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News from Fantasy Records: The Berkeley Item - #269

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On October 2, 1959, pianist RED GARLAND and his all-Philly trio--bassist Jimmy Rowser and drummer Charles “Specs" Wright--held forth at a Harlem nightery called the Prelude. They delivered three swinging sets, which were captured for Prestige by engineer Rudy Van Gelder (and producer Esmond Edwards) in the label's first location recording. Due for release 2/14 is a two-CD package--At the Prelude--that presents the full results of the trio's work that night.

The Prelude material--about two and a quarter hours of music--was originally issued by Prestige in somewhat scattered fashion, spread over four albums that appeared between the '60s and early '80s. Its first “complete" treatment had to wait until 2003, when a three-disc box including four previously unissued tracks came out in Japan. This new set contains all the music heard in the Japanese version, plus new notes by writer Joe Goldberg.

At the Prelude is prime Garland.




Producer BOB WEINSTOCK, who was a 20-year-old jazz collector and fan when he founded Prestige Records in 1949, died last Saturday (1/14) in Boca Raton, FL. He was 77.

Weinstock parlayed his passion for jazz first into a successful retail operation and then, in short order, his own record label, which became one of the major jazz indies of the 1950s and '60s. (It was sold to Fantasy, Inc. in 1972, and acquired by the Concord Music Group in 2004.)

Prestige's first recording session was held on January 11, 1949, when Weinstock cut four sides featuring Lee Konitz and Lennie Tristano that were issued on 78s on New Jazz, the original name of the company. He had an early hit with King Pleasure and “Moody's Mood for Love" and solid sellers with records by Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, but arguably the label's most important affiliation was with Miles Davis, who came on board in 1951. In a 1989 interview with James Rozzi, Weinstock recalled how he came to sign the trumpeter:

“Miles had vanished after he did those Capitol sides with the nonet [1949]; nobody knew where he was. Somebody had said that he may be at home in East St. Louis, so while I was in Chicago on business, I tracked him down. His father was a dentist, so I knew that his number would be in the phone book. I called information, got the number, called, and Miles answered. . . . I said that I was interested in doing a series of recordings, and that I wanted to sign him to a contract. He said alright, just get him to New York and we'd talk about it then."

Weinstock also revealed three that got away: Harry Belafonte, who offered him some calypso sides that the producer turned down, only to see Belafonte become “the hottest vocalist in America"; Jimmy Smith, who went on to success at Blue Note after Weinstock told him “Man, I can't put that out. That's not what I'm doing" ("After that I signed the next best six or eight jazz organists I could find"); and--what he calls his biggest blunder--Bob Dylan, whom Weinstock met around the time he was starting up the Prestige/Folklore label. “I asked [this one dealer at the Folklore Center on Bleecker Street] if Dylan had ever recorded (which he hadn't), and was told not to bother recording him, just listen to Woody Guthrie instead."

Here are a few of the artists Bob Weinstock did record: the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Coltrane, Mose Allison, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, Jaki Byard, Thelonious Monk, Red Garland, Dexter Gordon, Etta Jones, Ron Carter, Pat Martino, Phil Woods, Roosevelt Sykes, King Curtis, George Benson, Charles McPherson, Andy Bey, Curtis Fuller, Art Farmer, Tom Rush, Stan Getz, Benny Golson, Eddie “Lockjaw" Davis, Jimmy Witherspoon, Harold Mabern, Shirley Scott, Rev. Gary Davis, Eddie Jefferson, the Holy Modal Rounders, Jack McDuff, Lightnin' Hopkins, Tadd Dameron, Booker Ervin, Illinois Jacquet, Yusef Lateef, Oliver Nelson, Houston Person, Jerome Richardson, Lonnie Johnson, Jackie McLean. . . .




SONNY ROLLINS has been named Artist of the Year, as well as top Tenor Saxophonist, in the annual Jazz Times Readers Poll, and graces the magazine's February cover--his second Jazz Times cover in less than a year. In addition, his Grammy-nominated Milestone CD, Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert), placed second out of four titles in the poll's Best New Releases category and second in the critics' Top 50 CDs of the year.

Sonny's performance schedule resumes in March, with the following U.S. concerts booked thus far for 2006: 3/14 Gusman Center for the Performing Arts, Miami; 3/25 Historic Tennessee Theatre, Knoxville; 4/6 University of California, Davis; 4/8 Cerritos (CA) Center; 8/27 Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, NYC; 9/17 University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

He'll also be working in Europe in the spring and summer: 5/1 Goteborgs Konserthus, Goteborg, Sweden; 5/5 Victoria Hall, Geneva; 5/8 Concertgebouw, Amsterdam; 5/10 Parco della Musica, Rome; 5/13 Barbican, London; 5/15 Halle aux Grains, Toulouse; 5/18 Olympia, Paris; 5/21 Traumzeit Festival, Duisberg, Germany; 6/29 Theatre Antique, Vienne, France; 7/15 Polideportivo de Mendizorroza, Vitoria, Spain.

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