© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“During the vinyl age (roughly the early 1950s through the 1970s), record album covers played an essential role in music enthusiasts' listening ritual. This ritual involved delicately removing the disc from its protective wrapper inside the printed paperboard sleeve, then carefully placing it on the turntable while revving up the hi-fi. Each step was key to a multimedia experience that also included reading the liner notes and communing—the best word I can think of—with the artwork that adorned the album. Consciously or not, all the artists and artisans involved in creating a record package worked toward the same fetishistic outcome: making an immersive fusion of sight and sound.
When Mark Havens and Chris Entwisle invited me to preview the preliminary contents of WAIL: The Visual Language of Prestige Records, I had not heard of Prestige. I was reminded, however, that before the cable TV era when music videos were the next-big-music-industry-thing (replaced by online digital pyrotechnics), the simple paperboard album cover triggered more than mere commercial sales appeal. Cover art tapped into the listeners' personal senses of memory and emotion. WAIL celebrates these intimate relationships made between art, artist, music, and listener. Through oral histories and a wealth of ephemeral printed artifacts acquired over a twenty-year dig, it chronicles Prestige Records' graphic, typographic, and photographic legacy and the illustrators and graphic designers who made all the components come together. I had never seen any of these covers before, nor had I known about Prestige's place in the historical continuum.
Not every cover is virtuosic or resonant; some designers are clearly more talented than others, some outcomes look slapped together, and one or more seem to mimic graphic styles from other labels. A few of the rougher designs, interestingly, prefigure the punk or grunge anti-art style that became the graphic emblem for later generations. But unearthing this treasure trove of design relics is—seen en masse—as exhilarating to the eye of a design documentarian (like me) as are previously unheard tunes to the ear of a music connoisseur. This book is an important exploration, especially for those studying the histories of the postwar American jazz era.”
Steven Heller - “The Little Record Company That Could”
“The Prestige album covers of the 1950s trace a breathtaking creative arc. At no other label was the connection between jazz and graphic design as emphatic. Designers were free to take risks, and each used that extraordinary freedom to refine and codify their individual styles. As David Rosenthal points out, "the years 1955 to 1965 represent the last period in which jazz effortlessly attracted the hippest young Black musicians, the most musically advanced, those with the most solid technical skills, and the strongest sense of themselves, not only as entertainers but as artists."' This was equally true of the designers drawn to Prestige, as record packaging provided new opportunities to create a visual corollary to jazz. At its best, the music and art achieved a remarkable symbiosis.
Inspired by contemporary European graphic design and typography movements, Prestige's designers employed a range of radical techniques. Clearly, Weinstock was open to a wide variety of graphic approaches: successive covers moved rapid-fire from photography to painting to collage to street art. In this environment, anything was possible and each solution had its own intrinsic logic. Designers made the most of their modest resources and a proto-punk DIY sensibility prevailed. They cut type from magazines to incorporate into their layouts, photographed everything from discarded tangles of wire to frying eggs, and scratched album titles graffiti-style onto railroad boxcars and derelict buildings. There was no branding in the conventional sense; the work was unified only by the uncompromising creativity of its makers.”
Chris Entwisle and Mark Havens - “Radical Design at Midcentury: Prestige Records 1949-1960”
The visual arts have always formed a close alliance with Jazz. Since it’s almost impossible to represent Jazz in words, [wordless] images often create a bridge that adds another sensory dimension to the audio aura of the music.
Photographs, paintings, illustrations, drawings, caricatures - all have been employed to underscore and add depth to the listening experience.
Album covers serve as a mnemonic device to connect the audio with the visual.
- Hollis King
With the advent of the 12” long play 33 ⅓ rpm recordings in the 1950s, the covers that enclosed these records became a perfect platform for the visual arts in all their manifestations.
This was not only the case with the larger labels such as Columbia, RCA and Capitol, but especially so with the independent Jazz labels that carried the spirit of entrepreneurial risk over to employing young artists just getting started in their career.
The results were often magnificent and magical almost to the point where album cover art became its own art form.
Some of the independent Jazz record companies did designate the name of the artist or production company that produced the cover art, but the actual “act of creation” was rarely discussed.
