Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Into Something consists of three trio and four quartet tracks, the latter featuring Barry Harris on piano. On the album, these are intermingled, starting with the quartet piece “Rasheed,” and it’s a good place to start, with some of everything that made Lateef unique — the unusual lead instrument (in this case, oboe), the Middle Eastern influence, the blues roots. But actually the recording session started with the three trio pieces, so perhaps Harris was a little late for the gig, and they had to start without him. We know that Bob Weinstock didn’t believe in rehearsals, and valued spontaneity, so why not go with what have? Barry’ll be here soon enough, what works without him? Lateef had brought along three standards to go with his four originals—tunes he chose, he told Nat Hentoff who wrote the liner notes, because he particularly liked them, for various reasons.
The one he started the session with, “When You’re Smiling,” was a favorite of his father, who used to sing it often. It was a good memory, and he liked the message of the song. Do modern jazz musicians, whose improvisatory lines wander way outside the melody, think of the yrics of a song as they play it? Some do, some don’t. Bill Evans has said that he never did. Lateef, by his account to Hentoff, was thinking of the lyrics to “When You’re Smiling,” and thinking of them in a context.
Written in 1928, the first recording of the song (by Seger Ellis) featured a lead-in verse, almost universally ignored in later versions, about a blind man and a legless man who take care of each other, and go through life smiling. Louis Armstrong cut what is still the classic version in 1929, and his version is illuminated by the famous Armstrong style.
Jazz musicians have recorded it: Dave Brubeck, Errol Garner and Dick Hyman, Urbie Green and Sonny Stitt, all with a lilt. Lee Konitz recorded it, and even with Billy Bauer and a quartet of Tristano acolytes, he sounds positively jaunty. Who knows if they were thinking of the words? It's hard to believe that Konitz wasn't.
But Lateef apparently was thinking of the lyrics, but maybe not so much singing or reciting the lyrics in his head as he played. He may have been thinking more about his father's voice, because his version is gentle and pensive as he states the melody, then becomes fragmented and searching.
Lateef's original tunes express the range of his passions. "Koko's Tune," as the title suggests, is in the bebop vein, though gentled down somewhat from the lightning tempo of Charlie Parker's "Ko-Ko." But if the tempo is gentled, the intonation certainly isn't, going seamlessly from gutbucket blues growls to hard-edged modernity, spurred on by the driving complexity of Elvin Jones's drumming (Jones, Harris, and bassist Herman Wright make up the all-Detroit rhythm section).
"Water Pistol" is in much the same vein, with Jones demonstrating that he really is the new face of jazz drumming. He had been working steadily and had recorded widely since his 1955 arrival in New York. He had recorded as a leader on albums for Atlantic and Riverside, and he had already joined John Coltrane's great quartet, with whom he had worked on several sessions, including the ones that made up his My Favorite Things.
"P. Bouk" shows more of the Middle Eastern influence, and also includes an effective solo by Wright. And "Rasheed," with Lateef on oboe, shows him at full fusion strength, blending blues, bop, and the Middle East.
Also blending Middle Eastern voicing with classic Western melody is his flute-led "I'll Remember April," the Gene dePaul-composed jazz standard that made its debut in an Abbott and Costello film. It was the 45 RPM single from the session, with "Blues for the Orient" on the flip side.
It's hard to choose a "Listen to One" from this superior session, in which every song has something particular to reommend it, from Lateef's command of the blues to blistering solos by Jones, but I'll go with "Rasheed," as perhaps being the most distinctively Lateefesque.
Esmond Edwards produced. The album was released on both New Jazz and Prestige, with "I'll Remember April" / "Blues for the Orient" as a Prestige single.
Doug Watkins was one of the most prolific sidemen of the 1950s. He's been on 26 Prestige albums so far (including Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus) and countless more sessions on other labels. He was so respected as a bassist that when Charles Mingus took to the piano for 1961's Oh Yeah (Atlantic), he picked Watkins as his bassist. But he almost never stepped out as a leader. He had done one album for a small label in 1956, and nothing more until this session.
