Posted by Robert Silverstein
January 16, 2026 - 10:40pm UTC
January 16, 2026 - 10:40pm UTC
AVAILABLE NOW: THE NEW BOOK FROM AUTHOR TAD RICHARDS
Listening to Prestige: Chronicling Its Classic Jazz Recordings, 1949–1972
A complete chronicle of one of the greatest postwar jazz labels.
Founded by jazz enthusiast Bob Weinstock, Prestige Records recorded the leading jazz artists of its day, many of whom were at or approaching their creative peak, from its inception in 1949 until 1972. It documented the changing jazz styles as they emerged, from bebop and post-bop, to third stream, hardbop, free jazz, and soul jazz, while honoring the previous generation of jazz musicians. Prestige was also among the first labels to work with recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who revolutionized the way jazz was recorded.
The 1950s were a growth era for jazz, as modern jazz came to be accepted as part of mainstream American music. Prestige captured the leading artists of the era, including the Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and especially Miles Davis, all of whom did some of their most important work for the label in this period. The 1960s saw an exciting and challenging new avant-garde, making the music that came to be known as "free jazz," epitomized by leading Prestige artists Eric Dolphy and Booker Ervin. Other musicians looked back to their roots, developing the earthy, danceable style called soul jazz or jazz funk.
Prestige became the epicenter of this new sound, thanks to artists such as Gene Ammons, Shirley Scott, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Brother Jack McDuff and George Benson. Listening To Prestige presents the author's lifelong enthusiasm for the label and takes a deep dive into Prestige's impressive catalog, documenting the key artists who shaped postwar American jazz.
About the author: Tad Richards is a prolific visual artist, poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer who has been active for over four decades. He is the author of many books, including Jazz with a Beat: Small Group Swing, 1940–1960, also published by SUNY Press. He lives in Kingston, New York.
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Roots Music Report Presents An Interview With Tad Richards
RMR: I grew up in the legendary area where the founder of Prestige, Bob Weinstock had his early music store. My dad owned the coffee shop in the Abbey Victoria hotel for many years in the NYC Times Square area. I remember the Metropole when it turned into a strip joint in the 1960s and they had the go-go dancers in the window.
TAD RICHARDS: I used to go to the Metropole when they still had music – I remember hearing Henry “Red” Allen there.
RMR: Can you tell us where you were born and where you live now and what you like best about it? Tell us about your formative years. What era of music were you most influenced by? You’re turning 86 this year, so congratulations on achieving a venerable age Tad.
TAD RICHARDS: Born in Washington, DC. My father was a foreign service officer, so I lived overseas from shortly after WWII to about 1951. When I was 13 and starting to develop my own taste, I lived in Saugerties, New York, with my mother and stepfather, the sculptor Harvey Fite. I grew up in a world of the arts, but as far as music was concerned, they liked “music to talk over,” so discovering rock and roll was my breakout.
The first record I ever bought was “Bazoom (I Need Your Loving)” by the Cheers, on 78. We were just barely, on a good night, able to get Alan Freed from NYC, but I came to realize very early that Alan Freed was playing the real stuff – the Chords not the Crewcuts, the Moonglows not the McGuire Sisters, Little Richard not Pat Boone. I and my closest friends Peter and Wendell Jones were passionate about music – but really passionate.
And as good as Alan Freed was, the real gold strike was on the nights that we could get Jocko, your ace from outer space, from WOV in Harlem. And the Hound from WKBW – one evening Peter and Wendy and my brother and I were cruising, listening to the Hound, and he broke “Get a Job,” by the Silhouettes, and we spent the rest of the night driving around to good reception areas, waiting for him to play it again. And again.
Listening to Jocko turned me on to rhythm and blues, and I started buying – I don’t know how, I was a kid in upstate New York – 45 RPM records by Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter. Well, I did get into the city occasionally. And years later – the late 1970s, when I was living on the Upper West Side, a guy stopped me and said, “I know you.” How? “I was a clerk at Times Square Records.”
I was in Woodstock – then a haven for artists, not musicians – so I heard a lot of folk music, and the artist who affected me most powerfully was Lead Belly.
Then in 1958, as a freshman at Bard College… but this goes in the answer to your next question.
RMR: The amount of work that went into writing your new Listening To Prestige book is very impressive. Of all the jazz and record labels, why did you choose Prestige and how long did it take to research all the subject matter and then put it into book form? Were other labels in the running or did you want to focus specifically on Prestige and why?
TAD RICHARDS: In 1958, a freshman at Bard College, I came back to my dorm from a night drinking at Adolph’s, and turned on my AM radio looking for a late night rhythm and blues station, and suddenly I was transfixed, standing in the middle of my room, staring at the radio. It was John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio, and I was hooked. A new world had been opened up to me.
I bought the album. My first jazz purchase, and it was on Prestige, In fairly short order, I bought three more albums, and two of them were on Prestige.. the third was Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, on World Pacific. One was King Pleasure/Annie Ross. The other…well, I knew I was late to the dance with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and I had a lot of catching up to do, but here was an artist who was brand new, and I was getting in on the ground floor, just as I had with rock and roll. Back County Suite, by Mose Allison.
