A staff producer, a borrowed name and a prefix, 1960.

Impulse! did not start as an independent. English Wikipedia says the label was established by Creed Taylor in 1960 as the jazz subsidiary of Am-Par, the record company of ABC-Paramount, which the American Broadcasting Company had set up in 1955 to market music from its television shows. Taylor, a young producer who had also worked at Bethlehem Records, had already produced jazz albums for ABC-Paramount before the company hired him as producer and A&R manager for the new imprint.

The name came about by accident. Wikipedia says Taylor first chose “Pulse”, learned that another label already used it and added a prefix, and that the label’s headquarters moved to the Avenue of the Americas in the mid-1960s. The exclamation mark that followed became part of the name.

Kahn starts from the corporate setting. Speaking to NPR’s Morning Edition on 6 June 2006, the music journalist Ashley Kahn, whose book The House That Trane Built tells the label’s story, said Impulse! was “born within the belly of the beast”: a jazz line inside a company then known for pop singers such as Paul Anka and Frankie Avalon. Kahn told Jerry Jazz Musician in an interview published on 29 July 2006 that major labels such as Columbia or RCA had put their jazz records on the same imprint as their pop, classical and country artists, while ABC-Paramount decided to create a label dedicated to jazz. He said Taylor’s aim was quality productions inside quality packaging, preferring well-rehearsed, well-arranged sessions to loose jam recordings.

The opening signings set the pattern. Wikipedia says Taylor signed Ray Charles, recently out of his Atlantic contract, and released Gil Evans’s Out of the Cool and Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth. He also signed John Coltrane, the label’s one exclusive artist, according to Kahn on NPR; Wikipedia says the label came to be known as “the house that Trane built”. Taylor left in the summer of 1961 to run Verve Records for MGM.

Thiele, Michel, a move west and a run of owners.

Bob Thiele succeeded Taylor and produced most of the label’s albums of the 1960s. Wikipedia says Thiele had worked for Decca and its Coral and Brunswick labels, and that his first Impulse! production was Coltrane’s Live! at the Village Vanguard, released in March 1962. Kahn told Jerry Jazz Musician that Thiele came in after Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and recorded swing players as readily as the “New Thing”. Wikipedia lists Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, McCoy Tyner and collaborations between Coltrane and Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins among the decade’s releases. Thiele left in 1969 and later set up Flying Dutchman Records.

Ed Michel followed him. Wikipedia says the label under Michel acquired LP masters that Sun Ra had recorded for his own private label, and that when ABC restructured its record division in the early 1970s, merging the ABC label with Dunhill, Impulse! moved to share headquarters with ABC-Dunhill in Los Angeles. In 1970 it issued the American edition of Genesis’s second album, Trespass. In 1974 ABC bought the Famous Music labels and catalogue from Gulf+Western, and their jazz recordings were added to the Impulse! catalogue.

The owners changed after that. Wikipedia says new recordings stopped in the late 1970s, that ABC kept reissuing titles until it sold its record company to MCA Records in 1979, and that the label lay dormant until 1992, when it was revived as part of MCA’s GRP Records and began signing new artists again in the late 1990s. In 1999 Impulse! became part of Universal Music Group’s jazz holdings under the Verve Label Group. Universal has owned the label since then. Kahn said on NPR in 2006 that Verve was using the name mainly for music linked to Coltrane.

A newer chapter followed. Pollstar reported on 30 July 2020 that Jamie Krents, executive vice-president of Verve/Impulse! Records, described the signing of the London saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings as coming while the company was relaunching Impulse!, and that Hutchings’s 2020 album with Shabaka and the Ancestors, We Are Sent Here By History, came out on the label with cover art by Daniela Yohannes.

Orange, black and a mark that mirrors itself.

A record label has to decide early how much of each release it wants to own visually. At one end sits a house style: a fixed grid, a set typeface and a recurring frame or colour band, so that every cover reads as part of the same run and the artwork works inside a template. At the other end the label commissions a new image for every record, often from a different artist or designer each time, and its identity lives in the choices it makes rather than in a fixed layout. Many labels sit between the two, giving the front of the sleeve to the release and keeping the back, the inner sleeve and the centre label in a consistent format with the same type, credits order and placement of the mark.

Series give that consistency a second layer. A run of compilations, a dance imprint or a reissue line can carry its own colour, numbering and sleeve treatment, so that the series is recognisable on its own while still belonging to the label. Reissues add questions of their own: whether to reproduce the original artwork exactly, restore it from old film, or set it inside a new frame that marks the edition, its date and its format. When several labels join a group, they often share distribution, manufacturing and back-office systems while keeping separate names, marks and sleeve styles. For designers, a label identity is a set of rules about where the house voice appears and where it steps back for the release.

A livery chosen to stand out on a shelf.

The look of the records is documented in some detail. English Wikipedia says the black, orange and white livery was devised by Fran Attaway, then known as Fran Scott, whom Creed Taylor also credits with starting the label’s habit of hiring photographers for its covers, and that the colours were chosen for their brightness and because no other label used the combination. The logo set the Impulse! name in a heavy, lower-case sans-serif, followed by an exclamation mark that mirrors the lower-case “i” at the start. For most of the 1960s, Wikipedia says, covers carried the logo in orange letters inside a white circle, with black-and-orange exclamation marks above and the catalogue number below; A Love Supreme used the same badge in black and white. In 1968 the circular badge gave way to a one-colour panel pairing a simplified Impulse! logo with the ABC Records logo inside a divided rectangle.

The sleeves themselves were part of the identity. Wikipedia says covers usually ran large colour photographs or paintings to the edges, printed on glossy laminated stock, and that most LPs came in a gatefold sleeve with photographs, liner notes and sometimes booklets. It names the art director Robert Flynn and photographers including Pete Turner, Chuck Stewart, Arnold Newman, Ted Russell and Joe Alper. The sparse black-and-white back covers carried the line “The New Wave of Jazz is on IMPULSE!”

The spine was designed to be read. Jerry Jazz Musician printed a Creed Taylor quotation alongside its 2006 interview: an album could be seen on a coffee table or on a bookshelf, and either way the label should be easy to find. Kahn said in the same interview that what people noticed when holding an Impulse! record was the thick vinyl, the orange and black spine and the full-bleed glossy cover, and that the label understood listening included reading the liner notes and looking at the photographs.

For a design guide, Impulse! shows how a two-colour spine, a badge and a single punctuation mark can hold a catalogue together across owners and decades. Compare Blue Note Records, another jazz label known for its sleeves, and Verve Records, the label Taylor left to run and the group that now looks after Impulse!. For this guide we use spine orange, sleeve black and badge white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Impulse! Records’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.