Provocative Percussion (1959) by The Command All-Stars.
You’d think that the handful of album cover designs produced by Bauhaus artist Josef Albers would have decorated something by Xenakis, or one of the composers experimenting with tape recording and electronics at the end of the 1950s. But no, it’s the easy listening cocktail music of Enoch Light and co. who received the benefit of his abstractions. The covers are smart solutions for how to embellish a collection of percussive instrumentals without resort to the thumping obviousness of a photograph of the artists or their instruments. Albers’ designs found their way into more American living rooms than they otherwise might have done, and established a trend which you still find being imitated today.
• You’re The Top by The Command All-Stars
Persuasive Percussion (1959) by Terry Snyder And The All Stars.
Provocative Percussion Volume 2 (1959) by Enoch Light And The Light Brigade.
Persuasive Percussion Volume 3 (1960) by The Command All-Stars.
Provocative Percussion Vol. III (1961) by Enoch Light And The Light Brigade.
Pictures At An Exhibition by Mussorgsky/Ravel (1961); L’Orchestre De La Societé Des Concerts Du Conservatoire, Andre Vandernoot.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive
The reverse would also be fun: K-tel style covers for radical modernism.
Not quite radical composers but Westminster Gold managed to bring a gaudy sensibility to the classical music world in the 1970s:
http://www.kimbawlion.com/westminstergold/