What made him decide to put himself out in front?
A newfound passion. One of the most respected bassists in jazz, Watkins, like Mingus before him, turns the bass duties over to someone else, and takes on another instrument: his newfound passion, the cello.
How newfound was this passion? It's said that he picked it up three days before the recording date.
Which you can get away with if you're from Detroit, because that means you have a crew of homeboys who understand jazz, and who understand you, and who understand experimenting with different sounds, especially if one of them is Yusef Lateef, and the others are guys who've played with Lateef.
It's a shame that Detroit has come to be known as a blighted, crime-ridden city, because it has been a cultural capital. It was a cauldron of jazz before jazz came to be recognized as America's seminal art form. And it produced the man who was arguably the greatest poet of his generation, Philip Levine.
Levine nurtured his art on the assembly lines of Detroit, just as Yusef Lateef did, and also in the jazz clubs of Detroit, where he heard the greats who made it their home. Poet T. R. Hummer, in an essay in the literary journal Blackbird, says that:
Some were classmates of his at Wayne University as it was called then: the guitarist Kenny Burrell was there, as were the pianists Tommy Flanagan and Bess Bonnier; they were close friends and peers of Levine’s then, as was the great and inimitable baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, and the drummer Elvin Jones.
And he heard the greats who passed through, like Clifford Brown, whom he remembered as Benny Golson did:
I Remember Clifford
Wakening in a small room,
the walls high and blue, one high window
through which the morning enters,
I turn to the table beside me painted a thick white. There instead
of a clock is a tumbler of water,
clear and cold, that wasn't there
last night. Someone quietly entered, and now I see the white door
slightly ajar and around three sides
the light on fire. I remember once
twenty-seven years ago walking
the darkened streets
of my home town when up ahead
on Joy Road at the Bluebird of Happiness
I heard over the rumble of my own head
for the first time the high clear trumpet
of Clifford Brown calling us all
to the dance he shared with us
such a short time. My heart quickened
and in my long coat, breathless
and stumbling, I ran
through the swirling snow
to the familiar sequined door
knowing it would open on something new.
Shortly before he died in 2015, Levine collaborated with jazz saxophonist Benjamin Boone for a unique album of poetry and jazz. Hummer writes:
Boone said that he had suggested to Levine that it would be more efficient (as well as less taxing: it must not be forgotten that Levine was in his 80s
when this work was done) to record the music, at least the basic rhythm tracks, first and let him record his tracks after.
Levine’s response? “Why would I want to do that, Ben? I’ve sat in recording studios reading my stuff to myself plenty of times. I want to work with the musicians! That will be fun!”
And so the poet and the players convened session after session in a studio in Fresno, California, making the recordings. Another poet—especially one Levine’s age, who was also, by a certain point in the extended recording process, not in good health—might have found the lengthy, nitpicky process onerous. Levine loved it. He spent hours doing what is done in studios: sitting in a booth on a stool wearing headphones and staring at a microphone, recording take after take until everyone is satisfied, and then moving on to the next track. He stayed at it faithfully for the requisite long stretches.
The mixing of the album was not completed till after Levine died. When it came to mixing "I Remember Clifford," Boone was faced with a dilemma, according to Hummer:
For this poem, Boone composed a melody that is strongly reminiscent of, but not repetitious of, Golson’s composition. Anyone who knows Brown’s music is likely to know Golson’s composition, and so will be struck, as I was, by the extraordinarily tactful, effective work Boone did as a composer here.
But he did another excellent thing as well. Levine was always in the Fresno studio with basically the same core group of musicians. Boone is a saxophonist specializing in soprano and alto, each of which he plays wonderfully on most of these recordings (seriously, the man has deep and abiding chops; do yourself a favor and give him a listen) and he did the solo work on the original track. But as he listened to the playback of “I Remember Clifford” in the studio, and again and again at home, he found himself wondering, “Why is there a saxophone soloing in this? Clifford Brown played trumpet!”
