Postponed Parade: How I Turned Musicians' Isolation into Visual Chaos (Without Therapy)

The process of designing a jazz album cover for one of my favourite musicians.

February 23, 2020
East Village, New York, NY

There's something uniquely torturous about illustrating jazz. It's like being asked to draw what water sounds like, or sketch the taste of a Wednesday.

Early in the pandemic, I found myself hunched over my drawing board, locked in my East Village apartment with a commission that felt both thrilling and completely terrifying – my first jazz album cover. The musician, Seattle-based Ryan Burns, had been using his quarantine time with suspiciously productive energy, recording sessions remotely with his bandmates from their individual isolation chambers. The album title, "Postponed Parade," was so painfully apt it made my molars ache.

To Ryan's eternal credit, he not only insisted on paying properly (a radical concept in the arts), but gave me complete artistic freedom. "Just listen to the music and do your thing," he said, which every artist knows is simultaneously the best and most paralyzing instruction possible.

I’m lucky enough to live next door to Birdland— one of New York’s most iconic jazz clubs. I get to see a lot of live jazz each week. (For my money, though, nothing beats Mezzrow or Smalls… except maybe Ornithology) But I digress… My favourite jazz album art of all time is for Dave Brubeck, and happens to have been drawn by one of my favourite people in the world: Arnold Roth. Arnie signed my Brubeck album covers for Sophie and me many years ago, and they’ve proudly hung in every apartment I’ve lived in New York, if for no other reason than to remind me ‘how it’s done.’

Please ignore Mr. Yunioshi… it was a different time.

I slid my headphones on, cranked up the volume, poured a hefty glass of whiskey, and sank into that peculiar purgatory where creativity and self-doubt engage in mortal combat. After three hours, and what felt like sixteen midlife crises, I managed to produce something that didn't make me want to fake my own death and start over in New Zealand.

What emerged was a drawing that captured the energy of five musicians playing together while being forcibly apart – a visual representation of the strange, disconnected-yet-connected reality we'd all been living in. The design had a certain chaotic harmony to it, much like my apartment after what I call a "cleaning."

Ryan Burns wanders onto Chicago stages like a midwestern shaman who accidentally grabbed a banjo instead of a staff. His music emerges from some unholy matrimony between John Prine's storytelling and Fleet Foxes' harmonies—if those harmonies had spent a winter in a Chicago apartment with broken heat.