Impulse! Records was an American jazz label, originally established in 1960 by producer Creed Taylor as a subsidiary of ABC-Paramount Records. Creed Taylor, who had previously worked with the New York-based Bethlehem Records label initially decided on the name "Pulse", but shortly before the label was launched it was discovered that there was already a label with that name, so Taylor added a prefix, becoming Impulse.
The classic design of the label, used for most of the 1960s, featured alternations of the Impulse name and the "i-and-exclamation-mark" logo in white-and-orange, set in a black ring, which encircled the label details, most of which was printed in bold black lettering on an orange circle, with some details printed in white. Around 1968 the circular front-cover badge was replaced by a new one-colour design, featuring a simplified Impulse! logo and the ABC Records logo side by side, within a divided rectangular border.
Creed Taylor's successor Bob Thiele produced nearly all of the albums released during Impulse's "classic" period in the 1960s. During the period that Taylor and Thiele led the label, many Impulse albums were recorded at the Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey studio owned and operated by engineer Rudy Van Gelder, and this association lasted from the label's inception until around the time of Thiele's departure in the late 1960s.
Impulse is recognised as a key outlet for free jazz and the broad musical movement that was spearheaded by artists including John Coltrane and his wife Alice, Albert Ayler, Freddie Hubbard, Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp and McCoy Tyner.
Coltrane's classic 1965 LP A Love Supreme became one of the most successful jazz albums ever released, and with his premature death from liver cancer in 1967 Impulse lost its most prestigious, best-selling and productive artist. Impulse is now part of Universal Music Group and has been relegated to a reissue-only label.