Jazz, Blues and Stars

Here's two of my best contributions to good music in London.


The Blues of Cain poster was the first thing that I ever coloured with Photoshop when I got my first computer in 1998.
The poster had all that blue space so that it could have added the date and time of the gig with white strips of papers without having to print new posters each time.

I think that only 4 copies were printed and they indeed served the purpose they were intended for a lot of times, mostly along Kilburn High Road, some other times around the Portobello area.
This band is a smashing rock-blues groove machine led by my friend Dave Clarke that's a groovy bass player indeed.
I found here a page about Station House, another band Dave plays with and whose members sometimes coincide with those of Blues of Cain.

This other artwork is a cd cover for Roberto Bellatalla's excellent album Borrowed time.

Roberto is a free-jazz warrior and has been playing his double bass with many great free-jazz bands all over Europe since the mid seventies.
In this album he plays with Claude Deppa on trumpet and flugelhorn, Jason Jarde on alto and soprano sax and Brian Abrahams on drums.
All compositions are by Roberto and they're all great tunes. This cd is a blast and I'm proud of having been asked to do the cover art.

I thought that this illustration could convey a number of different messages at the same time. The most important being that here it's the bass that propells the band along its musical journey.
Another reason behind this illustration is the title of the cd with the movement of planets and stars representing the flow of time.
As for the style, I wanted it to remind of a renaissance invention like those crazy machines by Leonardo, to express how much this cd is the result of abstract thinking and at the same time making a reference to Roberto's Tuscanian origin.