Jazz graphic art - especially in the Seventies - hovers around in a zone between good and bad taste, but in some ways it's the stuff edging into gauche 'n' garish, horribly misconceived, evenoutright hideous, that is the most eye-arresting. Sometimes the tasteful - especially when it has a retro-chic quality - is worse than the fusion-era fantasia. Anything that breaks with the endless designer fall-back of a "horn" motif (worst of all is the horn with notes streaming out of it) is good.
Or that plays with that motif and against all odds finds a clever or cute twist.
I got propelled on this particular net-trawl after seeing the poster above on a wall at the big radio station in Frankfurt - one of a series for the city's annual jazz festivals. There was something pleasing - endearing, even - about the image. But what started as an attempt to find that poster (and others I saw on that wall - a few have eluded me) took me down some strange byways.
Okay this one is just ghastly.
Not sure if this a completely different set of German jazz festivals, or whether the main national jazz fest switched from Frankfurt to Berlin for a while.
Towards the end getting into a zone of kitsch that only jazz of the fusion-and-after era can reach (think of those Weather Report and Return To Forever album covers).
Then there's the Deutsche jazz festival, which seems to have been the same as the Frankfurt one, but is a whole different era of jazz graphic imagery.
And then a completely different festival series, as far as I can tell - the Deutsches Amateur-Jazz Festivals.
Miscellaneous German jazz graphic shit
Some random jazz graphic shit that's nothing to do with Germany
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