Mid-century Modern Jazz: Music and Design in the Postwar Home

Abstract

This article takes an imagined, transnational living room as its setting, examining jazz's place in representations of the 'modern' middle-class home across the post-war West, and exploring the domestic uses that listeners both casual and committed made of the music in recorded form. In magazines as apparently diverse as Ideal Home in the UK and Playboy in the US, a certain kind of jazz helped mark a new middlebrow connoisseurship in the 1950s and 60s. Yet rather than simply locating the style in a historical sociology of taste, this piece attempts to describe jazz's role in what was an emergent middle-class sensorium. The music's sonic characteristics were frequently called upon to complement the newly sleek visual and tactile experiences -of furniture, fabrics, plastics, the light and space of modern domestic architecture -then coming to define the aspirational bourgeois home; an international modern visual aesthetic was reflected back in jazz album cover art. But to describe experience or ambience represents a challenge to historical method. As much as history proper, then, it's through a kind of experimental criticism of both music and visual culture that this piece attempts to capture the textures and moods that jazz brought to the postwar home.

Modernism and Record Covers: Raising the Status of Jazz in Sweden

“…These changes in public and private living spaces make it important to situate record covers in the Swedish living rooms of the 1950s. Tom Perchard (2017) points out that jazz was connected to media that were consumed in the living room, such as the record player. The connection between furniture design and record covers also relates to the equipment that played the music.…”

“…The latter system shows striking similarities to the record stand described earlier. From an international perspective, it is important to note that in Sweden there was no explicit understanding of this kind of furniture as being connected to the ‘Scandinavian design’ that arose abroad (Perchard, 2017). For many Swedes, this furniture was primarily ‘modern’, and generally, ideas of modern ways of living tended to be inspired by the USA if they were at all connected to a nation-state.…”

Analysis of the Visual Design and Expression Effect of Virtual Reality and Three-Dimensional Space Technology in Art Space

“…en, it defines the ideal bourgeois family. Jazz album cover art reflects the international modern visual aesthetics [3]. Wu et al found that the unprecedented availability of social media data provides data owners, system operators, solution providers, and end users with numerous opportunities to explore and understand social dynamics.…”