Listening to Prestige 451: The Swingville All Stars

This is the first part of a two-session, double-album extravaganza released by Prestige as The First Annual Prestige Swing Festival, Spring 1961. The festival appears to have taken place entirely in the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs--I can find no record of an actual festival. And it appears to have been the only annual Swing Festival.

Nevertheless, a cause for celebration. Prestige had put together various collections of All Stars over the past few years, including one other set of Swingville All Stars (in March of 1960, with Taft Jordan, Hilton

Jefferson, and Al Sears as the front line), and all of their all star sessions were worthy of the name, but this one has some solidly heavy hitters, and a bunch of them. The heyday of swing was also the heyday of the 78 RPM record, so your typical swing session recording was three and a half minutes or less--maybe a little more if they decided to split a song over two sides. And the typical swing recording was section players with one soloist.

But bebop changed some of that, and the long playing record changed the rest of it, and this aggregation includes a number of all stars who deserve solo space, and who get it, and the length of the selections reflects that. "Jammin' in Swingville" is nine and a half minutes, "Spring's Swing" eight minutes, "Love Me or Leave Me" a little over seven. "Cool Sunrise" nearly eleven. 

"Love Me or Leave Me" is the standard by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson, first recorded by torch singer Ruth Etting in 1928, picked up by Billie Holiday in 1941, then covered a few scattered times in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was Etting's signature song, and Etting was basically a forgotten star by the 1950s, but it turned out her life, including a disastrous marriage to a brutal gangster, was more interesting than her career. It became a movie with Doris Day and James Cagney, and "Love Me or Leave Me" became the movie's title song, and jazz musicians as well as pop singers started recognizing its potential. 

"Jammin' in Swingville" and "Swing's Spring" are both credited to Vivian Hamilton, who I'm guessing was the wife of Jimmy. Her only credited compositions are on albums by Jimmy (although "Spring's Swing" was recorded in 2005 by Swiss-born, Chicago-based tenor saxophonist Sam Burckhardt), and Jimmy was the arranger for this session. "Cool Sunrise" is credited to Esmond Edwards, so important as a producer for Prestige during these years, but rarely listed as a composer. All of them provide an ample basis for joyous interpretation.

Swing, as its name suggests, is a joyful music, and extended jams like these sound like a lot of fun, like good friends getting together and producing something delightful. Let's hope this was the case, and why not? These guys were old enough, and far enough past their years of stardom, to have been able to simply enjoy getting together and making music. We continue to owe Prestige big time for recording these Swingville sessions.

Edwards produced. The title of the double album was Things Ain't What They Used to Be. When they were rereleased separately, that became the title of the record that had "Spring's Swing" and "Love Me or Leave Me" on it. The other separated LP was called Years Ago. A later rerelease as double album and CD was called Jam Session in Swingville.

Listening to Prestige 314: Tiny Grimes

Prestige follows up its Swingville debut with another Swingville set, this one led by Tiny Grimes, another traditional player, for an album that's steeped in the blues--and as Grimes comments in the liner notes, "If a man can't play the blues he won't last very long."
Everyone here could play the blues. Jerome Richardson, who played with Lionel Hampton and Earl Hines, certainly could.  He was fast becoming Prestige's go-to guy in 1958-59. He appeared with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Gene Ammons, the Prestige Blues Swingers led by Art Farmer, the Prestige All Stars with Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley and Kenny Burrell, and his own group with Kenny Burrell and Jimmy Cleveland.

