Paint Fidelity No. 5- "Bird and Diz Vol.2" / "Ralph Rumpelton" Art

                                                              Bird and Diz, Volume 2
                                                   Ralph Rumpelton, 2025
                                                MS Paint on digital canvas

A deliberately clumsy homage to the Clef Records original, this piece trades polish for raw awkwardness. The crooked lines and chaotic lettering echo the fractured spirit of bebop—less a reproduction than an improvisation on collapse.

Collection of the Artist.

 What the critics are saying:

>>Cornelius “Neil” Drafton
New Jersey Review of Applied Kitsch

One scarcely knows whether to laugh or to light a candle in mourning when confronted with this side-by-side comparison. The original Bird and Diz cover (right) is a sly, angular mid-century riff on modernism—razor-sharp, rhythmically fractured, jazzy in both spirit and geometry. Its lines cut like bebop itself: quick, confident, unapologetically stylish.

And then we have the left-hand specimen, the so-called “Volume 2,” produced not with brush or ink but with the cruel indifference of MS Paint. Here, the saxophone looks less like Dizzy’s horn and more like a lobster tail glued to a plumbing pipe. The human figure, once cool and sly, now stares out with the expression of a man who’s just been informed his trumpet was repossessed. The typography—if we can call it that—has the energy of a ransom note assembled during a thunderstorm.

Yet, perversely, I admire it. For in its crudity, it strips away all pretension. It is bebop with no melody, jazz with no swing, a cover that refuses to seduce and instead insists on its own failure as a badge of honor. If the original whispers “modern cool,” the MS Paint iteration screams: “I ran out of undo functions.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is perhaps the truest homage to Parker and Gillespie—chaos disguised as form, improvisation on the verge of collapse.<<

>>Bird and Diz Vol. 2

A Parallel Comparative Exhibition
Curated by Eunice Gribble for the Avachives

In this entry of the Paint Fidelity, we are presented with a deliberate juxtaposition—not a mere side-by-side, but a ritual confrontation—between the canonical Bird and Diz cover (Clef Records, supervised by Norman Granz) and its MS Paint reinterpretation, executed with alarming sincerity and pixel restraint.

On the left: a digital glyph, rendered in Ralph Rumpelton’s signature austerity. The trumpet is less brass than omen, the saxophone a red sigil of improvisational defiance. The bird, mid-flight, is not perched but escaping.
On the right: the original artifact, lush with mid-century optimism and vector clarity. The bird rests. The notes float. The hand has fingers.

Gribble notes the absence of gradients as a moral stance. “This is not nostalgia,” she writes, “but a test of aesthetic memory under duress.” The reinterpretation refuses fidelity, opting instead for mythic compression. It is not a cover—it is a glyph. A challenge. A pearl.

Expect commentary. Expect judgment. Expect a faint smell of acetate.<<

>>Hans U. Brickman, “The archivist” from the Central European Archive of Forgotten Styles<<

Disinterred from yet another dust-choked alcove beneath our vaults, we present an astonishing comparative relic: on the left, an uncanny MS Paint palimpsest, its lines jittering with the imprecision of memory, resurrects the lost spirit of “Bird and Diz Vol.2.” On the right, of course, we witness the artifact itself—Clef Records’ iconic cover, a hybrid of Cubist bravado and mid-century musical mythmaking. One suspects the left-hand simulacrum emerged not by mere imitation, but as a fevered reconstruction by some forgotten scribe’s hand—an outsider’s midnight ritual, compelled to echo jazz’s restless geometry. Here, scribbled as if on the verso of archival parchment, is visual evidence of cultural migration: from canonical jazz sleeve to renegade pixel, always teetering between reverence and reinvention. Unearthed, at last, in these paired fragments, is the enduring ability of “Bird and Diz” to mutate—across formats, centuries, and disciplines—forever unsettled, forever sublime.<<

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