Even books that published album cover art prints such as the Graham Marsh edited Blue Note: The Album Covert Art [Chronicle Books, 1991], California Cool: West Coast Jazz of the 50s & 60s The Album Cover Art [Chronicle Books 1992] or the more recent Joaquim Paulo and Julius Wiedemann, Jazz Covers [Taschen 2025] essentially print photographs of the album covers with little explanation of what when into the making of them.
The quotation on the back cover of Jazz Covers from Artists & Illustrators states: - A visual feast of 12-inch-square draftsmanship and photography at its finest.” But the work is heavy on the “visual” and light on draftsmanship and photographic techniques that produced them.
What makes Wail - The Visual Language of Prestige Records by Chris Entwistle and Mark Havens so distinctive and why it is also fitting that the Rochester Institute of Technology should be its publisher is that the work emphasizes the technology involved in making the cover art.
Before you get the impression that this is little more than a technical manual about illustration and photography techniques, the book also has an overriding human dimension in that some the principals involved with creating Prestige Records [1949 - 1971] including founder and producer Bob Weinstock, liner notes writer and producer Ira Gitler and Don Schlitten who produced AND designed, photographed and illustrated are represented through interviews.
To pull the lens back for a wide angle view of what’s on tap for the reader in Wail - The Visual Language of Prestige Records - Chris Entwistle and Mark Havens magnificent contribution to the Jazz literature [play on words intended], Hollis King sums it up perfectly in the following opening paragraphs to his Epilogue:
“History is not dead. It paces in the shadows waiting for the right person, time, and opportunity to allow its layers to slowly peel away.
Wail - The Visual Language of Prestige Records includes some of the most memorable album covers of their era. Looking at these covers as a collection, so much is revealed about the design, craftsmanship, typography, and production as it was done some seventy years ago…..
“In some ways this was the golden age, with the emergence of great artists like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Zoot Sims along with new technology. Weinstock saw the music and the covers as pieces of art. I remember talking to producer Bob Thiele of Impulse! Records about recording Coltrane and others. He said, “I just felt these guys were doing something important, so I recorded them and stayed out of the way.” Looking at the covers of Prestige, I get the same feeling about these visual artists. Reid Miles, Tom Hannan, and others were allowed the freedom to explore. They did painting, photography, typography, and design seamlessly. They were creating a world that had never existed before, a world we needed. [Emphasis mine. Add graphic designer and photographer Bob Parent, photographer Scott Hyde and graphic designer, illustrator, photographer and producer Esmond Edwards and graphic designer, illustrator and photographer David X. Young along with Miles and Hannan and the list of “others” becomes complete in terms of those artists whose work is explored in the book.]”
In addition to the myriad album covers, all in their original colors printed on luxurious thick paper stock, something that one would expect in such a retrospective, what also makes the book so pleasurable is that the authors have unexpectedly provided first person interviews with many of the principals that are very much in line with William Zinsser’s instructions for how to conduct an effective interview:
“Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does — in his own words.
His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land. They carry the inflection of his speaking voice and the idiosyncrasies of how he puts a sentence together. They contain the regionalisms of his conversation and the lingo of his trade. They convey his enthusiasms. This is a person talking to the reader directly, not through the filter of a writer. As soon as a writer steps in, everyone else's experience becomes secondhand.
Therefore, learn how to conduct an interview.”
- From “Writing About People: The Interview” in William Zinsser's On Writing Well
Zinsser
Following introductory essays by Steven Heller - The Little Record Company That Could and Chris Entwisle and Mark Havens - Radical Design at Midcentury: Prestige Records 1949-1960, we get the producers and artists telling their story in their own words along with examples of their cover art and images and photographs showing the reader the techniques they employed.
Bob Weinstock, Founder Producer, Photographer
My father loved jazz.
When I was eight years old, he and I were walking on Broadway and we saw a sign that said "RECORDS-9 CENTS." My father said, "Come on, come on! We gotta buy these!" I said, "Pop, we don't even have a record player." He said, "It doesn't matter! There's enough people in the building that got players. We'll borrow theirs!" That's when it started for me. These were 78s from jukeboxes—Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington. The vocal side was almost worn out but the other side was the instrumental that hadn't been played at all. It was like getting a brand-new record. So I became a real swing collector early on.
