Prestige

The label was founded in 1949 by Bob Weinstock, a twenty-year-old jazz enthusiast who initially named the company New Jazz before renaming it Prestige in 1950. Operating out of New York City, the label quickly became a major rival to Blue Note by documenting the emerging Bebop and Cool Jazz movements. Early sessions featured legends like Stan Getz and Lee Konitz, establishing the label’s reputation for high-quality, improvisational music.

In 1954, the label began a long and fruitful partnership with legendary engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who recorded hundreds of releases for the label in his parents’ living room studio in Hackensack, New Jersey. This era produced many of the most iconic albums in jazz history, including Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus (1957) and The Miles Davis Quintet’s Cookin’ (1957). Unlike its competitors, Prestige was famous for “blowing sessions,” where musicians were encouraged to improvise freely with minimal rehearsal.

During the 1960s, Prestige expanded its scope by launching several specialized sub-labels like Bluesville for acoustic blues and Moodsville for easy-listening jazz. The label also became a pioneer of Soul-Jazz, featuring artists like Gene Ammons and organist Jack McDuff. Landmark recordings from this period include The Bill Evans Trio live albums Waltz For Debby and Sunday At The Village Vanguard. Toward the end of the decade, the label even moved into jazz-funk and more commercial styles.

In 1971, Bob Weinstock sold the entire Prestige catalog to Fantasy Records, the San Francisco-based label often called “The House That Creedence Built” due to the massive success of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Under Fantasy’s ownership, the catalog was preserved and reissued through the celebrated Original Jazz Classics (OJC) series. Today, Prestige is an imprint of the Concord Music Group, which continues to manage its historic library of over 1,600 releases and occasionally issues new material, such as Jazzmeia Horn’s A Social Call in 2017.