerable amount of scepticism. She came from a family of psychics so being in touch with... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . the iiii label

12 Mar 2023  |  <1 min read

Frankly this collage isn't up to much. It was done in haste (no excuse) because I had spent so much time listening through to a bunch of albums on Wellington's iiii label (which I wrote about in a catch-all column here). The idea however was to use images from the various album covers (the walking figures, the massive squid) with some acknowledgement of Creative New Zealand which... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Judas

18 Feb 2023  |  1 min read

This is a very old collage -- from the late Eighties at a guess. I found it after the 2023 Auckland Anniversary Weekend flooding swept through my office which meant I had to clear out -- and unfortunately dump -- many decades worth of collected music, books, DVDs, journals and memorabilia. And along the way as I waded through soggy albums, cardboard boxes, ruined family photos and saturated... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Frank Zappa #2

6 Feb 2023  |  1 min read

To be honest, I'm not sure if this collage was ever used. I have no record of it appearing on any article and maybe I just did it because . . . I could? I know when I did it I was thinking of the idea of iconic images but also the one I had seen of Wild Man Fischer, a kind of damaged street person whom Frank Zappa recorded for his Bizarre label. I have written about the rather sad... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Joe Meek

22 Jan 2023  |  <1 min read

As time goes, on the life of British producer Joe Meek actually comes down to his tragic death, a suicide after murdering his landlady. Aside from his work in the early Sixties on Telstar by the Tornados which was innovative and the thumping Have I The Right? hit for the Honeycombs in the Beat Era, not much of his work makes an impact outside of  musicians' circles these days. A... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Stephan Micus

15 Jan 2023  |  <1 min read

German multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus is one of those artists you probably only find by accident, such is his extensive catalogue on ECM which defies easy pigeon-holing. I came across him by chance with his Wings Over Water album in '82 when, on scanning the liner notes, I thought, "Flower pots? Yeah, why not?". Aside from gently hitting various pots, singing in a... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . John Scofield, again

8 Jan 2023  |  <1 min read

Unfortunately this collage to illustrate a review of the great guitarist John Scofield's album Piety Street isn't as sharp in the scan as it is in front of me now. The idea was certainly to have Sco, as he is known, a more muted and bleached out figure behind the more important aspects (the crucified Christ and Sco's guitar) as well as setting the whole thing against a map of the French... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Lola Falana

1 Jan 2023  |  1 min read

I'll be honest, I'd never heard of Lola Falana until was flicking the pages of coffee-table book of photographs by Sammy Davis Jr. And I learned two things: Sammy was a more than decent photographer-cum-documentarian who, of course, had "access" to his scene with Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack; and that Lola Falana -- who was his partner for a while -- was an astonishing... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Pilot

11 Dec 2022  |  <1 min read

Too easy really. When deciding to write about the British pop group PIlot for the We Need to Talk About pages, the idea just came immediately. Pilot from Scotland were inspired by the Beatles and in the mid Seventies started having popular, Beatlesque-MOR hits like Magic. They were a decent enough Beatle-style pop band and in the absence of the actual Beatles who'd broken up a few years... > Read more

Elsewhere Art . . . Rune Grammofon

13 Nov 2022  |  <1 min read

More than a decade ago the Rune Grammofon label out of Norway appeared on our radar. This was experimental electronic music and a few of the albums were very appealing, at the time we noted it was free jazz ruled by the head and not the heart. So yes, thoughtful and calculated but also quite romantic and charming in places. The article we wrote placed it in the longer... > Read more