To get to school, I had to change trolley cars by the old Commodore Music Shop. I'd go in there every day. Jack Crystal, Billy Crystal's father, was the manager. He was a great guy—he knew I didn't have much money, but he liked me. Every time he'd see me, he'd say, "You gotta hear this!" He started playing me these bootleg records that were coming out—The King Oliver Band, Louis and the Hot Fives, Bessie Smith, all that Hot Club stuff. Musicians like George Brunis, Wild Bill Davison, and Pee Wee Russell would come in and I'd talk to them, so I sort of gravitated to the old stuff. I really got into it. When I was sixteen, I started a mail-order business selling records out of my parents' apartment. I wanted to sell records, but I really did it to buy up collections for myself. This was right after the war when there wasn't much jazz being produced, so the records were real collectibles. I used to sell a lot of Blue Note, the early stuff—George Lewis, Sidney Bechet. Alfred Lion would deliver the record orders himself. One time when he stopped by, he said, "Here, listen to this," and he gave me a Thelonious Monk. That's how I got into bebop. Soon I had so much inventory and so many people coming to my house, it was overwhelming. I was into this thing twenty-four hours a day and it just overran the apartment. I was only eighteen, but I thought, "I need a store."
So I rented a counter at the Jazz Record Center for a while before starting my own place called the Jazz Record Corner. I was on Forty-Seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth and then moved to Forty-Eighth and Eighth across from the old Madison Square Garden. I had it set up so people could play records all day. It was a collector's place; I made it like I would like it. I stayed open late— I even sold cigarettes. A lot of companies were bootlegging records, and I carried them. I moved some big quantities. My store carried it all. Everything, you name it, I used to track it down.
Soon I got to thinking. I could see the important musicians were Dizzy and Bird. I couldn't afford Dizzy—he wanted big bands—and Bird was so unreliable it was ridiculous. But I could also see that there was another wave coming with Miles and Getz and Konitz. That's when I got interested in starting a label. Since my company started as an outlet for modern jazz, at first I called it New Jazz, not Prestige.”
Ira Gitler Producer Writer
“I got my education at The Savoy.
My brother and I used to go there and dance. I grew up on Basic and Louis Jordan and The Savoy Sultans and Jimmy Lunceford. It was all around you. It was in the movies, it was on the radio. I really got into it, I just had an affinity. But there was a big schism after the war between beboppers, dixieland, and swing fans. All kinds of nasty stuff being said about each other. In France they had fistfights about it, but that's the French, what are you going to do? They booed The Rite of Spring, made the curtain come down. Whatever. I didn't stop loving Coleman Hawkins and Buck Clayton just because I loved Bird and Dizzy Gillespie. I was in my teens, but it just clicked, you know?
I met Bob Weinstock through Stanley Sands, a friend of mine who'd gone to grade school with him. We all used to listen to Platterbrains, Leonard Feather's jazz show on WMCA. Stanley would write to Leonard and eventually was invited to come down to the studio. That's where he and Weinstock got reacquainted. Bob was supplying Leonard with rare 78s, so Stanley was my link to Bob. At first, Bob was selling and trading records out of his parents' apartment; he didn't have a store back then. In the summer of 1948 he got a counter in what was called the Jazz Record Center. It was run by this guy who used to be a strongman in the circus. He mostly sold traditional jazz. It was like a loft. You had to go up one flight and there was a big banner: "Everything from Bunk to Monk." Bob was selling a lot of modern jazz there before he started the Jazz Record Corner. Then he'd send me mail-order catalogs when I was in college. I'd get all my new releases from him and I'd see him when I came home on vacation.
Bob started the New Jazz label in 1949.I remember going to the Stan Getz session when he did Long Island Sound. In the fall of 1950, I went to work for Bob because by that time he'd started Prestige and had a storefront. In those early years, I was sweeping the floors, packing record boxes to be shipped, writing label copy and publicity. It was my postgraduate degree. Originally, the covers didn't have anything at all on the back or they'd just have a list of albums. But then Bob told me, "You're the writer. I want you to write some notes for this new record." It was called Swingin' with Zoot Sims, and it was a milestone recording because it was the first time they had extended takes in the studio. I was at that session. Zoot was so into playing this blues that he didn't look up when people were wigwagging from the control room. So it went on for eleven minutes or whatever. Later on, they asked him to do East of the Sun in a stretched-out version and it came out on either side of a ten-inch LP. That was a historic record for Zoot (and for me, too). After that, Bob wanted notes on all the new releases. I wasn't paid anything extra; it was just part of my job. I didn't actually get paid for writing liner notes until I started freelancing.”
