Book Review: Two New Looks at Prestige Records

There is an apocryphal tale of a young singer making his first boat trip to Europe with a band of older, established jazz players. He snuck up on deck to eavesdrop on two of them hanging over the gunwale smoking a joint, hoping to hear some precious wisdom. What he heard instead was one saying, “Man, the Atlantic Ocean is big,” and the other responding, “Yeah, and that’s just the top.”

This is a good analogy for historical research. Just the surface is enormous; getting further down is an almost endless endeavor. Even the best jazz history surveys only cover the lodestar movements and figures, leaving aside deep dives.

One way to avoid this is being inductive instead, typically through tomes on a single record (Ashley’s Kahn’s A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album), a single artist (Robin D.G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original) or a single movement (George Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music).

Two new books, researched and written separately yet published within a few months of each other, take this approach with Prestige Records as the focus, yet from distinctly different angles. Either one is worth reading, but best to pair them up for fuller understanding of one of the most significant postwar record labels.

Listening to Prestige
Founded in 1949 and existing as a discrete entity until a sale to the Fantasy conglomerate in 1971, Prestige helped document several movements’ worth of small-group modern jazz. It was one of the several independents doing so under the direction of one or two internal figures before that world dried up in the ’70s, largely to be replaced by overseas imprints and artist-run houses until a return of major-label interest at the end of the decade and beyond.

The story of Prestige is largely that of jazz aficionado-turned-record seller/producer Bob Weinstock. Yet like anything jazz-related, ultimately it became a collective effort, through his various “employees”: musicians, producers, talent scouts, artists and so forth. If there is a common thread to these two different books, it is that Weinstock was comfortable both with what he did and did not know, giving plenty of freedom to the aforementioned workers, the results all the more dynamic for it.

Listening to Prestige: Chronicling Its Classic Jazz Recordings, 1949–1972 (SUNY Press), by Tad Richards, grew out of a blog project he undertook: listening to the label’s entire catalogue chronologically, the discographical equivalent of using sonar to map the ocean floor. All that material was a good foundation for this book, which, in about 250 pages — it could have been twice the length — covers Prestige’s story with key recording sessions and label artists. The narrative provides enlightenment on the period more broadly through various examples of overlap.

Richards’s style is very conversational, full of anecdotes and multi-person accounts. As such, Weinstock is presented warts and all, whether it was not paying for rehearsals in the name of artistic spontaneity, or reissuing albums in a slapdash fashion, but also for the delegatory spirit mentioned above. Artists too are given similar treatment, not always lionized, with Miles Davis often persnickety, John Coltrane self-effacing and Thelonious Monk belligerent, to give only a few examples. Given that nearly all the principals are gone, Richards fills out the stories with direct quotes from earlier interviews.

As we go from Weinstock’s earliest days selling records from his parents’ apartment, the rise of various record sizes and the intricacies of distribution to the artists arriving — sometime receding and returning — on the scene and encountering one another in Rudy Van Gelder’s home studio, a picture emerges of jazz as a living organism developing in real time through various choices and happenstance, a nice change from a more typical presentation of everything as almost preordained.

What would have happened if early Prestige photographer, later A&R man and producer Esmond Edwards hadn’t been neighbors with drummer Art Taylor and been invited to accompany him to a Jackie McLean recording session? No one can know really, but it is possible many of the artists he later brought to the label may never have gotten a chance to be heard. Even scarier, what if Van Gelder’s parents had wanted to keep their living room for entertaining?

Interspersed with all these stories of groups hastily put together, figuring out what to do in six hours of booked studio time, are reviews of some of the same, excerpted from Richards’s blog, oddly offset in grey blocks as if screengrabs.

Written at a different time and for a different purpose — and presumably unedited from the original posts — these reviews have a different tone, more analytical and definitely more opinionated. Though not stated explicitly, the author’s tastes become quite evident over the course of the book, championing certain artists in particular.

Wailing with Prestige
Edwards is introduced in Richards’s book in a chapter discussing the label’s cover art. This brings us to the second book, WAIL: The Visual Language of Prestige Records (RIT Press), put together by Chris Entwisle and Mark Havens, both artists and designers. In contrast to Richards’ small-form paperback, WAIL is a gorgeous, nearly LP-sized hardcover edition with thick glossy paper, crucial for the reproductions included.

A similar illuminatory quality comes through in its 300-plus pages. Now a record cover can be nearly as important as the music contained therein, but at the time of Prestige’s founding, the LP barely existed in the form we know now. How that changed is initially described in an introductory chapter by noted design historian Steven Heller.

But more granular details come through in detailed portraits of Prestige’s stable of designers, now legendary names like Edwards, David X Young,  Bob Parent, Tom Hannan and Reid Miles, as well as remembrances of early Prestige employees Ira Gitler and Don Schlitten. A name somewhat lost to history is saxophonist Gil Mellé (later a soundtrack composer and pioneer of electronic music), who designed covers for both Blue Note and Prestige during his time as a recording artist for both labels.

Weinstock emerges as an unlikely hero. While some of the early releases had his photographs — another cost-saving measure, like the fact that two-tone rather than full-color printing was far cheaper, explaining a key element of Prestige cover style — Weinstock was a savvy enough businessman to realize the marketing potential of front-facing album artwork.

And in the same way he was loathe to tell his musicians what and with whom to play, he gave designers near carte blanche to bring their own spirit to their work, whether it be Young’s abstractions, Hannan’s representative style or photographer Scott Hyde’s exposure experiments.

Especially fun is reading the backstories of some of the most iconic covers in jazz, like Edwards deciding on a posed photo of John Coltrane in Van Gelder’s backyard rather than a performance shot for the saxophonist’s leader debut, or how the design of Hannan’s rolleiflex camera led to the perspective of Sonny Rollins on Saxophone Colossus. Also nifty is a bonus section showing how some covers changed when reissued.

The main draw, though, is the artwork, which taken together is as vibrant and groundbreaking for its time as the music it accompanied.

If there is a complaint to be made about the two books — apart from Richards mistakenly giving the venue for Monk and Coltrane’s 1957 concert as Town Hall rather than Carnegie Hall, or referring to Eric Dolphy as a free-jazz musician; and WAIL having several incorrect page numbers in its index, making reading and looking an occasional challenge — is that both focus mostly on Prestige’s first decade, giving short shrift to its later catalogue.

Richards does talk about that era and some of its artists briefly — almost painfully so — but his focus is more on what one imagines are the albums he prefers, which tend be early in the history. Similarly, WAIL barely cracks the ’60s, maybe because Entwisle and Havens found later covers to be less creative and compelling. JT