Mistakes, Mishaps, and Miscues: The Early LPs of Prestige Records
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Published:March 2024
Chapter 2 investigates the jazz industry’s transition to the LP format through the activities of Prestige Records, Bob Weinstock (the label’s owner), and the musicians that this independent label employed. This chapter attends to the commercial infrastructures of the jazz record business through a focus on the sounds contained within Prestige’s catalog, especially the musical mistakes and miscues that regularly circulated on the label’s LPs between 1951 and 1955. This chapter asks what it meant for Black performance to circulate on LP during a time of limited agency for Black cultural producers within the predominantly white-owned record business. The informal performances of Miles Davis, Zoot Sims, and James Moody point to a broader shift within the industry in what it meant to document jazz history on record.
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