The songs are a mixture of familiar folk songs, not always a first stop market for jazz musicians, "Ain't Misbehavin'," so familiar and beloved a melody that it could almost be a folk song and originals by Grimes and Doretta Crawley, about whom I can find no biographical information and no other writing credits, so I'm guessing a romantic liaison of some sort. Whether Crawley helped a lot, I don't know, but she certainly didn't hurt. These are tunes that roll up the blues and lay them flat out. “Down With It” and “Home Sick” are slow blues, redolent of the juke joint,  vehicles for Grimes’s bent notes and unreconstructed feeling. Grimes is really the center here, but Richardson weighs in with a flute solo on “Down With It” that makes as good a case for the flute as a blues instrument as you’re likely to here, then comes back with the tenor sax for the final statement of the theme. “Home Sick” gives Ray Bryant some great solo space and duet space with Grimes. “Durn Tootin’” kicks up the tempo and puts Richardson in the driver’s seat, which changes a lot of things. It gives Tiny a different direction, so that without giving away any blues cred, he stretches out his jazz chops a lot. They're one-shot tunes, just for this album, so limited royalties for Ms. Crawley, but they sound good.

Tiny in Swingville was the second Swingville release. "Annle Laurie" and "Durn Tootin'" were put out as a 45, and got a nice heads up from Billboard:

Annie Laurie: Tiny Grimes is featured on guitar on this swinging version of the familiar folk tune. Good side for jazz boxes. Durn Tootin: Jerome Richardson and Ray Bryant join Grimes on this happy riff effort that should appeal to modern jazz buffs.

And that hits it pretty well. Swingville's marketing, and the presence of Tiny Grimes, was a signal to the swing fans and the classic rhythm and blues fans that there was something here for them, and yet Prestige was not losing sight of its modern jazz soul.

Esmond Edwards produced.

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

Listening to Prestige 283: The Prestige Blues-Swingers

It's those lazy hazy crazy days of summer in 1958, and we're coming close to wrapping up our first decade of recording music for a new label that's come along at the right time, and made its mark in jazz. Look at the musicians who've passed through our door. We brought Miles back to New York and restarted his career. We were the first to record the Modern Jazz Quartet (well, after one tentative start on Savoy). Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz and Lenny Tristano and Thelonious Monk have all made significant recordings with us. John Coltrane is soon to move on--he'll be gone as we start our tenth anniversary--but he's still doing some great stuff for us. We've been an important part of the jazz of the fifties, and that's an era that's giving way to change. What will the new jazz of the sixties be? How are we going to prepare for it, to position ourselves in it?

Meanwhile, who cares? Let's have some fun!

Let's get a bunch of the finest modernists around, and let them loose on some classic trad jazz tunes, and just blow, blow, blow. In fact, that's a good idea for a tune.

Of course, when the dust has settled, and you have six horns, plus a guitar and a rhythm section, you've got a pretty good sized aggregation, and you can't just blow, blow, blow. You're going to need an arranger.

Bob Weinstock brought in a new addition to the Prestige catalog, Jerry Valentine, who had been a trombonist in the Billy Eckstine band, and had arranged for Earl Hines. Valentine's credentials were a bit scattered, but he turned out to be the right man for the job, writing several of the tunes for the session, and finding a sound that was trad and modern at the same time.

The classic tunes were by Andy Razaf (Fats Waller's longtime collaborator) and Will Weston ("I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town"). Billy Eckstine and Earl Hines ("Jelly, Jelly") and Count Basie with Eddie Durham and Jimmy Rushing ("Sent for You Yesterday"). The ensemble has a Basie feel, except that it doesn't. The musicians are virtuoso modern jazz players, and Valentine has given them a solid ensemble footing and room to wail.

The other newcomer is trombonist George "Buster" Cooper, who generally went just by "Buster,," who knew how to entertain and knew how to swim with the big fish. He had been in the house band at the Apollo Theater, had accompanied Josephine Baker in Paris, and had played with Lionel Hampton (he was with him for the legendary 1953 European tour) and Benny Goodman. He also contributed to jazz history when a friend from the younger days in Florida  arrived in New York, and Cooper took him down to sit in with the house band at the Café Bohemia. The friend was Julian "Cannonball" Adderley.

Later, in the 1960s, he would join the Duke Ellington orchestra, where he would be a featured soloist.

