Member ListeningToPrestige has published ... Listening to Prestige

[Big Beat Steve]

17 minutes ago, andybleaden said:

Well 

I have all three - the Ruppli, the Swing Journal (alongside those for many other labels)  and now these interesting 4 volumes and I find them all helpful and interesting. 

What I find I enjoyed was Tad's writing and input - not facts - I have the Ruppli etc for those (and many of the LPs/CDs also) 

I never saw this as a discography but as a blog (which I happened to have completely missed online - now in print)  - a document about "listening to" Prestige with yes - some facts missing or lack of access to all the music available - that was never the point for me.

I do see your points - which goes to show that approaches and expectations are different. That Vol. 1 does have its merits and like I said, I usually find his thoughts interesting and useful "food for thought" when listening to the music. 
Beyond this, however, my point just is that - to put it bluntly - "if you name facts, get the facts right." Not caring enough about factual accuracy is not the way to do it IMHO because some readers may just take incorrect facts as the real thing and then these errors risk getting carved in stone through repetition elsewhere (and become doubly hard to straighten out from then on). Happens all the time, alas ...
Better not to mention facts than to mention wrong ones or go out on a limb with assumptions or speculations that don't hold water because it has long been shown that things are not that way. 

And of course the requirement of factual accuracy applies to the "Listening to Prestige" label history too (in fact to any such book). 

8 minutes ago, Peter Friedman said:

However, I don't believe the book was intended to be a complete discography of every Prestige recording. I am reading the book with the understanding that it is the work of a person who truly loves jazz, especially that which is on the Prestige label. Though my opinion of various recordings may not always agree with that of the author, I nonetheless always find it interesting to see the opinion of others.

I didn't take it to be one, either. Maybe the sales blurb for the book and certain endorsements did the purpose of the book a disservice in unduly stressing the "virtually every tune from every session" angle and the resulting "reference book" claim.  As for the individual session chapters as stimulants for revisiting the recordings - see my statements above.  

Edited February 5 by Big Beat Steve