Is there anyone as cool as Miles Davis?  And is there anything cooler than the cover for the 1959 album Workin’ with the Miles Davis Quartet?  Album covers, because they’re big and square and flat, have a fundamental graphic presence that book covers don’t.  And jazz album covers, because they don’t pander to teenage tastes, rock-and-roll cliches, or bourgeois pretensions, seem altogether more sophisticated than other types of album covers.  Different Miles Davis covers showcase cutting edge graphics, photography, and renderings.  On Workin’ there’s a photo of the master trumpeter and bandleader taking a break from a recording session on a quiet New York City side street.  He’s natty, sporting an Eton collar and a skinny black tie, holding his coat closed, and just barely smiling, waiting for the photograph to be taken so he can light his cigarette.

What seduces is the backdrop.  Across the street, sealing the view, there’s the sort of banal concrete and glass building (scaleless, endless and monotonous) that gives modernism a bad name.  The street is empty except for a steamroller, a man crossing the street, and the bumper of a car that just barely pokes into the frame on the left-hand side.  While the perspective lines are dynamic, there’s an air of mystery about the proceedings, an Edward Hopper kind of loneliness, but one that’s distinctly urban.  Is the other man, who looks as if he’s in uniform, a worker operating the steamroller?  Whose car is it?  And is someone looking down from the building across the street, through the open jalousie?  It’s a scene rather loosely (perhaps even accidentally) composed, without heroism, yet it feels ripe mythologically.  Everybody’s going about their business on an ordinary afternoon, and yet it seems like it could be much more than that.