Don Schlitten Graphic Designer, illustrator, photographer, producer
“I was a strange little boy.
I was born in the Bronx—I'm a real Bronx person. But I wasn't one of those kids who played baseball in the streets and that kind of stuff. I was really trying to find something. When I was thirteen, I heard the music and that was it. I started investigating. I started collecting records, I started playing the saxophone. I wanted to be the Jewish Don Byas.
I used to sneak into jam sessions at clubs in the Bronx. I'd go to Club 845 on Prospect Avenue and 165th Street. Dexter Gordon and Lockjaw Davis would play there. Every Sunday afternoon there was a jam session. This was about 1946 or so. Once I saw Miles, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, and Max Roach at the Red Mill Inn on 170th Street and Jerome Avenue. That was the band for the afternoon, and I was lost forever. That was it—I mean that was if. Imagine being fifteen years old and going to a jam session. The stage is about knee-high, and everybody's moving their chairs up close. In front of you are Thelonious Monk, Sonny Stitt, and Gene Ammons. Do you think your life would ever be the same? It was like all of this went right into my arm and I became a total junkie. Forever and a day.
I met Bob Weinstock when I was around sixteen. Byas had gone to Europe and was recording for Blue Star in France, so his records were really hard to find. Weinstock
was only a little older than me, but he was already starting to sell records out of his parents' apartment. Somewhere along the line, he got my name as a collector and mailed me a list of his stuff. So I got in touch with him and we met up. In his room, he had these bookcases made out of orange crates with all the records in them. Since Bob and I were pretty much the same age, we got to be friendly.
You have to realize what was going on in our history at that time. A lot of young people wanted to get into the arts or be artists. Everything was new. Record companies were new, the music was new, business was new. You would go around and investigate everything, you know. You'd take your portfolio to a record company or a book publisher or an advertising agency. So instead of working in an office someplace, you'd work for an art studio, learning how to do mechanicals. You'd start out doing a $30 a week job and you were really a gofer, but you watched and you listened—and that's how all of it evolved.”
Wail - The Visual Language of Prestige Records intersperses commentary about key benchmarks in Prestige's development. For example:
Evolution: The Twelve-Inch Era
“The twelve-inch era at Prestige begins with several artists who designed only a handful of covers for the company. A Touch of Taylor,' the label's first twelve-inch LP, features Fran Scott's studio portrait of a genial Billy Taylor emerging from behind a modernist screen. ….
Photojournalist Carole Reiff (Galletly) was one of the most incisive documentarians of the postwar jazz scene. She was a habitue of clubs, studios, rehearsal lofts, and festivals, where she captured some of the most definitive portraits of the era. Reiff designed two covers for Prestige…..
Gil Melle was the only musician to both design and record for Prestige. ….
Finally, the irreverent Don Martin illustrated a series of wildly eccentric covers just as he was beginning his relationship with Mad magazine. His neurotic menagerie of screaming buzzards, lockstep marathoners and trombone-toting monks resonated with young jazz fans, making an implicit connection between the music and then-current sick humor.
While a true continuity of visual style would begin to develop only with the emergence of Tom Hannan in late 1956, there is such diversity in these first twelve-inch covers—posed photo shoots, public domain art, scabrous cartoons, surreal line drawings—that any single concept could have provided a graphic identity for the label.” [Emphasis mine.]
Tom Hannan, graphic designer, illustrator, photographer
“In the new field of record packaging, Hannan recognized an opportunity to combine his great loves—jazz and visual art. Bob Weinstock vividly remembered Hannan knocking on the door of the Fiftieth Street Prestige offices, portfolio in hand, and introducing himself as an art director. Described by Weinstock as "a Village-type
At Prestige, Harmon found a highly personal voice. He was as likely to draw inspiration from nineteenth-century broadsides as interwar modernist art movements. His visual lexicon included vintage engravings, Japanese calligraphy, gilt wooden signage, custom rubber stamps, and his esoteric collections of musical instruments and antique bottles. On Jackie McLean's 4, 5, and 6,2 Hannan uses a Weinstock session photograph and an improbable combination of type and spacing. The backlit photo is drastically enlarged, exaggerating the grain of the original. McLean, surrounded by a haze of smoke, slouches in a chair between takes, cigarette in hand: this is Friday afternoon in Hackensack. The indifferent title (it's simply the number of players on each tune) along with Hannan's color palette—incandescent vermillion and a deep coral monotint—results in one of the most memorable covers of the era.”