Jimmy Forrest was another one of those guys who played the style of jazz known as bebop and the
style of jazz known as rhythm and blues. He brought the two together when he turned a Duke Ellington riff into "Night Train." He was also the leader of a group which was recorded live in a small club in 1952, with Miles Davis sitting in: to my mind, a significant recording, He gets some solo space on "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town," and shows that he knows what to do with it.

Outskirts of Town was the name of the album, and the tune also became the A side of a 45 RPM release, b/w a Valentine original, "Blue Flute."





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

Listening to Prestige 280: J. C. Higginbotham - Tiny Grimes

I love it that the unexpected keeps cropping up in the Prestige catalog. J. C. Higginbotham was an unreconstructed swing trombonist, best known for his work in Luis Russell's orchestra in the late 1930s,  but also with Chick Webb, Fletcher Henderson and Benny Carter. The late 1950s saw him resuming his career after losing several years to the bottle. He played a regular gig with Henry "Red" Allen at the Metropole Café in Times Square, the traditional jazz club next to which Bob Weinstock had opened the record store which commenced his jazz Odyssey--an Odyssey that very quickly took him away from the Metropole's brand of nostalgia and into the newer world of bebop. But here Higginbotham is, playing with an eclectic group of musicians, and fitting in quite nicely, thank you.

If Higginbotham was unreconstructed, Tiny Grimes was almost continually reconstructed. He played swing, and even sang with a swing vocal group (The Cats and the Fiddle). He played Art Tatum's almost unclassifiable brand of jazz when Tatum, for a short period, formed a trio. He played with Charlie Parker. He played rhythm and blues.

Tiny Grimes came to the guitar late in life--as he put in an interview with Stanley Dance, "when I was very, very old." In other words, about 20. In his youth he had played the drums until they were washed away in a flood, and then the piano. He was self-taught on the guitar. As he told Dance for his book of interviews, World of Swing (quoted in James Lester's biography of Art Tatum. Too Marvelous for Words):

No one ever learned me nothing! ... The way I learned my chords, I used to find sheet music with ukulele diagrams on them. I got my own little system going, found out how to make certain things, and just translated the music my way... I used to lock myself in my room all day, every day... after three months of sitting up in that room day in and day out, I could make little gigs.

Perhaps learning from ukulele diagrams is why Tiny chose the four-string tenor guitar? Perhaps, but it would have been tricky. Tiny played the standard tenor guitar, tuned just like the four high strings on a standard guitar. Ukulele in standard tuning has essentially the same intervals, but three steps higher, so you could more or less transpose the chords, but it would still sound a little different, because the highest string on the uke jumps up an octave. In any case, Tiny was going for a different sound, and he found it, because within a few years, he had taken the place of the Air Force-bound Slim Gaillard in Slam Stewart's guitar-bass duo, and when Tatum decided, in 1943, that it would be to his economic advantage to form a piano-guitar-bass trio along the lines of Nat "King" Cole's, he called on Stewart, which meant he also got Grimes.

In 1944, he had a recording session as leader for Savoy, and his band included a cat who was making his recording debut for Savoy, although there would be a lot more: Charlie Parker.

Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis would be doing a lot with Prestige, both with and without Shirley Scott. His Prestige years coincide with the soul jazz years, but his complete discography is a lot more than that...and here again, I have to go against the accepted wisdom. The writer of Davis's Wikipedia entry, and it's a good, knowledgeable piece of writing, says that "he played in the swing, bop, hard bop, Latin jazz, and soul jazz genres. Some of his recordings from the 1940s also could be classified as rhythm and blues."

So why is rhythm and blues the poor stepsister, hunched up beside the cinders? Why not say "he

played in the swing, bop, rhythm and blues, hard bop, Latin jazz, and soul jazz genres"? Why is the work Wilbur Harden did with Ivory Joe Hunter less important than the work he did with Curtis Fuller?

So put them together, you have three  cats who can play the blues. Two of them could walk into any room in the world where musicians were playing in any blues-based genre, sub-genre, or alt-genre, and sit right in.

