In 1966, at a moment when jazz was exploding into new forms, Alan Bates, a young producer at Fontana Records, launched what would quietly become one of the most significant and collectible avant-garde jazz projects of the decade.

Working across both the UK and Dutch Fontana imprints, Bates curated a series of albums that captured a crucial era in the evolution of free and experimental jazz (roughly 1962 to 1966) just as the old guard was giving way to the New Thing.

The sessions themselves came from everywhere: club recordings, self-financed tapes from the artists, even reissues of overlooked U.S. material originally released on Riverside, such as George Russell’s The Outer View and Rod Levitt’s Dynamic Sound Patterns. What unified them wasn’t geography but spirit, an urgency to document the shifting fault lines of modern music.

And then came the artwork.

To give visual form to this radical music, Fontana turned to a 29-year-old Dutch artist and lithographer named Marte Röling. Known at home for her vibrant pop-inflected portraits and fashion illustrations, Röling brought a bold, psychological twist to the series.

Across roughly 16 albums, Röling designed a suite of covers that remain unmatched in the history of jazz art. Each is a vivid, surreal portrait of a musician: Paul Bley, Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim), Marion Brown, Cecil Taylor, Dewey Redman, John Tchicai, Ted Curson, and others, rendered as an intricate cutaway head, its interior filled with colorful symbols, numbers, valves, and dreamlike mechanisms.

They’re portraits of consciousness: the machinery of the jazz mind.

For John Tchicai’s Mohawk, Röling filled the skull with saxophones and protest marches. On Marion Brown’s Juba–Lee, numerals and coiling brass valves twist through the psyche. Each image seems to visualize the synaptic chaos and creative logic of improvisation itself.

Photographers Guy Kopelowicz and Ray Ross provided the base portraits that Röling reinterpreted through lithography, producing lush, layered images that still feel startlingly modern.

“All people, musicians included, are made of a vast series of past experiences and influences,” Röling once said. “Some clear to us, others buried deep. I wanted to show both.”

Musically, the Fontana New Jazz Series was as adventurous as its artwork. This was jazz unshackled; experimental, politically aware, and deeply international. Fontana’s UK and Dutch divisions both pressed the series, though the exact editions varied: collectors note that Communication, Mohawk, Rufus, and Jazz Realities appeared in both black-label British and blue-label Dutch pressings.

Despite its limited run, the series burned bright. It captured the restless energy of early European free jazz and its dialogue with America’s radical new movement. Many of these recordings were ephemeral, urgent, improvised and might have vanished without Bates’ intervention.

Over time, Röling’s lithographs became as coveted as the music itself. Collectors prize these Fontana LPs not only for their historical importance but for the sheer beauty of their presentation. The saturated colors, the tactile quality of the print, the way each portrait feels simultaneously introspective and cosmic.

They were printed using traditional color lithography, Röling’s preferred technique, which lent each cover a richness that screen-printing couldn’t match. Today, complete sets of the series are vanishingly rare; individual titles routinely command high prices on the collector market. Japan has reissued many of the sessions with the original artwork by Röling.

What makes Röling’s work so timeless is its conceptual depth. Each drawing features a dotted line bisecting the head — a symbolic divide between the conscious and subconscious, the rational and the improvisational. Inside that boundary, Röling seems to illustrate the neurological dance of creativity: the valves of thought, the gears of instinct, the noise of the world channeled into melody.

In her universe, the jazz musician isn’t just playing; they’re processing; absorbing history, politics, identity, and sound, and releasing it as art. The effect is both whimsical and profound, like the music it represents.