WAIL: The Visual Language of Prestige Records (Part 2 of 3)

Continued from Part One…

Chris Entwistle: Everything that Mark said is absolutely true. And on a personal note, as [the project] started to get close to 20 years, Mark would really bristle when I would [point that out]. He would say, “Well, what can live up to that? We’ve got to stop saying that! What would somebody anticipate if they saw that?”

But really, the project took on a life of its own. There were times in 2012 where we said, “You know what? We could go to press with this. This is really just about done, but we keep discovering things.” As Mark said, we took so many left turns, but it would have been an entirely different book had we stopped at a certain point. So I’m grateful it [took] a lot of time. I hope that the book substantiates what we were doing.

Mark Havens: One instance that I always think of is this: We were looking for an interview with Reid Miles. He was so famous for the Blue Note covers, but there’s a stunning lack of specifics about him, and certainly a lack of [quotes] in his own words. We tracked down a couple of very brief quotes from a magazine article about him in the early 1990s, I believe. We thought, “If there are quotes in that article, maybe there was an interview done to get those quotes.”

So we tracked down the author of that article, who it turns out wasn’t a journalist anymore, but changed careers and became a gallery curator. And they said, “Yeah, I remember doing that interview. I taped the interview on two sides of a cassette, but I don’t have any idea where that is, guys.” And so we said, “Well, thanks. Here’s all our contact information in case you run across something.”

And three years later, I get a padded manila envelope in the mail [with a note] that just says, “Found this in a closet.” We were surprised they even remembered that we asked!

Did Prestige have a guiding aesthetic for the album covers, or were the artists given free rein?

Chris: Bob Weinstock, who was the label founder, was aware of everything that was going on. Not just at Blue Note, but at all the independent labels. Prior to that, he knew what was going on with the small bebop labels like Dial. He was not an artist himself, but he was acutely aware of what the aesthetic was. I think he didn’t really have pretensions, even though he took some photographs that ended up on the early covers. I think he was just open to anything that looked to him as though “this kind of conveys that feeling.” And a guy like David X Young ended up creating a whole identity for those early 10” and 7” sides.

Do you have a sense that the artists listened to the music before they would design an album cover, or were they just going off a vibe?

Mark: There’s a huge range of answers to that. There are [designers] who said, “I wanted to be a jazz musician. I took lessons, but there was no way I was ever going to make it to that level. But I wanted to be involved in the music in any way that I possibly could.” So [they had] real passion for what these artists were doing.

On the other hand, you have folks like Reid Miles who said, “I wasn’t a jazz fan at all, but you didn’t need to be a jazz fan in order to do really good covers. You just had to have a good sense of what contemporary graphics were.” And the drive that he had – to upend all of the standard thinking in graphic design at that time – was really what drove his covers in that era.

What connection, if any, do you think there was between album design and advertising design of the era?

Chris: We point out in the book that Reid Miles was the [designer] most connected to the worlds of advertising and graphic design. When you see his covers, he’s using illustrators like Andy Warhol was using fashion photographers. Warhol had big campaigns going on in the ‘50s prior to pop art. So a guy like Reid Miles was probably more attuned generally to what was going on in the larger world of advertising.

I’d say the majority of the other guys, even though they were aware of that, they much more thought of themselves as fine artists, pure artists who came from abstract expressionism and different areas. Not that they looked down their nose at design; I’m sure that they were aware of Bauhaus and those kinds of things, but their thing was a little more fine art. And it was just their entree into jazz. That appealed to them, and in a way, that’s how they justified what they were doing commercially.

Mark: I agree. But a number of them also speak about being excited about what at that time was a new means of communication: a large 12”x12” space dedicated to showing a minimum of information but conveying a maximum of emotion. That really intrigued a lot of them.

What were some of the biggest challenges that you faced in the project?

Chris: We started this simply because we loved and we believed in the project. The thing that we thought would be hard was getting people – the figures who did all this design – to talk to us. And that turned out to be easy. Once we made those initial connections, we spent a lot of time with these people.

I think [the biggest challenge] was tracking down the albums. Because each of these things were photographed; we shot every one of these albums. If there’s a central repository, nobody knows where. So we were tracking down single albums. And that’s part of why it took a long time, too. Because when we started to get close to documenting just about every one – and we documented every single one that we wanted to – as it got toward the end, [finding them all] seemed more and more unobtainable. Certain album covers, we thought, “We’ll never get that. We’ll never be able to shoot that.”

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