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

Continued from Part Two…

Mark Havens: Right, because the first run always seemed to be printed in very small numbers. And then, as is mentioned in the book, Weinstock would often commission a redesign of a cover because someone who was playing as a sideman on a particular date might be gaining in popularity, so he’d put their name on the cover in big letters.

I think an equal challenge was finding some of these individuals. Some were incredibly elusive, like David X Young, who passed away before we even started the project. We tracked his daughter down in the Dominican Republic; she said that there were some boxes with estate materials, but they were in a house out on Long Island. We tried for a very long time to get into that location, but we weren’t able to.

Then the materials were transferred to a storage locker in Manhattan. We eventually ended up making contact with the individual who was administrating [that estate]; we made a date and got the storage locker opened. But even then, we didn’t know what was there. We just knew it was boxes associated with David X Young. We were really blessed in finding a whole bunch of mock interviews and personal writings that we were able to fashion into the narrative you see in the book. And it’s his own words. It’s not us; it’s him, actually speaking his thoughts about his work and that time in New York.

What was the biggest surprise that you encountered?

Mark: There were so many of them. For me, it was the extraordinary generosity of the people we collaborated with. Just on a handshake, people let us walk out of their houses or institutions with things that were absolutely irreplaceable. It was a tough road finding this stuff. But it really restores your faith in humanity [seeing] how generous the people we eventually did track down were. [They displayed] so much openness and willingness to help the project along.

Chris Entwistle: I completely agree with that. At the beginning, we just thought this stuff was undervalued; we didn’t go into it with a theory beyond that. What we intuitively thought was that this was a really unique body of work. And it was. Even though it wasn’t unified by the kinds of things that you typically think of in design, you could start to recognize a kind of explosive creativity, something that wasn’t happening at other labels.

Do you have personal favorite album covers from among the ones in the book?

Chris: I mean, so many. But I don’t know why this one always sticks with me. From the first time I saw it, I was really knocked out: 4, 5 and 6 by Jackie McLean. It’s a Tom Hanning cover with a Bob Weinstock photograph. To me, that is emblematic of what Prestige was doing right in that era.

Mark: When I think about this question, I usually find myself going to things that were incredibly difficult to get right, covers that have ended up as some of my favorites just because we were able to track one down.

There’s one that was very tough for us to locate. But that the process to do it is so unique as well. And that’s Down East [by Zoot Sims et. al, 1957]. The cover is a photograph of a boxcar in a railroad yard in New York. But the title and the lineup of players is actually graffiti’d onto the boxcar by Reid Miles, and then the boxcar was photographed by Esmond Edwards. It’s such a unique collaboration between the two of them, and it’s visually unlike most other things that you see at the time. That one’s at the crossroads of tough-to-get, visually interesting and process-based.

You focus solely on the albums’ art and design, and not at all on the music within the jackets. What drove your decision to take that approach?

Chris: We love the music; we could talk endlessly about the music, sure. But we didn’t really feel as though we were equipped to write about it so much. I felt, “That’s not really our area. But what if we approach this the way somebody might approach book jackets by Alvin Lustig or the Penguin book design?” So it’s driven by the designers. It’s not so much the hip musician that was on it, or the fact that it evoked something on the design. Album covers have not traditionally been looked at like that. They haven’t been treated so much as pure design the way some other design disciplines are.

What would you say is the lasting significance of the body of album cover art that came out of Prestige?

Mark: The techniques and the results that these artists collectively achieved using Prestige as the [means] to do it is a towering graphic achievement. There are techniques that are still being used today, being done today, being imitated today unknowingly. Weinstock’s got a quote in the book that says, “I treated it all as art: the music and the covers.” And if it wasn’t for Weinstock’s extraordinary willingness to embrace that inherent vagueness and ambiguity of navigating all those different creative processes from these artists, there’s no way you’d be able to intentionally curate a body of work that resulted from him going, “You know what? I’m gonna let the artists be the artists.”