Seymour Chwast didn’t do a huge number of album covers, but he was there at the start of the format in the early Fifties and still doing designs in the early 1980s, of which this was one. He and Milton Glaser, who also did a number of album covers, ran a studio together for 21 years.
I spotted it at a flea market and although I didn’t know Chwast’s name, thought it had to be worth investigating. Chwast was skilled at these sort of whimsical but entertaining outline illustrations and I will keep a look out for more examples of his album work. It’s a shame this isn’t a gatefold, as the illustration continues across the back cover (below), but economies were being sought by labels by this time.
The title (the cover was designed by Paula Scher, Seymour’s wife) is the only thing which perhaps lets the sleeve down, although I appreciate on a compilation you needed to get people’s attention to the guest stars. It would have been great to use one of Chwast’s own font designs for the album title though.
In Harmony 1 (below) was issued in 1980 and while not as good an illustration, it was put together by Peter Whorf (infamous for those bizarre Westminster classical sleeves) and the type was based on hand written titles and the end result is a little more together.
Like Vol 1, In Harmony 2 was also connected to the Children’s Television Workshop and an unspecified donation from the royalties went to that organisation.The Springsteen Santa Claus track (live) was not available elsewhere for a while so gave the album some extra collectability; it was issued as a tie-in pic sleeve single (below) with part of the album cover’s back illustration cropped to feature Santa.
Needless to say Chwast’s work (he is still hard at it!) extends to all other forms of printed media and part of his remarkable body of work is best seen in a gallery on his own site.
http://seymourchwastarchive.com/
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