Who's on the cover of Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil?

December 5, 2007 2:49 PM

Who is the woman in the foreground on the cover of Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil?

There are a hojillion jazz albums that have a photograph of the artist(s) on the cover, and an awful lot that have a photograph of some model (almost invariably female) on the cover. But I can't recall any that have a photograph of the artist and a model on the cover.

So what's the deal? Was she someone in Shorter's life, or was it indeed a model and this just another example of Wayne Shorter making a unique artistic choice?

Any related musings on jazz photography, cover design, etc. welcomed too, along with illustrative counterexamples to the last sentence of my first paragraph.

posted by No-sword to media & arts (5 comments total)

I think you'll find that the image is a combination of two separate images. From that small image, it looks like there is a natural division down the middle. Plus, the lighting on the two faces are quite different.

I ran across this image of the Shorter album "Ju Ju". While not the same image of Shorter, it certainly looks to be from the same photo session as the picture on the album you reference. Note the leafy grasses.

My guess is they used a pic from that photo session, then stripped-in a female model onto the right side of the cover. I doubt that there's any relationship between Shorter and the girl.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:21 PM on December 5, 2007

Oh, duh. I was assuming that he just broke out the leafy grasses again for thematic reasons, but obviously it'd be much easier to use a spare from the last session and add another face on the right to fool easily-fooled people like me into thinking it was totally different. Thanks!
posted by No-sword at 3:46 PM on December 5, 2007

The photos and cover design are by Reid Miles. And the model might have been Rose Nelmes, who was working for Miles on other Blue Note covers of that time.
posted by paulsc at 5:06 PM on December 5, 2007

Says here (Japanese) and here (Japanese) that it's a Japanese lady who was Shorter's wife at the time. But these sources are shaky, to say the least. Although there's no reference about her on his Wikipedia page, according to it he appears to be a Gakkai-in, so I guess it might be possible. Maybe someone else can shed some light.
posted by misozaki at 6:04 PM on December 5, 2007

Huh, so it might still be somebody meaningful even if edited in after the fact... I found some more shaky sources in English and Korean that put a name to her: Irene (or Teruka) Shorter. That looks like it's as far as I'm going to get online, though. Thanks, all.

(paulsc, that's a great example of artist + model. I had completely overlooked the "artist ogles model" genre.)
posted by No-sword at 4:15 PM on December 6, 2007