Prestige Records
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Prestige Records is a jazz record company and label founded in 1949 by Bob Weinstock in New York City. The company recorded hundreds of albums by many of the leading jazz musicians of the day, sometimes issuing them on subsidiary labels. In 1971, the company was sold to Fantasy, which was later absorbed by Concord.
History
The Prestige office was located at 446 West 50th Street, New York City. Its catalogue included Gene Ammons, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Wardell Gray, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins.
Audio engineer Rudy Van Gelder was the recording engineer of many Prestige albums in the 1950s and 1960s. Prestige created new labels in 1960: Swingville, Moodsville, covering jazz, Bluesville featuring blues revival artists, Lively Arts featuring spoken word recordings and Prestige International, Prestige Folklore, Irish and Near East with folk and world music.
During this period, Weinstock ceased supervising recording sessions directly, employing Chris Albertson, Ozzie Cadena, Esmond Edwards, Don Schlitten, and producer/music supervisor Bob Porter, among others, to fulfill this function. Musicians recording for the label at this time included Jaki Byard and Booker Ervin, while Prestige remained commercially viable by recording a number of soul jazz artists like Charles Earland. In 1966 the company's headquarters were located at 203 South Washington Avenue in Bergenfield, New Jersey.
The company was sold to Fantasy Records in 1971, and original releases on the label formed a significant proportion of its Original Jazz Classics line. Fantasy was purchased by Concord Records in 2005.
In 2017, Concord Music Group revived the Prestige label. The first album released under the label's reactivation was A Social Call from Texas native Jazzmeia Horn.
