Impulse! Records (occasionally styled as "¡mpulse! Records" and "¡!") is an American jazz record label established by Creed Taylor in 1960. John Coltrane was among Impulse!'s earliest signings. Thanks to consistent sales and positive critiques of his recordings, the label came to be known as "the house that Trane built".

Impulse!'s parent company, ABC-Paramount Records, was established in 1955 as the recording division of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). In the 1940s and 1950s, ABC benefitted from the U.S. government's antitrust actions against broadcasters and film studios who were forced to divest parts of their companies. In the early 1950s, ABC acquired the Blue Network of radio stations from NBC and later merged with the newly independent Paramount Theaters chain, formerly owned by Paramount Pictures.

The new recording division was located at 1501 Broadway, above the Paramount Theatre in Times Square. Under the leadership of Leonard Goldenson, the former head of Paramount Pictures, the company "sought to establish itself as a cross-media force in television, theaters and sound recordings". It enjoyed early success in TV with The Mickey Mouse Club, a joint venture with Disney.

To market music from the successful TV show, ABC-Paramount established the Am-Par Record Corporation and the ABC-Paramount label in early 1955, appointing Sam Clark, a Boston record distributor, as president, with Larry Newton as sales manager and Harry Levine the A&R director. The new recording company enjoyed Goldenson's full support. Sid Feller, a producer and arranger, was the first salaried employee on July 15, 1955. The label achieved early success in pop music with Paul Anka. A young producer named Creed Taylor, who also worked for a period at Bethlehem Records in 1955, produced some of ABC-Paramount/Am-Par's earliest albums for musicians such as Urbie Green, Billy Taylor, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Dorham and Zoot Sims.

In 1960, Am-Par established a jazz subsidiary and hired Taylor as producer and A&R manager. He chose the name "Pulse" but then learned there was already a label with that name, so he added a prefix. In the mid-1960s, the headquarters of Impulse! was moved to 1130 Avenue of the Americas.

Impulse!'s albums are known for their visual appeal. The black, orange, and white livery was devised by Fran Attaway (then known as Fran Scott), whom Taylor also credits with establishing the label's tradition of using cutting-edge photographers for its covers. The color scheme was chosen for its brightness and because no other label used this combination.

The label's logo featured the Impulse! name in a heavy, sans-serif, lower-cased font, followed by an exclamation mark that mirrors the lower-case "i" at the beginning. For most of the 1960s, Impulse!'s album covers featured the logo in orange letters in a white circle, with black-and-orange exclamation marks above it, and the catalog number below it. One exception is the album A Love Supreme, which used the design in black and white. In 1968 the circular front-cover badge was replaced by a one-color design featuring a simplified Impulse! logo and the ABC Records logo side by side within a divided rectangular border.

Album covers often featured stylish, large-format photographs or paintings, usually in color, which were typically bled out to the edges of the cover and printed on glossy laminated stock. Many of the best-known Impulse! covers were designed by art director Robert Flynn and photographed by a small group that included Pete Turner, who shot covers for Verve, A&M, and CTI; Chuck Stewart; Arnold Newman; Ted Russell; and Joe Alper, who was known for his early ’60s photographs of Bob Dylan) The sparse black-and-white back covers bore the slogan "The New Wave of Jazz is on IMPULSE!" Most Impulse! LPs were issued in a gatefold sleeve, with photographs, liner notes, and, in some cases, multi-page booklets.