“It was a tough decision, in terms of my own ego,” Boone told me. But in the end he contacted, through a friend of a friend, the trumpeter Tom Harrell. Harrell, now seventy-one, is a master musician who has played with just about everyone, from Stan Kenton and Woody Herman to Horace Silver on down. Who better to channel Clifford Brown?
So that's another part of Detroit. But here, for this session, the Motor City is represented by Lawson
on cello and Lateef on oboe as well as flute, so they're stepping outside of the jazz box. Detroiter Hugh Lawson is the pianist. a cat who came from Detroit with Lateef and spent many years with him before moving on to Sun Ra and others. Detroiter Herman Wright takes the bass duties, and New Yorker Lex Humphries is the drummer, in his first session for Prestige.
They play three standards, two originals by Lateef and one ("Andre's Bag") by Watkins. The album, on New Jazz, would take its title, Soulnik, from a Lateef composition. Prestige would later rerelease it under Lateef's name as Imagination, but it's very much Watkins' session, but the creativity and versatility on display here in Watkins' pizzicato cello would get little chance to grow and blossom. This would be his second and last album as leader; in 1962 he died in an automobile accident.
Esmond Edwards produced.
It' not too late to give Listening to Prestige Vol. 3 as a Christmas gift for the jazz fan who has Volumes 1 and 2! And for those who haven't, the complete set makes a fabulous gift!
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Yusef Lateef, like many musicians who worked in this contemporary American musical form, created by African American artists, hailed as America's signal cultural achievement, did not like the word jazz. It's understandable, and I've written about it before--the lowlife origins of the word, the not always attractive associations that have grown up around it. As Lateef told Marc Myers of Jazzwax,
I feel the word is a misnomer. It has meanings and connotations that debase the art and belittle those who play it. Performing music that inspires listeners and puts them in touch with themselves is a beautiful and challenging and difficult expression. There’s communication between the artist and the listener, and hopefully both are better people and more enriched as a result.
...If you look it up, you’ll see that its synonyms include “nonsense,” “blather,” “claptrap” and other definitions that reduce the music to poppycock and skulduggery. I find that the word “jazz” is a meaningless term that too narrowly defines the music I play, and it adds a connotation that’s disrespectful to the art and those who perform it.
I do like the word. I feel that it has been ennobled by the people who have played it. It has been elevated from the profane to the sacred, without losing a touch of the profane, by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, Ben Webster and Eric Dolphy, Erskine Hawkins and Bug Jay McNeely. It has gone to college with Dave Brubeck, to the Philharmonic with Norman Granz, to high society with Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby. It has gone into concert halls with the Modern Jazz Quartet. And if America's greatest art form had its roots in the bawdy houses of Storyville in New Orleans, the mob-controlled speakeasies of Chicago, the urban corruption of Boss Pendergast in Kansas City, then it has something in common with Hamlet, which was written by an actor, about as lowlife and raffish a profession as you could find in Elizabethan England. Great art comes from folk roots, and the folk are where you find them.
It's also difficult to find a word to replace it. Lateef, in the same interview, suggested:
autophysiopsychic music. This means music from the physical, mental and spiritual. I think it’s an adequate term.
It's hard to dispute its adequacy, and it's certainly better than the "social music" that Miles Davis put forth, but it's not likely to catch on.
The 1960s were a time during which a lot of musicians were chafing at the name "jazz" (in Art Taylor's book Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, he asks a lot of his subject what they think of the term, and they mostly don't like it), but they were also a time during which musicians were questioning what the music was, and what its boundaries were. Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy were the most famous of these, but Lateef was one of the important figures in this jazz revolution.
Lateef, in discussing his bending of barriers, credited the spiritual element that he brought to the music, but that's hard to quantify, although there's a direct correlation to something that is quantifiable. He was one of the earliest convert to Islam among American jazz musicians, embracing the religion in Detroit in 1948, and this brought him into contact with Detroit's Islamic community. These days greater Detroit, particularly Dearborn, is home to one of America's largest Islamic communities, but even then the influence was there if one was open to it, and Lateef was. From a Syrian fellow assembly line worker at the Chrysler plant he began to learn about Middle Eastern music, and it was to have a profound effect on the music he would make.
