Listening to Prestige 304: Coleman Hawkins

As Prestige roars into its tenth anniversary year, new ideas are taking shape, and everything old is new again. The 19-year-old who as a youngster had gone out with his father collecting traditional jazz 78s by the bushel, who had experienced the epiphany of Thelonious Monk and begun a new label to become an apostle of bebop, was 29 now, and looking around at the music scene on the cusp of a new decade.

Ten years as president of a record label will also give you new ideas about marketing, and as 1959 rolled on, Bob Weinstock was preparing to unleash three new subsidiary labels, Moodsville, Swingville and Bluesville.

These were not the "budget" labels that a lot of record labels put out in those days: LPs that were repackagings of earlier recordings, or masters that had been bought up from defunct labels. The budget labels were cheaply pressed and cheaply packaged, and were a way that companies tried to squeeze a few last nickels out of music that they probably weren't going to see a payday any other way. It's not widely known, but in 1977 RCA Victor was planning a massive budget rerelease of the music of one of its declining stars, Elvis Presley. That, of course, was the year that Elvis achieved true immortality by dying, and RCA changed its plans in a hurry.

New Jazz was sort of a budget label for Prestige, although its catalog feature some of Prestige's best artist doing some of their best work. The London Jazz Collector notes that some New Jazz titles:

 are sometimes marred by “hissy vinyl”, due to the raw vinylite being bulked up with recycled vinyl (containing minute detritus and fragments of paper label, which the stylus picks up as a continuous hiss) . Some pressings are ok, others have the dreaded hiss throughout, sometimes minor, on  other copies quite prominent. There is no consistency – even the same title can be found with hissy copies and not hissy copies. Perhaps it all depended on whether the vinylite stock delivered to the XYZ pressing plant that week had been bulked up with recycled vinyl or not. I have not encountered the problem with any other labels than Prestige, and does not occur with pre-Bergenfield [Prestige moved from New York City to Bergenfield, NJ, in the mid-1960s] label pressings or those from Abbey Manufacturing, so the finger points to reckless cost-cutting or dubious quality at some plants.

But for the most part, New Jazz records had pretty good quality control. Status was the real budget label, and even there, according to the London Jazz Collector, it's

difficult to see what was budget apart from saving on ink, providing minimal information saved nothing, but made it look budget. Working in Marketing in the Seventies, the big fear was always “cannibalisation”. You wanted all the sales you could get at the premium price, and extra sales at the budget price, without losing the one to the other. Extra effort was incurred to make things look less attractive. More marketing genius from Weinstock.

Swingville, Bluesville and Moodsville do not appear to have been budget labels at all. There's a lengthy discussion of this question online at the Organissimo jazz forum, and Chris Albertson, jazz historian and producer of many a Prestige session, weighs in with this:

I really don't think there was any serious marketing decision involved in the creation of the Bluesville, Swingville, Moodsville, etc. series. Remember, these were not stand-alone subsidiary labels--it was always Prestige Moodsville, Prestige Swingville, etc. I don't recall if the pricing was different--if so, that may have been a factor. As a dj when these first came out, and later as a Prestige employee, I never thought of them as anything but Prestige albums with a series name.
Sometimes I think that consumers/collectors make more out of such details than the facts call for. When I produced a session, it was a Prestige session--whether it came out on Prestige, Prestige Bluesville or Prestige Swingville, made no difference.

If Bob Weinstock was, as the London Jazz Collector suggests, a marketing genius, perhaps he was also by this time pretty savvy about accounting, and maybe there was a tax advantage to these subsidiary labels.

Or maybe it was just about the music. I'll deal with Bluesville and Moodsville later, but Weinstock, who had grown up on swing, and whose Times Square offices were still within hailing distance of the Metropole, was already assembling quite a collection swing era veterans, to the extent that he could have created a whole new line of Prestige All Stars or Prestige Blues Swingers. Because All Stars these gents certainly were, starting with one of the all stars of all of jazz history, Coleman Hawkins, who is gracing the ten-year-anniversary halls of Prestige and the Van Gelder Studio with his larger than life presence. And here, joined by:

• Charlie Shavers, 42 years old, first recruited by Prestige for the February 20 Hal Singer session. Swing credentials include Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Jazz at the Philharmonic, Count Basie, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, Budd Johnson, and his own band with Terry Gibbs and Louis Bellson. He is the composer of  "Undecided," which had its origin in a tune that Shavers liked enough to send off to his publishers. They liked it too, and asked for a title. Shavers was trying to decide between  a couple of catchy titles, but hadn't made up his mind yet, so he wrote "Undecided." The publishers immediately sent it off to lyricist Leo Robin, and the rest is history--and some 200 recordings.
• Ray Bryant, the kid of the group at 28, but a kid who felt perfectly at home sitting in with the old guys at the Metropole in the afternoon, then heading downtown to play with the moderns in the evening.
• Tiny Grimes, 43, veteran of three earlier Prestige sessions, including a swinging soirée with J. C. Higginbotham, would be a Swingville staple. Played with Slam Stewart, Art Tatum, Billie Holiday. He had a hit with a swing version of the Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond." On the strength of that, he organized  Tiny Grimes and his Rocking Highlanders, which featured Red Prysock until Red quit because he refused to wear a kilt.
• George Duvivier, 39, made his mark with the Shirley Scott and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis sessions, but his first Prestige gig had been two years earlier, with Gil Melle, of all people. He played with Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway, Louis Bellson, Count Basie, Benny Carter, Anita O’Day, and lots of moderns too. Pretty nearly everyone.
• Osie Johnson, 36, played with Earl Hines, Zoot Sims, Dinah Washington, Paul Gonsalves. He first hit Prestige in 1955 with Bennie Green, and stuck around over the next four years to back up Barbara Lea, Tiny Grimes and J. C. Higginbotham, 

Coleman Hawkins was 55 when he stepped the studio with this aggregation and in the middle of yet another career renaissance.

So what are these Swingville all stars playing? It’s nothing that you would have heard from a Benny Goodman radio broadcast on a Saturday night high atop the Rainbow Room. It’s nothing like the jump, jive and wail you would have heard from an old Louis Prima record or from a contemporary group like the Stray Cats when swing music and swing dancing had a renaissance among the kids in the 1990s. This is small group jazz from New York musicians in the 1950s, guys who have been around long enough to remember when jazz was dance music, but who know that today’s listeners want to hear inventive solos that’ll take them someplace new. You’d go to a Swingville album, as the label established itself, to hear music that would give you a certain traditional feel, but would also give you the modern jazz you’d come to expect from Prestige.

Coleman Hawkins, the architect of the saxophone sound in jazz, the guy who played with Fletcher Henderson, who gave new meaning to the improvised jazz solo with “Body and Soul,” who played with Dizzy on 52nd Street, who was still playing, the amalgam of everything he ever knew, was the perfect choice to build a new label around. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine that signing the Hawk to Prestige was what gave Weinstock the idea for Swingville.

Hawk Eyes' first release was on Prestige, but it soon became one of Swingville's early releases.

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                                             
--Dave Grusin

An
important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell