Golden Age Jazz Publications: Metronome
continuing this series highlighting mid-century magazines
This next installment of my publications series is highlighting the magazine Metronome. Metronome was originally founded and started issues in January of 1885, ultimately running through December of 1961, making it just shy of 77 years old!
While it initially focused more on classical music, come the early 1920s they began shifting to big band/swing and early Jazz, covering the emergence of bebop. For me, most of the best issues of this magazine were from the 1950s until it’s demise. Ultimately, I think the magazine struggled with focus a bit, sometimes shifting into other popular music of the time instead of leaning in to a specific genre — the Jazz Today experiment that only ran for 13 issues was an attempt to dive more into Jazz editorial work, but it didn’t quite get the adoption rates needed to keep it viable.
I do not have a complete set of these (they tend to be a bit tough to track down and fairly expensive) but I have about 60 issues overall, mostly spanning the 1950s and 60s. I selected a spread of covers to highlight that also show quite a few different cover layouts and fonts (including the brief name change to Music USA around the time when Jazz Today was in production.
Like the last post, I will also highlight advertisements and photography that stuck out to me when flipping through the issues.
Covers
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Photography
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Advertisements/Graphical Elements/Typography
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Bonus: Jazz From Japan article!
Here’s a fun article with early reporting on the Jazz movement in Japan. Please keep in mind with all of these articles that there is language used in them that is ‘of the time’ and not exactly culturally sensitive in 2025, to put it kindly, but from a historical/archival perspective it’s interesting to read!
Click each to enlarge to view full size to read.
I hope you enjoyed this look inside Metronome! Do you own any issues of this magazine? If so, what is your favorite? Do any of these covers/images surprise you?
One of my favorite images I found in these issues is one of Sarah Vaughan, Clifford Brown, and the rest of the band recording Sarah’s legendary EmArcy self-titled release — one that was her own favorite recording and has been inducted into the Grammy hall of fame! What a wonderful peek into the studio for such a pivotal recording!