Lateef was not the only jazz musician to turn to the Middle East for inspiration (we've heard Herbie Mann's "Tel Aviv" in a 1957 Prestige recording), but he may well have been the most profoundly influenced. So his spiritual quest became a musical quest, and it didn't stop with the tonality and instrumentation of the Middle East. As he told Marc Myers:
When I was beginning to explore spiritual music in the mid-1950s, there was some resentment. My early albums as a leader for Savoy—Jazz for the Thinker and Prayer to the East—were different than anything else that had been recorded. I realized then that if I was going to continue, I had to change the format. I started studying [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, a classical composer who was changing music with his embrace of electronics and new theories. After listening to composers like him, I knew I had to go beyond what I already knew.
When he signed a recording contract with Prestige, Lateef was still living in Detroit. He had recorded one earlier Prestige album, and the two game-changers for Savoy, but for all of these, he would pile his musicians and instruments into a station wagon, drive all night to New York, make the record, then back to Detroit. The Motor City had one of the most vibrant and active jazz scenes in the Midwest, and had sent an all star cast of musicians to New York, but Lateef was one of the last holdouts. He would not move east until 1960, and when he made this recording for Prestige, it was sill under those conditions, so all of the musicians on this date were Detroiters.
One of them, Lonnie Hillyer, who become known in the 1960s for his long association with Charles Mingus, was the stuff of legend in Detroit for an episode he wasn't even directly involved with. When Miles Davis lived there in the early 1950s, he was deep into heroin addiction, and his trumpet was generally in a pawnshop, so when he got a gig he'd have to borrow one, and the trumpet's owner had to hope it wouldn't end up in a pawnshop at the end of the evening. On this particular night, Miles had touched up young teenage trumpet student Lonnie Hillyer. When Lonnie's mother found out, she was furious. She went straight to the club, marched up onto the stage, and snatched the horn away from Miles in mid-solo.
Hillyer was all grown up in 1959, and like the rest of his bandmates, used to playing with Lateef every night. This was a tight group of Detroiters that Lateef brought to Englewood Cliffs, and they were able to hang tight with the leader as he pushed boundaries. These were all musicians who had grown up in the jazz cauldron of Detroit, and who were fully equipped to understand and abet the fusion between jazz and autophysiopsychic music.
Lateef brings us both: what we already knew of as jazz and what we were to discover by listening to his music, in this album, in the earlier Prestige and Savoy albums, and in recordings to come.
He has not brought any of the exotic Midde Eastern instruments that he has mastered to this session, like the arghul, which he played on his 1957 recordings for Prestige, but he does play both the flute (at this point not unusual on a jazz recording) and the oboe (still unusual) in addition to the tenor sax, and these allow him to find a range of sounds and feelings beyond the usual. He plays four of his own compositions and three standards: Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays," Tadd Dameron's "If You Could See Me Now," and "Seabreeze," a swing-era tune credited to Larry Douglas, Fred Norman, and Rommie Bearden, the last named more commonly known as Romare Bearden, one of the great painters of his generation.
Cry!-Tender was released on New Jazz. Weinstock was creating quite a renaissance for New Jazz in his tenth anniversary year -- and that in addition to the new labels he was starting. Quite a lot of diversification, presumably for tax reasons. Cry!-Tender wasn't actually released until mid-1960, but a lot of New Jazz product was shipping as 1959 wound down, some of it cut in the waning months of the year, some of if off the shelf.
