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

[Dan Gould]

I finished this over the weekend while visiting Mom at her assisted living facility.

It very much makes me want to return to a lot of OJC releases in the stacks, and also leaves me wondering about many that I never started in on, Mose Allison as one for sure.  And I really plan to reacquaint myself with some Red Garland Trio recordings, which I collected on OJC vinyl back in the late 80s/early 90s in St Louis.

I also must note one major error that stood out:

Page 186, "British journalist Chris Albertson ..."

Chris was born in Iceland, lived in Denmark and worked in the UK (educated there too?) but I can't imagine him ever identifying as "British" prior to his moving to the States in 1958. 

 

[gmonahan]

1 hour ago, Dan Gould said:

I finished this over the weekend while visiting Mom at her assisted living facility.

It very much makes me want to return to a lot of OJC releases in the stacks, and also leaves me wondering about many that I never started in on, Mose Allison as one for sure.  And I really plan to reacquaint myself with some Red Garland Trio recordings, which I collected on OJC vinyl back in the late 80s/early 90s in St Louis.

I also must note one major error that stood out:

Page 186, "British journalist Chris Albertson ..."

Chris was born in Iceland, lived in Denmark and worked in the UK (educated there too?) but I can't imagine him ever identifying as "British" prior to his moving to the States in 1958. 

 

I'm reading it right now. Didn't catch that error. So far, I'm enjoying it. I do find it odd that there's not more on Dexter Gordon's work for the label in the book, but otherwise, it's an interesting read.

[Big Beat Steve]

That allegedly "British" Chris Albertson was an error I noticed and noted at the margins too. Had me wondering too how this came about in the first place. 

There are a few more errors and, above all, misjudgments (this list is not necessarily complete):

Page 13: "... Serge Chaloff led a group on March 10, 1949, that traded on the Herman name ... ". This was no recording session for the Prestige label at all. And therefore it is outside the scope of this book. (The author does not dwell on the sessions for the Joe Davis label, for example, either that were reissued later by Prestige.) It was recorded for the MERCER label which, for a time during that period was distributed by Prestige (Discogs says so FWIW) and this may have been the reason why it MUCH later appeared on a Prestige REISSUE. 

Page 17: "Weinstock also recorded a considerable number of Swedish musicians ..": He did NOT. These were recordings LEASED from the Swedish Metronome label, but it was with Metronome they saw their original releases. The author got it somewhat correct on page 36, but this is erroneous anyway.

Page 35, about Wardell Gray's backing musician sessions: "They backed up singer Damita Jo that was released on the Xanadu label, then went into two extended jams ..." - this is misleading in that this sounds like that tune featuring Damito Jo ("I Can't Give You Anything But Love") was released on a Xanadu label back in the day. Not so - this apparently remained in the can until it was reissued on the "Sonny Criss Memorial Album" on Don Schlitten's (!!) Xanadu label in 1984 - 34 years after the fact. 

Page 74: Regarding the "Concorde" album by the MJQ: "Concorde is another Francophile nod from Lewis, and inspired the Eiffel Tower cover of the album, designed by bob parent."  Eiffel Tower, eh?  The pic on that cover shows the (Egyptian) obelisque on the roundabout of the Place de la CONCORDE (!!), a place that ought to have been well-known to many Americans visiting Paris as the U.S. embassy in France was and is nearby. This should not have happend by any stretch ... 

Page 80: Eddie Lockjaw Davis and the rise of the organ-sax combo: There is a puzzling sentence there: "Bill Doggett's recordings in the early 50s also were trio recordings. Perhaps Davis got the idea of the organ-saxophone combo that shook the world with "Honky Tonk" from Davis and Scott." How are we to understand this? Which Davis got "the idea" from which (other) Davis? And which Scott? Cannot have been Shirley Scott? And Wild Bill Davis plus Clifford Scott (the tenor saxist on "Honky Tonk") does not make much sense without any context to go with it. So ...? Paging Dan Gould now ...  

Page 84: "...drummer Ike Day ... another victim of the heroin scourge, never recorded, but he was a legend in Chicago." Not really so. Ike Day was on two surviving sessions (both for Aristocrat) in 1949, one with Tom Archia and one with Gene Ammons.

Page 93: "Rollins with Art Farmer" (20 jan. 1954): "... listening to this oddly forgotten session released on a ten-inch and then buried until the 7600 reissue in 1969'...". Not quite so forgotten: It had been reissued on New Jazz 8258 ("Early Art") in 1961 and then on Status in 1964. Which appears to have been a relatively normal cycle for Prestige reissues of recordings from the 10-inch era.

Page 183, Coleman Hawkins and the 30s: "... with his breakthrough 1939 recording of "Body and Soul", and participated with Dizzy Gillespie in what is generally regarded as the first bebop record." Honor to whom honor is due: Coleman Hawkins was the LEADER of these sessions!

Hmmm ...  

Edited June 15 by Big Beat Steve

[Dan Gould]

Yeah I noticed the garbled timelining and confusion on that part about Lockjaw's recordings.  And while his very earliest King recordings were with a trio, it took hardly anytime for Doggett to realize that he sounded a lot like Wild Bill Davis who also recorded for King.  Doggett resolved to find himself a young tenor saxophonist to change the sound and by 1952 was recording with Percy France.  It was one of the earliest organ-tenor combos but not the earliest.

[andybleaden]

I have had some seriously good evenings catching up and finishing Volume 1 of these books and also trying to listen to the tracks where possible. Such a nice concept (albeit with a few errors here and there) that I now cannot wait to start volume 2 (and I am only just up to 1954!) 

 

What was an interesting rediscovery for me were the Teddy Charles recordings