The economic conditions that produced much of the greatest art of the 20th century were… not great. Artists as a class have never made money, and have always struggled. The few exceptions only bring the challenges facing the majority into even sharper relief. (I think of Cecil Taylor’s joke about Miles Davis: “He plays pretty well for a millionaire.”) And much of the best music in American history has been released by independent labels started by hustlers with a dream.

When I first started listening to jazz in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I bought tons of CDs that bore the legend “Original Jazz Classics.” I learned much later that this was an umbrella label created by Fantasy Records to reissue the catalogs of various formerly independent labels they owned, including Prestige, Riverside, Milestone, and Contemporary. They bore the original LP cover art, but the back covers were plain black with white type, listing the tracks, the recording date, the personnel, and the label that had originally put them out. And they were cheap, usually around $10 each. So I bought a lot of them, quickly collecting titles by Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk and others.

Prestige Records was founded by Bob Weinstock in 1949. What qualified him to start a jazz label? He wanted to. As Orrin Keepnews, founder of Riverside, put it:

The fifties were a heyday for the formation of independent labels… they were the result of fans turning professional. This is what Blue Note was. It’s what Prestige was. It’s what Riverside was. In California, it’s what Contemporary and Pacific Jazz were. The self-professionalizing of a bunch of enthusiasts. I used to say, if you own the company, there’s nobody to tell you that you’re not qualified to be a producer. That’s how a lot of us started out. Nobody could tell us not to.

Weinstock’s approach, particularly in the 1950s, was bare-bones and pragmatic: He didn’t pay for rehearsals, he just got the musicians into the studio and let them figure out the music and play together. Standards, originals, and if the session hadn’t yielded enough material by day’s end, a simple blues everyone could blow on. Complex arrangements were (generally) out of the question — the focus was on tunes people would respond to. And they did. Prestige was never the most popular jazz label, but they built a reputation by choosing wisely. Davis, Coltrane, Rollins, the Modern Jazz Quartet and other major acts all made key early recordings for the label.

That first decade of activity is the main focus of Tad Richards’ Listening To Prestige: Chronicling Its Classic Jazz Recordings, 1949-1972, out now from Excelsior Editions, a publishing imprint of SUNY Press. (Buy it.) The book started life as a blog on which Richards listened to and commented on every Prestige album, and excerpts from some of those online writeups are folded into the text. But the book absolutely stands alone, and provides an informative history of the label, its artists, and the 1950s jazz scene as a whole. 

Regarding the accusation that Weinstock ran his label on the cheap, Richards writes:

Prestige, with its laissez-faire attitude — let them play, let the public hear what they played — is the quintessence of [the 1950s jazz era]. Critics have charged that Bob Weinstock’s approach was the result of his being too cheap to pay for rehearsal time, and there’s some truth to that. But I don’t believe it’s the whole story. Weinstock started Prestige when he was nineteen years old — just a kid. Jazz as pure spontaneity is a fantasy. It was Jack Kerouac’s fantasy when he set out to write poetry as “spontaneous bop prosody.” And it was a kid’s fantasy when young Bob started his own record label. Few kids get to live out their fantasies, and the world is probably the poorer for it. Bob Weinstock did, and recorded jazz is the richer for it.

That said, there were some Prestige artists who treated their album sessions as a chance to make serious art, like Mal Waldron and Eric Dolphy, and they get their due here. Prestige was an important incubator label for avant-garde and forward-looking jazz in the early 1960s, providing a home for Yusef Lateef, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and organist Larry Young, among others.

In its second decade, Prestige put out a ton of soul jazz records by Shirley Scott (with and without Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis), Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, Brother Jack McDuff, Richard “Groove” Holmes and others. This era is not dealt with in as much depth as the one before, and as a reader I was a little disappointed by that. I wanted to know more. But the fact is, these albums are not as well known today as titles like Sonny Rollins’s Tenor Madness and Saxophone Colossus, Miles Davis’s Cookin’/Workin’/Relaxin’/Steamin’ series, and the like. They don’t get deluxe vinyl reissues; they just sit in used bins, someone’s uncle’s collection dropped off after his passing.

