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What inspired you to take on this project?<\/b><\/p>\nAlmost from its very beginning, Prestige Records was a landmark record label, a giant in the world of jazz. Artists including Dorothy Ashby, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Milt Jackson, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and other greats released records on the New York City-based independent label founded in 1949 by Bob Weinstock. Beyond the music, Prestige album cover designs were themselves striking and innovative, drawing upon the gifts of some of the era\u2019s most talented visual artists. A new book from Chris Entwistle and Mark Havens is part lavish coffee table book, part oral history.<\/p>\n
WAIL: The Visual Language of Prestige Records<\/i> is the product of an intensive and often daunting two-decade adventure in which the authors sought to locate quality copies of every record released on Prestige during the \u201850s. The duo also went to great lengths to locate the designers \u2013 or traces of them \u2013 to include new, firsthand perspectives on the often revolutionary design work done for the label. I spoke with Entwistle and Havens about the project\u2019s genesis, the paths it took, and the culmination of their work.<\/p>\n
What inspired you to take on this project?<\/b><\/p>\n
Chris Entwistle:<\/b> Because we worked on it for so long, so many things at different points became inspirational. But initially, we felt that the design work at Prestige was especially undervalued. Right when we started this project, there had begun to be some books about the Blue Note designs from Reid Miles. And that seemed to take up just about all the oxygen in terms of what people thought. But we felt that there was so much interesting stuff going on at Prestige \u2013 with some of the same designers \u2013 but people were [working] with a lot more freedom there. Not that it was rigid at Blue Note, but you had Francis Wolf dictating in terms of using [certain] photographs. We felt like it was completely open-ended at Prestige. And in the years that we worked on the book, what we discovered and what we saw was that that turned out to be true.<\/p>\n
Mark Havens:<\/b> Chris and I had taken a trip to Hackensack, where a lot of the Prestige albums had been recorded back in the 1950s. Chris and I have loved the music for so long, and because we both come from visual backgrounds, we liked the album cover art. We pored over that stuff and the liner notes on the back just as much as we listened to the music. And we would always see, \u201cRecorded by Van Gelder, Hackensack\u201d on the back.<\/p>\n
Most of these albums were recorded in Rudy Van Gelder\u2019s parents\u2019 living room. He convinced them to turn the living room into a recording studio. And we thought, \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be great to find that house again?\u201d So one Saturday in the winter, we drove up to Hackensack to see if we could find where this [music] was recorded.<\/p>\n
We drove around a lot. We stopped at the Hackensack library and eventually dug up an address. We went to the address, and the only thing there is the parking lot for Hackensack Sports Medicine. I remember standing there just in disbelief. We were just looking at each other like, \u201cWow, there\u2019s nothing here to commemorate what happened.\u201d Some of the most important music in the American canon was captured there.<\/p>\n
It was a very quiet ride back down the turnpike, as you might imagine. But it got us talking about some of the things that were explored as far as the music and the graphics and the creativity at that time. Very shortly, we had the idea to do a book about Prestige album cover art.<\/p>\n
The one-sheet promo that came with the book mentions 20 years of research. Tell me about that.<\/b><\/p>\n
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Mark: <\/b>Well, a lot of things happened in between. One of the reasons that the book took a long time was because we started out with very humble ambitions: just to create a compendium of album cover art, as we had seen many times for other labels. But as we began to get into things, we realized that first of all, visually, the first printing of original editions of the albums was dramatically different than most of the reissues, and certainly [different than] the reissues from later decades.<\/p>\n
So it became really important to us to track down the original first edition of each album cover. [That way] we could really get the idea across to the reader of what that designer intended. Because in a lot of instances \u2013 because of the lower quality of [cover art printing of] reissues \u2013 it wasn\u2019t really clear. So that was one of the things that took a lot of time.<\/p>\n
And then when we started down that road of what the designer\u2019s intent was, we wondered about the designers themselves. We would just see these very small-type last names somewhere on the front or back of the album. We wondered, \u201cWho is Hannon? Who is David Young? And we began to explore the possibility of tracking these people down, if they were still with us. And if not, tracking down an estate, if there is an existing estate, and a custodian of the estate to find out more about who these people were.<\/p>\n
Instead of just a compendium of album covers, it turned into what the book is now, which is nine different visual histories coupled with an oral history that illustrates the unique creative approach to each of the illustrators, photographers or designers.<\/p>\n
Along the way, we hit lots of dead ends and we took lots of wrong turns. But an extraordinary [number] of generous people \u2013 from the artists themselves to folks who own certain album covers \u2013 [helped us]. Also, folks who didn\u2019t know anything specifically about what were after, but said, \u201cYou ought to have a cup of coffee with this person\u201d and connected us with someone who ended up being a lead we were looking for. There was a lot of investigative research, a lot of archaeology with this. But in the end, the book is what we envisioned.<\/p>\n