Here's a quick rundown of the last quarter of the year:
NJLP 8224 Meet Oliver Nelson, recorded 10/30/1959
NJLP 8225 Kenny Dorham - Quiet Kenny, recorded 11/13/1959
NJLP 8226 Jerome Richardson, Roamin' with Richardson, recorded 10/21/1959
NJLP 8227 Ray Bryant Trio, delayed release of a 1957 recording
NJLP 8228 The Ray Draper Quintet Featuring John Coltrane, delayed release of a 1957 recording
NJLP 8229 - Johnny "Hammond" Smith - That Good Feelin', recorded 11/4/1959
Two 45 RPM singles came from the session. "Dopolous" / "Yesterdays" was released on New Jazz, "Seabreeze" came out on Prestige, paired with "Love Theme From Spartacus" from a later session, which was to become Lateef's biggest hit.
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.
There's a moment during "Bohemia After Dark" when Dorothy Ashby and Herman Wright are doing a harp-bass dialog, and then it's Wright and Frank Wess doing a flute-bass dialog, and you're not quite sure when the crossover occurred. That's how well these musicians play together.
This is the second and last Ashby recording session for Prestige. She would pack a lot of music into it, and she would pack a lot of music, art, writing and performance into her short 58 years on this earth. She was from the jazz hotbed of Detroit, and she would continue to make Detroit her home, although she toured and recorded widely. For five years in the 1960s, she and her husband, John Ashby, had a jazz radio show in Detroit, where they "talked about the new jazz releases, about the problems of jazz, and about the performers" (from an interview with her and Cannonball Adderley). She reviewed jazz records for the Detroit Free Press. And she and her husband founded a theater company in Detroit, the Ashby Players. John wrote the scripts and Dorothy the songs, music and lyrics. She even performed in at least one of the plays. Unfortunately, none of this work has been released to the public, although it's said to exist on reel-to-reel tapes.
But plenty of her other work survives. She recorded eleven albums as leader of her own group, including one with Terry Pollard, another Detroit woman who broke through jazz's glass ceiling. And she wasn't just a specialty act, either--"Hey, let's build an album around this chick who plays the harp." She was in serious demand as sidewoman, recording with jazz groups (Bobbi Humphrey, Wade Marcus, Stanley Turrentine, Sonny Criss, Gene Harris, Freddie Hubbard) and vocalists (Bill Withers, Minnie Riperton, Stevie Wonder, Billy Preston, Bobby Womack). She recorded with Japanese new age musician Osamu Kitajima. She's been sampled by hip-hop artists.
And if the harp wasn't enough, she brought another unusual sound into jazz: the koto, a Japanese multi-stringed instrument which she played on The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby, a remarkable album released in 1970 on Cadet, a Chess Records subsidiary, an album which also featured an electric harp, and Ashby's vocals.
Ashby was active up until shortly before her death in 1986, but she had some interesting things to say about the era we're looking at now, also in the joint interview with Adderley:
I speak often of the decade of 1950-1960 as being the best for the Black jazzman. The economy of the country was in pretty fair shape. What we missed out on in the way of post-war adjustments, we "made up for" with the Korean venture. The United States was becoming aware of jazz's role in international goodwill. The jazz festivals were born, giving jazz some of its greatest and most diverse audiences. Jazz was used in the films, like Odds Against Tomorrow, No Sun in Venice, and Miles' The Elevator to the Hangman.
Another nail in the coffin of the myth of the 1930s being the golden era of jazz's popularity.
This album features standards, and two compositions by Ashby, "It's a Minor Thing" and "Rascality." One sort of expects a minor thing to be moody and subdued, but this one is rowdy, rambunctious and bursting at the seams. "Rascality" is a hell of a piece of music. It's hard to say what makes one jazz tune into a widely recorded standard, while another doesn't make it beyond its first recording session. Oscar Pettiford's "Bohemia After Dark," which Ashby and Co. start off the day with, is one such standard. "Rascality" is not, perhaps because nobody thinks a melody written by a harpist can translate into other instrumentations. Ashby discussed that in an interview with jazz historian Sally Placksin:
Even arrangers admit that often they don’t know how to write what they’d like to write. What they would be willing to write for harp often doesn’t work, because they’re writing from a pianistic point of view, or maybe another instrumental point of view, and that doesn’t work on a harp, because you can only change two pedals at a time, and various other technicalities…. The harp has complexities that a person has to be able to work out in their head while they’re spontaneously creating jazz on it.
