The Weird Connection Between ‘The A,’ Dizzy Gillespie, and Tony Bennett

Atlanta will debut their new City Connect uniforms tomorrow — the 49th anniversary of Henry Aaron’s record-breaking 715th home run. The front of the jersey, with its “The A” insignia, reminded longtime reader/contributor Ron Ruelle (the man behind the Brooklyn Branches project) of a design project from early in his career. It’s a fun story — take it away, Ron!

The Story of the “the”

By Ron Ruelle

There are lots of design elements in the Atlanta baseball team’s new City Connect uniform, but I’m particularly interested in the jersey insignia — “The A.” Specifically, I’m interested in the “The.” Some designer spent some time on that, and I should know, because I once had to design another “The,” similar to this one. By coincidence, my story takes place in Atlanta — or, rather, in “the A,” as it is apparently now called. And while my story doesn’t involve Henry Aaron, it does involve Dizzy Gillespie and Tony Bennett, so listen up!

Back in 1989-90, when I was in grad school at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta, I worked for Intersound Records. I designed covers mostly for classical records, but they also had a jazz label and some other niche labels. Anyway, in August of ’89, Dizzy Gillespie recorded something called The Symphony Sessions, which featured him blowin’ his horn along with a symphony orchestra. Our label had the rights to distribute it, so we rushed it into production later that year. It would be one of the last recordings of new material released in Gillespie’s lifetime.

For the record cover, our company acquired the rights to a painting of Dizzy by singer Tony Bennett (who is also a talented painter). Our lead designer was working on the rest of the graphics, but he wanted a handwritten script for the “The” in “The Symphony Sessions.”

That “The” became my assignment. I spent, I kid you not, an entire half-day at work writing the word “The” over and over again with different markers, brushes, calligraphy pens, crayons, whatever was handy. All-caps, script, scratchy, scribbly, weird folk styles, “jazzy” styles, you name it. Remember, this was before Adobe Illustrator was a useful program, before all those lovely script fonts, before the internet.

And yes, I was on the clock the whole time.

Eventually, they combined the “th” from one version and the “e” from another to create the “the.” It’s unfortunate that the text covers so much of the illustration, but still not a terrible cover. Sadly, since I did not get a design credit in the liner notes, this assignment doesn’t show up on my Discogs profile. (But I do have a sweet Dick Tracy record cover illustration from those days listed there). (Update: Someone has now added the credit to my Discogs profile after all!)

So yeah: Dizzy, Tony, and me. And that’s that for the “the.”

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I love this story! But I have a major gripe with the typography: For the recording date — August 25th, 1989 — they put the comma after the “5,” instead of after the superscript “TH.” Superscripts often cause problems — it’s usually best to avoid them.

Anyway: Big thanks to Ron for sharing this story with us, and for giving us some fun content to ease us into the weekend!