There also aren’t as many legendary stories about their making. Working musicians who turn up to the studio on the appointed day, crank out 40 minutes’ worth of music, and head back to Harlem or Newark or out on the road to play for their fans don’t captivate the imagination in the same way Charlie Parker-worshipping junkies staggering through a session do. Soul jazz has always gotten short shrift in jazz history books, and that trend continues here, though it’s worth noting (and admirable) that Richards quotes two other important books on the subject, Mike Smith’s In With The In Crowd: Popular Jazz In 1960s Black America and Bob Porter’s Soul Jazz: Jazz In The Black Community 1945-1975.

Anyway, Listening To Prestige is a well-written and informative history of a label that often seems to exist in the shadow of Blue Note, or just confused/commingled with other smallish indies of the era like Riverside and Jazzland. They were much more than that; their releases had a real identity, and deserve recognition.

Wail: The Visual Language Of Prestige Records completes the picture (sorry). A beautiful hardbound coffee-table book by Chris Entwisle and Mark Havens, published by the Rochester Institute of Technology’s RIT Press, it dives deep into the label’s cover art, from its early, bare-bones 7” and 10” EPs to the 12” LPs of its golden era. (Buy it.) It includes a foreword by Sonny Rollins, and contributions from Bob Weinstock, critic and in-house producer Ira Gitler, and various photographers and graphic designers who worked for the label over the years, including Don Schlitten, David X Young, Gil Mellé, Bob Parent, Tom Hannan, Reid Miles and Esmond Edwards. 

Some of these men were photographers, others painters, and Mellé was a musician himself. They had varying amounts of formal graphic design training, but they were all given almost as free a hand as the musicians when it came to their work. For this reason, Prestige’s album covers don’t have the same stylistic uniformity as Blue Note’s (though Reid Milesworked for both), but at their best they have an Abstract Expressionism-meets-punk quality that’s genuinely striking. As the authors put it: 

Inspired by contemporary European graphic design and typography movements, Prestige’s designers employed a range of radical techniques. Clearly, Weinstock was open to a wide variety of graphic approaches: successive covers moved rapid-fire from photography to painting to collage to street art. In this environment, anything was possible and each solution had its own intrinsic logic. Designers made the most of their modest resources and a proto-punk DIY sensibility prevailed. They cut type from magazines to incorporate into their layouts, photographed everything from discarded tangles of wire to frying eggs, and scratched album titles graffiti-style onto railroad boxcars and derelict buildings. There was no branding in the conventional sense; the work was unified only by the uncompromising creativity of its makers.

The book is broken into sections devoted to particular designers and the albums they worked on. First-person testimony is provided in many cases, and some of the lives described are almost as fascinating as those of the musicians: David X Young, for example, was a painter who hung out at the Cedar Tavern with legendary Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and his album covers had a stark, monochromatic quality almost like woodcuts. 

Tom Hannan, by contrast, created covers that were more about playing with type, employing multiple fonts and colors — one innovation of his that stuck was putting the words “PRESTIGE HI-FI” in the upper right corner, in Hellenic Wide, a font from the 1800s; this became the label’s wordmark/logo beginning in 1957. Although type seemed to be Hannan’s focus, he created one of the most striking album covers in jazz history, for Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, turning a black-and-white photo of the artist into an image that recalled a Greek statue.

Esmond Edwards was a photographer who collaborated with Hannan, Reid Miles and Marc Rice, hanging out at recording sessions and grabbing shots that would be incorporated into album art. Before the end of the 1950s, he was designing covers himself, and even producing albums. “At first I went to take pictures and just groove on the sessions,” he writes. “But Bob [Weinstock] was quite able to delegate authority. He reached a point where one day he said, ‘Look, I don’t want to produce anymore. You go.’ Just out of the blue! That’s how I started to have full involvement, really. In many cases, I’d discover the artist, sign him, record the session, and design the album cover.”

Bob Weinstock sold Prestige Records to Fantasy in 1972, and moved on to a career as an investor. He died in 2006. Many of the label’s releases have never gone out of print, and some are currently getting deluxe vinyl reissues (albeit with the “Original Jazz Classics” label slapped on) but there hasn’t been the kind of constant barrage of legacy branding that Blue Note engages in. And given the quality of the music, that’s kind of a shame. But these two books tell a pretty amazing story, and are well worth any jazz fan’s time.