Presenting the Studio on Record Covers: Changing the Understanding of Swedish Jazz Records

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes early Swedish jazz record covers to understand how producers and users comprehended the jazz record as a medium. It employs Jonathan Sterne’s definition of a medium as a social agreement about use. The article shows how, following the transition from shellac to vinyl records in Sweden in the 1950s, record covers reinterpreted the understanding of the jazz record. From seeing a record as a mediation of live music, users and producers started to see the record as an artifact that resulted from artistic work that had taken place in a recording studio.