The only other version I've been able to find is one by contemporary jazz harpist Destiny Muhammad, in a concert tribute to Dorothy Ashby. But a great tune is a great tune, and jazz musicians have made a mistake by not picking up on this one.
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.
Dorothy Ashby, harpist. Can a harpist swing? Can a harpist play bebop?
Before you answer, consider one other fact.
Dorothy Ashby came from Detroit.
Detroit, like most of the jazz world of this era, was male dominated, but there was enough of a meritocracy that it was possible for a woman to make it, if she was really good. Those doors didn't open easily. But then, to play in Detroit at all, you had to be ready to challenge and prove yourself with some of the finest musicians in the country. Three who
did were Terry Pollard, Alice McLeod (later Alice Coltrane) and Dorothy Ashby.
All three were pianists. There was a certain amount of gender discrimination in the instruments women were presumed able to play, just as there was racial discrimination in the positions football players were presumed able to play. There were all-girl orchestras in the 30s and 40s, so there were at least some musicians playing a variety of instruments. A couple of my favorites: drummer Viola Smith, the Hep Girl, who announced in Down Beat that women could hold their on any male bandstand, and proved it by sharing a stage with Chick Webb. And trombonist Lillian Briggs, who later became an entrepreneur and rented the pleasure yacht Monkey Business to presidential hopeful Gary Hart, who became an unhopeful when he was caught on the yacht doing
monkey business with a woman not his wife. And Terry Pollard put together a group of musicians good enough to challenge a group led by Clark Terry in the Leonard Feather-produced LP, Cats vs. Chicks.
But if you were good enough to play with the big boys in Detroit, you were good enough to challenge the ideas of who could play what. Terry Pollard moved over from piano to vibes, and it was said that when she and Alice McLeod shared the bandstand, not many musicians were man enough to sit in with them and keep up with their rapid tempi.
Dorothy Ashby made, arguably, an even gutsier move, to an instrument that may have been traditionally associated with women, but was definitely not associated with jazz. Terry Pollard had to convince the boys that she could play with them. Dorothy Ashby not only had to convince the boys that she could play with them, she had to convince the boys that a harp could play with them. The harp was associated with classical music and with polite parlors, and it was also associated with the white musicians who were granted access to classical orchestras and polite parlors.
Ashby proved all of that (and so did McLeod/Coltrane, who would later take up the harp). Critic Tom Moon, in an essay for National Public Radio, describes her achievement:
Ashby operates in an unassuming way, leaping through intricate arpeggios that no other jazz instrumentalist could attempt. Her single lines may not be terribly fancy, but she selects her notes carefully, and plays each one with a classical guitarist's stinging articulation...sometimes snapping off chords as if the harp were just a bigger guitar, and at other times using its immense range to conjure an enveloping wash of sound in the background.
You get all of that and more on this collaboration with Frank Wess: the "more" being her considerable gifts as a composer. The four standards on the album are augmented by three Ashby originals, "Pawky," "Back Talk" and "Jollity." "Pawky" means "having or showing a sly sense of humor," and she does that. She also takes the harp out of the parlor and into...well, actually into Rudy Van Gelder's parents' parlor, but this is a parlor in which nearly every jazz great has sipped tea. She and Frank Wess complement each other on strings and woodwind as ingeniously as Kenny Burrell and John Coltrane had done a fortnight earlier in the same parlor. She also does a wonderful bass-harp duet with Herman Wright on "Back Talk" which does everything Tom Moone describes: the biting single-string notes and the enveloping sound of the harp. And Art Taylor gives the session all the propulsion it needs.
The album was released as Hip Harp, which was sort of a hard sell--in case you hadn't realized that a harp could be hip. It's had various re-releases over the years, and "Charmaine" was included on a Moodsville collection called Lusty Moods Played by America's Greatest Jazzmen. A jazzwoman, it turned out, could be just as lusty and just as great.
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.
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