Prestige Records is a jazz record company and label founded in 1949 by Bob Weinstock in New York City which issued recordings in the mainstream, bop, and cool jazz idioms.[1] The company recorded hundreds of albums by many of the leading jazz musicians of the day, sometimes issuing them on subsidiary labels. The company's began releasing jazz records in 78 and 45 RPM formats in 1950. The Prestige label includes the 13000 and 25000 cat# series. Prestige International was a sub-label of Prestige, active from 1960 to 1969, that mostly released folk music. In 1971, the company was sold to Fantasy, which was later absorbed by Concord.
Audio engineer Rudy Van Gelder was the recording engineer of many Prestige albums in the 1950s and early-to-mid-1960s. Prestige created new labels in 1960: Swingville, Moodsville, covering jazz, Bluesville featuring blues revival artists, Lively Arts featuring spoken word recordings and Prestige International, Prestige Folklore, Irish and Near East with folk and world music.[1]
In 2017, Concord Music Group revived the Prestige label. The first album released under the label's reactivation was A Social Call from Texas native Jazzmeia Horn.[5][6]
^ abcdRye, Howard (2002). Kernfeld, Barry (ed.). The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Vol. 3 (2nd ed.). New York: Grove's Dictionaries Inc. p. 324. ISBN1-56159-284-6.