And they had the right three guys in the rhythm section, especially Ray Bryant, who was as progressive as they come, but could just as easily be found sitting in with Red Allen and J. C. Higginbotham at the Metropole.

And what would you call this music? I don't know. I'd just listen to it. Although Higginbotham gets co-leader credit, it's Tiny's session--all the tunes except "Air Mail Special" are his--but everyone makes it work. It's got the blues, it's got rhythm, it swings, it bops, it's got some great improvisation, it's got what it takes.

"Grimes Times," "Air Mail Special," "Callin' the Blues" and "Blue Tiny" were all included on the album Callin' the Blues, released in 1958. It would also be rereleased when Weinstock started his Swingville subsidiary in 1960. The other two ultimately were folded into a compilation album called Guitar Soul, on Prestige's budget Status label,




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

Listening to Prestige 268: Tiny Grimes-Coleman Hawkins

Somebody asked me recently how the tenor saxophone had come to be such a prominent instrument in jazz, and I answered in two words: Coleman Hawkins. Yes, the tenor sax is soulful and expressive, and yes, it has the flexibility and tonality to express the subtlety of bebop and the immediacy of rhythm and blues. But nobody was sitting around saying "We need to develop two new styles of music, one with subtlety and the other with immediacy. Is there an instrument that can do this? Hey--what about the tenor saxophone?"

No, nothing like that. The tenor saxophone was not taken seriously as an instrument. It was largely used to make the sorts of funny sounds that would later become associated with the Spike Jones Orchestra. Until Coleman Hawkins.

And time did not pass the Hawk by. He brought the saxophone into jazz in the 1920s, made his enduring recording of "Body and Soul" in the late 1930s, and joined Dizzy Gillespie for what is widely considered to be the first bebop recording, in 1944.

During the 1950s, Hawkins played and recorded widely, and with a wide variety of bandmates, from trad cats like Henry "Red" Allen to modernists like John Coltrane, and he had no trouble fitting in with any of them, because any student of jazz knew enough to fit in with him.

Here, he is teamed up with Tiny Grimes, who was another musician with an eclectic track record, He
had played with Art Tatum and with Charlie Parker, and had led a successful rhythm and blues group featuring, at various times, sax man Red Prysock and vocalist Screamin' Jay Hawkins. He also played an eclectic instrument: the tenor. or four string, guitar.

Here, joined by flutist Musa Kaleem, they're playing the blues, and with all the incredible, innovative things that jazz musicians have done, and continue to due, there's a special place in heaven reserved for a bunch of great musicians getting together to play the blues. Theologian Karl Barth, whose heart was in the right place but his cultural frame of reference somewhat limited, once said that when the angels play for God, they play Bach, but when they play for each other, they play Mozart, and sometimes God listens in. Well, I suspect that on Saturday night, God goes down to a heavenly juke joint and listens to the blues. And since Eternity has no time markers, God would have had to invent a Saturday night in heaven, which He certainly would have done once he heard the blues.

Musa Kaleem didn't record much, but he played a lot, often on the road, notably with Fletcher Henderson's band, then with Ellington, Basie, the Savoy Sultans and others. Maybe that had to do with wanderlust as well as musical opportunity, because after moving to New York in the late 1940s and starting to become well known on the scene, he spent most of the 1950s at sea--depending on which source you choose, either as a seaman or a cruise ship musician.

Earl Womack has two recording credits that I've found, this one and another in 1978, so either it's two different guys (Womack is a surprisingly ubiquitous name in the music world) or he had a solid career in music. Teagle Fleming, Jr., knew how to play the blues, and shortly after this session, he joined Ray Charles and played on several of his recordings. He also makes a cameo appearance in a novel called The Jitterbug Man by Billy Georgette.

And we know that Ray Bryant can play the blues.

The album was released on Prestige ("Tiny Bean" omitted) as Blues Groove by Tiny Grimes and Coleman Hawkins, and later on a Prestige re-release and on subsidiary Swingville  as Blues Groove by Coleman Hawkins. "Blues Wail" was a two-sided 45.

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