Bob Weinstock founded and operated Prestige Records, the aptly named independent U.S. label that was among the premier chroniclers of postwar New York City jazz culture. In sharp contrast to its primary rival Blue Note, Prestige celebrated spontaneity and improvisation, ignoring mainstream conventions to release pivotal sessions in the careers of immortals including Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane. Born in New York in 1929, Weinstock was a lifelong jazz fan. With the aid and encouragement of his father Sol, he launched his own mail-order music business while in his teens, promoting his services via advertisements in Record Changer magazine. Eventually Weinstock rented his own retail space inside the Jazz Record Center's 47th Street location, and by his late teens was a regular at the Midtown club the Royal Roost, befriending myriad local musicians who steered his tastes away from traditional swing to cutting-edge bebop sensibilities. The 20-year-old Weinstock founded New Jazz Records in early 1949, debuting with a Lennie Tristano Quintet session that generated Lee Konitz's classic Subconscious-Lee. Rave reviews in Down Beat and Metronome helped secure national distribution deals, and Weinstock never looked back. As saxophonists quickly began to dominate the label's catalog, he launched the Prestige subsidiary, complete with a distinctive saxophone logo; in short time Prestige became Weinstock's dominant imprint, in 1952 scoring its first major chart success with the King Pleasure smash Moody's Mood for Love.

At Prestige's peak Weinstock recorded an average of 75 sessions per year, typically setting up sessions with little or no rehearsal time. While the label's output suffered in some respects, there's no doubt the approach captures an uncommon vitality that a more conventional approach to recording would have eroded. And there was no doubting Weinstock's ear for emerging talent -- he cut pivotal sides by J.J. Johnson and Wardell Gray, and in 1956 issued Two Tenors, Coltrane's debut as a leader. Prestige's most legendary recordings remain its sessions led by Miles Davis, beginning with 1951's Blue Period. Under Weinstock's eye he emerged as the most creative musician of his generation, cutting a series of seminal dates before exiting the label in 1956. The terms of Davis' departure from Prestige demanded he cut a stockpile of new material for subsequent release, and over two daylong sessions he and Weinstock recorded no fewer than four LPs, among them the classic Cookin' With the Miles Davis Quintet and its companion volumes Relaxin', Workin', and Steamin'. Still, few if any of the major artists signed to Prestige did their finest work for the label. Only Sonny Rollins could claim to reach to his creative apex under Weinstock, cutting his masterpiece Saxophone Colossus in 1956. The label instead contented itself with a series of jukebox hits, including smashes from Stan Getz and Sonny Stitt.

While Weinstock served as producer of Prestige's earlier sessions, by the mid-'50s he was distancing himself from the studio to focus on the label's executive operations, establishing new distribution and promotion systems while turning over recording responsibilities to staff producers including Ira Gitler and Ozzie Cadena. Their input altered Prestige's direction, and by the following decade the company's calling card was soul-jazz, spearheaded by acts including Jack McDuff, Richard Groove Holmes, and Shirley Scott. Producer Bob Porter encouraged his artists to further embrace commercial sensibilities, yielding jazz-funk classics from Charles Earland and Houston Person. Prestige also branched out into folk and spoken word releases via short-lived subsidiaries like Bluesville, Swingsville, and Moodsville. But with the dominance of rock roll growing more and more pronounced, Weinstock found it increasingly difficult to remain competitive, and in 1971 he sold Prestige to the Fantasy label and retired to Florida. The label's output dribbled to a minimum in the years to follow, although in the late-'80s Fantasy began reissuing landmark Prestige dates on CD under the "Original Jazz Classics" banner. Weinstock even returned to Fantasy during the 1990s as an executive producer, helming sessions from his Deerfield Beach, FL, home. He died of complications from diabetes at a Boca Raton hospice on January 14, 2006. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi