Listening to Prestige
By Tad Richards
Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press
I once had a conversation with a friend who was bemoaning what he considered to be the miserable state of contemporary pop music. He said that was OK by him, though, because he could ignore it and spend the rest of his life listening to 1950s and 1960s jazz he hadn’t heard, and told me, “If I haven’t heard it, then it’s new music to me.”
I was reminded of my friend’s comment after reading the new book, Listening to Prestige by Tad Richards. I thought I knew my jazz. After reading Listening to Prestige, however, I realized that there are vast gaps in my jazz knowledge, and it was a delight to have author Tad Richards educate me about the rich history of the Prestige record label during its existence from 1949 to 1972, about its founder Bob Weinstock, and about the many, many jazz greats who recorded for the label. Richards has a deep understanding of jazz history, and the book is an outgrowth of his Listening to Prestige blog, which he started 10 years ago and which, like this book, is a comprehensive deep dive into Prestige’s incredible recorded legacy. And that legacy is monumental – Prestige released around 1,000 jazz albums, plus singles.
For me, jazz is the highest form of music, along with classical. Classical of course requires virtuosic talent from the musicians, but I’m more attracted to jazz because of the improvisation, the ability of jazz musicians to create spontaneous and brilliant music on the spot. Thankfully, Prestige, along with independent and major labels like Blue Note, Riverside, Verve, Impulse!, Savoy, Atlantic, Columbia and others, captured some of the greatest artists and moments in jazz.
Listening to Prestige covers a dazzling range of music and albums including landmark moments in jazz history, from Prestige’s beginnings in recording bebop and post-bop when the label was named New Jazz, to Miles Davis’s and John Coltrane’s early recordings, through Prestige’s soul jazz and free jazz albums of the 1960s and early 1970s.
What a roster Prestige had! Those who recorded for the label as leaders or sidemen include Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, George Benson, Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, Cannonball Adderley, Sonny Stitt, Mose Allison, Stan Getz, Art Blakey, Paul Chambers, Roy Haynes, Kenny Burrell, Philly Joe Jones, Herbie Mann and almost countless others. Along with those luminaries, Prestige recorded a wealth of lesser-known though very talented musicians, like Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, Jimmy Forrest, Carmell Jones, and…did you know about Dorothy Ashby? Neither did I. She played harp, a rare instrument in jazz, and was wonderful.
Prestige also earned its place in jazz history as being among the first labels to work with recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who was a pioneer in the way jazz was recorded, and who later became legendary for his stellar-sounding work with Blue Note. Richards calls Van Gelder’s parents “the unsung heroes of jazz,” because they let their young son build a recording studio in their living room.
Like so many record entrepreneurs who began their careers in the 1940s and 1950s, Bob Weinstock started the label as an enthusiast. He lamented the fact that his favorite bebop music that he heard in the New York jazz clubs was not being recorded. Fueled by the post-World War II economic boom, record making had become a growing field, and record companies became aware of listeners’ growing demand for jazz, R&B and blues. Weinstock seized the opportunity.
As a youth, Weinstock had worked at a record store and was more knowledgeable than some about the business side of record making, and with the help of musicians like Kenny Clarke and others he had met at the record store, he sought out musicians. Since Weinstock lived in New York, the jazz capital of the world, he found them. They encouraged him to start his own label and record the bebop music and artists that were ignored by other companies. After a number of releases under the New Jazz label, the first being a record by the Lennie Tristano Quintet, Weinstock changed its name to Prestige, which began releasing 78 RPM discs, then 10-inch LPs, then in 1955 moving to the 12-inch long-playing format.
The first part of Listening to Prestige follows a largely chronological format which covers the early history of Bob Weinstock and postwar independent jazz labels, the artists who recorded on the New Jazz label, and the birth of Prestige. The book moves on to include chapters and sections about individual artists like Miles, Monk, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Sonny Rollins, Mose Allison, and Yusuf Lateef, while weaving in chapters about Rudy Van Gelder, the changing musical tides of post-bop and free jazz, and more. There’s a chapter on Prestige’s subsidiary labels Swingville, Moodsville and Bluesville, established in 1960 to accommodate more musical diversification…and for tax purposes. Weinstock was frugal. He did not pay musicians for rehearsal time, so among other things, recording sessions were spontaneous, and the loose feel of some Prestige recordings, which some criticized and others prized, were the result. (Weinstock liked spontaneity and first takes.)
Interspersed among the chapters are more than two dozen sidebars, reviews of key albums taken from the Listening to Prestige blog. They are encyclopedic in their listings of personnel, catalog numbers, session details, and insightful criticism. (In an odd printing or transcription quirk, some of the letters in the text randomly are in boldface, but it doesn’t detract from the readability.)
The book does not shy away from the era’s discrimination against Black musicians, and the fact that Weinstock was not immune from exploiting them. At the time, the critics of the day showed prejudice in favor of white musicians in their writing and in the Down Beat and Playboy jazz polls. As Miles Davis pointed out: “A lot of white critics kept talking about all these white jazz musicians, imitators of us…Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, Kai Winding, Lee Konitz…like they was gods or something. And some of them white guys were junkies like we were, but wasn’t nobody writing about that like they was writing about us…Now I’m not saying that these guys weren’t good musicians, because they were…but they didn’t start nothing, and they knew it, and they weren’t the best at what was being done.”
On the other hand, Weinstock gave musicians a platform for their art, and a second chance for people like Miles while they were struggling with addiction. And Listening to Prestige does not sugar coat the rampant use of heroin among the jazz musicians of the era, which included many if not most of the big names. The book recalls a Charlie Parker session where he was strung out while recording a song. Before he had to play his solo, he was woken up, after which he nodded off again. It’s hard to believe that Miles Davis was once considered washed up, but the book chronicles his battles with heroin in the early 1950s in passages like this: ”He played in clubs when he could get a gig, and when he could borrow a horn, his own having long since been traded for the white powder he could cook up and shoot into his arm. And borrowed horns had a distressing habit of turning up in pawnshops.” The book also follows Miles’s hard-fought recovery.
Listening to Prestige is filled with stories and anecdotes that illuminate a golden era of jazz. It would take…well, a book…to list more than a few more, but here’s a sample:
For the recording of album The Thelonious Monk Quintet Blows for LP, during the last song of the day producer Ira Gitler needed more material to complete the LP. He recounted: “There I was in the control room…holding up a cardboard sign telling them not to stop. It got to be pretty comical.” The song wound up being more than 10 minutes long.
After recording a track for the album, Gitler asked Monk what the title of one of his compositions was. The pianist said, “Let’s call this…” and got distracted. Gitler took “Let's Call This” as the name of the song. For a second composition, Gitler again asked Monk, “What’s the title?” Monk said, “Think of one!” So, “Think of One” it was.
There was the time when Thelonious Monk spilled a beer during the sessions for the Bags Groove album, featuring Davis, Monk, Milt Jackson (“Bags”), Kenny Clarke, and Percy Heath. Drummer Charli Persip was there: “There’s one spot on one tune where Monk’s solo – he started playing ding-da-ding-ding-ding-ding. What happened was, he had a beer, and he knocked it over on the floor, and he was trying to get that beer up before Rudy Van Gelder would see it, because he knew there would be hell to pay, so he’s fumbling around down there trying to get the bottle to stop it from leaking on the rug, and at the same time he was still playing the solo!”
In the mid-1950s, Esmond Edwards became Prestige’s principal photographer, and at the last minute, Bob Weinstock, slated to produce the album, asked Edwards to fill in. He certainly rose to the occasion: the 1957 album, Coltrane, was John Coltrane’s first as a leader. He would continue as a photographer and keep producing albums for Prestige and other labels. During another session with saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, Edwards noted, “You could tell [him] six months in advance you had a session, and he would not do anything towards preparing for it. I’d show up at the date with a briefcase full of sheet music and say, ‘Hawk, you want to try this? You want to try that?’
Surprisingly, a lot of the tunes I considered well-known standards, he wasn’t that familiar with, but the guy, you’d stick the music in front of him. He’d run it down once, and it was like he wrote it the second performance.”
Don Martin of Mad magazine, “Mad’s Maddest Artist,” actually did some album covers for Prestige. They have a…distinctive look.
If you grew up reading Mad, it won't be hard to figure out who did this bizarre cover art for Miles Davis and Horns.
The Prestige story, other than reissues, came to a close in 1971 when Bob Weinstock sold the label to Fantasy Records. As the book notes, he felt that the jazz he had fallen in love with didn’t exist anymore. The 1960s saw seismic changes in music and society. Eventually, Prestige was the last independent jazz label standing, because no one wanted to buy their catalog until the soul jazz success of organist Richard “Groove” Holmes, along with veteran Prestige saxman Gene Ammons and pianist/organist Charles Earland, made the label attractive to Fantasy. After Fantasy purchased Prestige, though some new recordings would happen, Fantasy mainly became a reissue label, and started the Original Jazz Classics label to re-release the Prestige catalog, along with Riverside, Contemporary, and other labels Fantasy now owned. In 2004, Concord Music Group bought Fantasy and continued to issue releases under the Original Jazz Classics imprint.
Bob Weinstock passed away on January 14, 2006 at age 77. His incredible legacy lives on.
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To hear a selection of 1950s Prestige recordings, click on this Spotify playlist:
Tad Richards: Listening to Prestige, the 1950s
From the first note of “Subconscious-Lee” by Lee Konitz, you’ll know why this music is such an important part of jazz history, and such a joy to listen to.
Tad Richards is a visual artist, poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer who has been active for over four decades. He is the author of many books, including Jazz With a Beat: Small Group Swing, 1940 – 1960.
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