So Prestige and I go back a long ways. I bought all of Mose’s other Prestige albums, too.
Peter Jones and I, Wendy died tragically young, never lost our passion for music, and we kept talking about it by text and email when we got separated geographically. How many artists can you name who are still alive who played with Bird? How many Capitol recording artists from the 1950s can you name? And one topic we would come back to… the jazz we started listening to in the 50s.
The rock and roll we loved came to us over the radio from DJs like Peter Tripp, the Curly Headed Kid in the Third Row, but we had to strain through dreck like Pat Boone and Rock and Roll Waltz and Dungaree Doll. But the jazz, from Symphony Sid and Les Davis and records we bought after reading about them in Down Beat … it was all good. All good! Could that really have been possible?
So I decided to put it to the test. With the aid of a Japanese website, jazzdisco.org, which had session logs for every session on every independent jazz label, I could listen, in chronological order, to every session on a representative label, also with the aid of Spotify and YouTube, and blog about it. And it was just natural of me to pick Prestige.
I had been blogging “Listening to Prestige” for about 8 years, and was halfway through the 1960s, when SUNY Press asked me for a book, and a history of Prestige again was the natural choice,
RMR: What other books did you write that you’re the most proud of, and what was the first book you wrote? When did you start writing about music and how many books have you written? How challenging is it to delve so deeply into a subject matter like the Prestige Records story?
TAD RICHARDS: I’ll start with my first two publications. The first group of poems I had accepted for publication were in Poetry magazine in 1963 – talk about starting at the top. It’s been not so impressive a career since then. In 1964, I sold my first satire piece to The Realist, and continued as a regular for The Realist into the 1970s. One of my Realist pieces – on Lyndon Johnson’s daughter’s wedding night – brought me some notoriety.
My first novel - not counting two comic soft-core porn novels, but maybe I should count them, because they were published by Dell Books, and the first one made Dell’s best seller list, right behind Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots, was a thriller called The Killing Place, and it was optioned by Howard Hawks, but he died before he could make the movie.
I’ve published something like three dozen books, fiction, poetry and nonfiction. I guess my first book on music was a biography of Dolly Parton, which I wrote in 1979 for a small New York publishing firm called Quick Fox, for a flat fee of a thousand bucks. I wrote it under a pseudonym because I didn’t want anyone to know I would work that cheap. Shortly after it came out, Dolly became a megastar, and a big mass market house picked it up, and it was excerpted in a big newspaper chain. I asked the publisher, who was a friend, for a little bonus, but he said no, a deal was a deal. I was also playing on his Central Park softball team, so for the next game I doctored my team shirt to read “My book made a bundle for QUICK FOX and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
In the 1980s I started reviewing country music for the Middletown Times Herald Record, and that led to The New Country Music Encyclopedia (1993, Simon and Schuster). I wrote a number of entries for The Saint James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, including Jazz, Rhythm and Blues, Kansas City Jazz and New Orleans Rhythm and Blues, as well as entries on individual artists. I’ve written songs that have been recorded by Orleans, the John Hall Band, and Fred Koller.
I’m proud of the satiric novel I wrote with my brother Jonathan, Nick and Jake. Bud Powell and Jerry Wexler are both characters in it.
My first book on jazz, also for SUNY Press, was Jazz with a Beat: Small Group Swing 1940-1960, about the great - and criminally underappreciated - rhythm and blues instrumentalists of that era. I was the first writer to treat that music as a legitimate genre of jazz.
Writing about Prestige was a labor of love, and an education. I thought I knew a lot about the label from writing my blog, but I learned so much more.
RMR: The Prestige book is quite thorough. Could you mention a few of your favorite Prestige album releases and a few of your favorite Prestige artists and what do you think set Prestige Records apart from other labels of the era? There have been so many legendary record labels from back in the 1950s and ’60s and ‘70, the era I grew up in. What other labels were the competition of Prestige?
TAD RICHARDS: Well, I guess I should start with Mose Allison, John Coltrane/Red Garland, and King Pleasure - Annie Ross. John Lewis’s “Django,” played by the Modern Jazz Quartet, is one of the most beautiful compositions ever written by an American. I had never really listened to the soul jazz, especially the organ jazz, of the early 1960s. I came to appreciate it, and especially the incredible talent and originality of Shirley Scott. In the past, it seemed that whenever I heard jazz on the radio and thought, “Wow, that’s great, but I don’t recognize it – who is it?” - it would turn out to be Eric Dolphy. Doing the Prestige blog and book taught me to really appreciate Eric Dolphy.
Here’s an artist I really had never listened to before starting this project – Jaki Byard. Do contemporary jazz audiences even know who he is. Lists voted on by contemporary listeners like Ranker.com of the umpty-ump best pianists don’t even mention him. But what a talent! Eclectic, innovative, always musical. He drew on every era of jazz, and created something all his own.
I don’t have anything original to say about what set Prestige apart from its competitors… Blue Note was of course the major one. Riverside, Savoy… Atlantic was an indie label back then. Prestige was known for its spontaneity, Bob Weinstock believed in the jam session – he didn’t pay for rehearsals, didn’t do a lot of takes. Because of this, Prestige is kind of the odd duck in today’s music world that prizes perfection. But back then, that wasn’t so true.
When Miles Davis did his ‘Contractual Marathon’ sessions for Prestige before jumping to Columbia, he just played through. One take, ballads that everyone knew. At the same time, he was allowed to record for Columbia, but they couldn’t release the record until he’d satisfied his contact with Prestige. So he did the session for Columbia that became Round Midnight – lots of rehearsals, lots of takes, lots of splicing. Perfection. Today, Round Midnight is considered one of Miles’s masterpieces, and a lot of younger critics dismiss the Prestige albums as sloppy. But back then, spontaneity-prizing critics often preferred the Prestige albums.
RMR: Was there a prequel to the Listening To Prestige book? I saw on Amazon there were 3 volumes? Is the 2026 issue of the book the definitive version?
TAD RICHARDS: I self-published a number of collections of my blog entries, and the blog was also called “Listening to Prestige,” but the book – although it contains some of my blog writing – is an entirely separate project.
RMR: Do you still listen to music and who are some of your favorite current albums and recording artists? How about reissues and box sets? Is Prestige well represented in the record world of 2025
TAD RICHARDS: I’ve become more of a curator than a pioneer. I listen mostly to older music. But I’m not entirely a moldy fig. The first time I heard Vijay Iyer I couldn’t stand him. But I went back and gave him a couple more chances, and ultimately came to realize his brilliance.
I wonder if Prestige gets its due today. A friend who is still a serious record collector tells me that first edition Blue Notes command serious dough, while equivalent Prestige albums are relatively cheap. And as I’ve said, a lot of younger critics tend to belittle the Prestige spontaneous approach. But that music will never die. And the fact that Prestige recorded a lot of music – in their peak years, much more than they could actually release – would anyone seriously want to unrecord any of it? It is such a glorious cross section of such an important era of American culture.
RMR: What was it like working with Mel Brooks on the book version of Blazing Saddles? What did you do with the movie? I’m currently watching Life Stinks, one of Mel’s most underrated movies, from 1991. Mel is going to be 100 this year, it’s a miracle.
TAD RICHARDS: I respect Mel Brooks tremendously as one of the giants of American humor, but my interaction with him is kinda its own comedy routine.
I was hired by Bob Abel, a great editor. It was he who pulled me off the slush pile and took my first piece for The Realist - to write a novelization of Blazing Saddles. He knew that the screenplay as written was too short to fill out the page count of a paperback book, so he got me because he knew I could write comedy, and he told me to improvise some, and add some scenes. Normally, this would not have been a big deal, because normally no one cared about novelizations.
But the head of the publishing house, Warner Paperback Library, was Mel Brooks’ brother in law, so the manuscript got sent to Brooks for approval, and he hit the ceiling. “What is this shit? Doesn’t this guy realize that this script is in the great comic tradition of Chaplin and Keaton and The Producers?” He flew in from California to have a sit-down meeting with me, which was friendly. During a half-hour meeting, he must have called me by name about forty times – “Well, Tad, I think…”
What he thought was, take out all of my gags. Yes, but the movie is full of sight gags, and I had to find verbal equivalents. No verbal equivalents. Just describe the sight gags. How about the ending, where the fight bursts out of the Western set and into the Warner Brothers cafeteria? Just write what it says in the screenplay.
They even had a special showing of the movie for me, so that I could take notes and not miss one golden word that had been added after the final screenplay. So that’s how I saw Blazing Saddles – a black and white work print, with no music.
Then they set up a cot for me in the WPL editorial offices, so I could work straight through – rewriting three months worth of work in three days.
RMR: For someone in their mid-Eighties, what do you think about the internet? It seems like everything’s been exposed online? Do you think the internet and all its appendages is good for the music world and the artists?
TAD RICHARDS: I love the internet, because it makes my research so much easier. So many people have written so much more knowledgeably than I ever could about the effect of it on artists – mostly that they get ripped off, and if you think what’s happening is bad for artists, it’s a hundred times worse for songwriters. But I’m so separate from that world.
RMR: Now you will turn 86 in 2026. Are you still writing every day and do you have some new writing ideas even at such a venerable age? Are there other writing goals that you are pursuing? I wish you much good luck and more success Tad.
TAD RICHARDS: Yes, I still write every day. I’m writing another book for SUNY Press – a biography of my stepfather Harvey Fite and the story of his masterwork, Opus 40. I’m halfway through a big novel about young artists in the 1920s and ‘30s. I write a bi-monthly column on poetry for an online journal, Verse-Virtual. I haven’t written much poetry in the past few years, but two nights ago I started writing poetry again, so that well isn’t completely dry. I don’t do much songwriting any more, but in the past couple of years I’ve written a couple of songs with John Hall that you can find on YouTube.
I plan to finish the Harvey Fite bio this year, and then get back to the novel. I don’t feel like I’m running down, but I guess that can happen at any time.