Prestige Record company and label

The company was established in 1949 in New York by Bob Weinstock, and quickly embarked upon an ambitious program of recording many famous young musicians of the day. The catalogue included mainstream jazz, bop, cool jazz, and hard bop by such musicians as Gene Ammons, Wardell Gray, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, John Coltrane, and many others; some recordings were issued on a subsidiary label, New Jazz. In the 1950s many sessions were recorded by Rudy Van Gelder at his studio in Hackensack (later in Englewood Cliffs), New Jersey. In 1960 the company began to diversify, setting up new labels: Swingville (to put out material from a growing catalogue of mainstream jazz by older musicians); Moodsville (to release muted, atmospheric recordings by swing and bop musicians); and Bluesville (a blues label). Artists and repertory were supervised by Weinstock, though others, including Chris Albertson, Ozzie Cadena, Ira Gitler, Bob Porter, and Don Schlitten, were also involved with the catalogue at various times. From the late 1950s until the late 1970s Prestige was chiefly associated with soul jazz, issuing recordings by Brother Jack McDuff, Groove Holmes, Shirley Scott, and Johnny Hammond with various tenor saxophonists. In 1967 the company transferred its headquarters to Bergenfield, New Jersey; in May 1971 it was acquired by Fantasy, which ran the catalogue and label from its base in Berkeley, California.