Scott Hyde, photographer
“The family across the street had a portrait studio.
When I turned sixteen, I worked for them and liked it a lot. They taught me to print pictures because all their printers kept getting drafted; this was during World War II. They thought, "Wow, if we could get us a sixteen-year-old, we'd have him for two years." Well, that only lasted a month or so, but I got such a taste for it that I applied to the biggest commercial studio in Portland and started working there after school and in the summers.
There was no fine arts photography establishment to speak of at that time. Without galleries, book jackets and record covers were some of the only outlets I had for the kind of abstract pictures I was doing in my personal practice. The first album cover I ever did was a portrait, though. Bob Dorough was a buddy of mine, and Bethlehem Records wanted a cover photo for an album he'd just done. So Bob had me take some pictures of him sitting at the piano. When I showed them to Bethlehem, they told me, "That's fine, but we can't do anything with this. It needs graphic design.
Do you do that?" I said I didn't, so they said, "Well, there's this fellow we work with sometimes," and they put me in touch with Tom Hannan. I went to see him, and he was extremely reassuring.
The Prestige covers that I did with Tom came after Bethlehem. Tom would get a phone call, then go tearing down there and they'd give him the assignments. He saw some shots I'd done with a 4 x 5 camera, purely for myself. They were virtual images, pictures of things you couldn't see. The camera could see them, but your eye couldn't. Tom said, "We could use these!" They were the result of a long series of experiments.
.
The rectilinear images like the one on the Evolution cover were made using a scalp vibrator that I picked up in a secondhand store. Held against the side of the tray, it set up interesting patterns of standing waves. So you'd get these incredibly distorted yet distinct shapes scattered across the surface of the water.
I don't remember how the work for Prestige ended. I doubt that it had anything to do with money. We never said, "Never again." We were so strung out that we never turned down anything, whether we got paid or not. We just prayed that we'd get paid.”
Perhaps the best summation of what’s on hand for the reader in Wail - The Visual Language of Prestige Records by Chris Entwistle and Mark Havens is contained in the following closing paragraphs from their essay by Jazz historian Dan Morgenstern:
"It was invariably a labor of love for anyone working in the relatively small world of jazz. Prestige was a pioneering modern jazz label, but it was like a mom-and-pop store, operated on a shoestring."
This perpetually tight budget ensured obscurity for many of the covers. After a small initial print run, the designs often changed. Ensuing releases of the same title might appear with small tonal variations or in wholly different colors, depending on whether Weinstock had paid his previous printing bill. In addition to these inconsistencies, the company would often completely redesign an album cover and give it a new title—sometimes within a year of its original release. If a rising star played as a sideman on a recording, he might be elevated to leader on the album's next printing. Designer Don Schlitten explained: "Weinstock would change the covers a lot; as soon he ran out of covers for an album, he would give it a new number or a new cover. I think he hoped that maybe the distributors wouldn't notice the difference and would think it was a new record!" This freewheeling approach expanded the scope of what was possible as Weinstock's impulse to regenerate product provided the designers with uncommon opportunities to reimagine the original concepts.
Collectively, the album covers of Prestige's first decade are a compelling picture of the explosive creativity of midcentury New York. In the midst of a dizzying golden age, this ragtag group of young designers captured postwar jazz at its popular apogee and created a body of work that remains audacious, visionary, and resolutely modern.”
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[Winner of the 2025 Jazz Journalist Association Special Citation for Historic Writings, Steven Cerra is a professional Jazz drummer and the author of anthologies on Gerry Mulligan, Bill Evans, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Shelly Manne, Jazz West Coast Readers Vols. 1-3, Profiles in Jazz, Vol.1, Jazz Drummers A Reader Vols. 1-2, Jazz Saxophonists A Reader, Vol. 1, 2 & 3, Jazz Piano A Reader, Vols. 1, 2 & 3, Jazz Trumpet A Reader Vols. 1 and 2 and A Companion Celebrating The 100th Anniversary Of the Jean Goldkette Orchestras, 1926-2026. He also hosts the jazzprofiles.blogspot and cerra.substack blogs.]
While I sometimes jest about the “editorial offices” at which I work, the truth is that I do everything you see here myself. My apologies for any typos, line breaks and other errors in grammar, syntax or in the final printed format.
