I told Harry Levine, „I’d like to do a gatefold cover with a laminated surface, but not just one title. I think we need a handful of titles, a full line, in order to have a dynamic impact in the marketplace.“ Harry agreed.
„Pulse“ was my original idea for the name of the label. That’s what jazz is all about – a rhythm or a pulse. ABC did a copyright search but the name wouldn’t clear. Some other product had the name. It occurred to me that Im-pulse would also be appropriate, to have a jazz label with a name that meant „of the moment.“ That cleared but not too long after the first Impulse titles came out, I walked into the men’s room at Idlewild Airport and there on the urinal was the brand name „Impulse.“ I don’t think that hurt our sales.
[…]
The lower case „i“ against the exclamation point was the idea of my secretary – Margo Guryan, a songwriter who later married Bob Brookmeyer. The orange and black in the Impulse design was my concept. I was pleased to discover that those colors on the spine worked so well. Those Impulse albums stood out on people’s shelves at home, and it certainly worked well at the retail level.
Creed Taylor (as told to Ashley Kahn), Oktober 2010 (First Impulse: The Creed Taylor Collection – 50th Anniversary“, Hip-O-Select/Universal, 4CD/Buch, 2011)
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba