Chris Entwisle and Mark Havens: authors of WAIL on the constraints that led to timeless designs for Prestige Records

Speaker A: With so many things at designers fingertips now, it's almost difficult to place limits upon a project that the limits that you put on yourself by choice or by virtue of the project that you've taken on and the realities of that, those limitations often make the difference. Embracing that whole what can I do with the minimum amount? Was something that every single prestige designer was great at it.

Speaker B: Years ago, two friends in Philadelphia, both designers, both obsessed with jazz, kept noticing the same notation on the back of their favorite records. It said, recorded by Van Gelder in Hackensack. So one Saturday they drove out to find it. They tracked down the address in a 1955 phone book. It they pulled up and found a parking lot. No sign, no plaque, nothing to mark that Rudy Van Gelder had once turned his parents living room into a recording studio right there, capturing some of the most important American music of the century. That quiet drive home planted the seed for a 20 year project. Mark Havens and Chris Entwistle are the authors of Whale Visual Language of Prestige Records, the first real look at the design history of a label that, unlike Blue Note, never got its design mythology, despite cover art that's just as striking and definitely as durable. They tracked down original pressings, interviewed the designers before that history disappeared for good, and uncovered how a label run, in one historian's words, like a mom and pop store, no budget, no briefs, no marketing department produced a visual identity coherent enough to still echo through design today.

Speaker C: What we love about this conversation is how much of it comes down to constraints driving creativity. Reed Miles couldn't afford imagery, so he made typography the art. Tom um, Hannon had no budget for stock photography, so he shot the musicians himself. Designers got an album title and nothing else. No brief, no comp, no client approval. And turned that absence of direction into creative freedom. Because Bob Weinstock simply vett it all his art, the music and covers alike. This is a conversation about jazz, but it's also about what happens to creative work when nobody's watching too closely. And why limitations so often produce things that last. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.

Speaker B: And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our Premium subscriber feed. DesignBetter Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad free. Plus you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level. You'll also get our Toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Perplexity, Miro, Readai, and more. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a Premium Subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe the podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program, so if you can't afford a subscription, just shoot us an email@subscriptionsecuriositydepartment.com and we'll help you out. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

Speaker A: Foreign

Speaker B: hey, before we start the show, I wanted to give you a heads up that there is a video version of our episodes on YouTube. Head over to DBTR Co YouTube. That'll take you right to our YouTube channel where you're going to find not only video versions of episodes which are fun to watch and kind of see the behind the scenes, but also some bonus content that you can't get in the podcast feedback. That's DBTR co YouTube. Or just go to YouTube and search for Design Better podcast. Okay, on with the show. And now back to the show. Mark Havens and Chris Entwistle, welcome to Design Better.

Speaker A: Thanks for having us.

Speaker D: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Speaker B: Yeah, we are big record fans and jazz fans and graphic design book fans so you fit in the Venn diagram of all the things you've published recently. A wonderful book called the Visual Language of Prestige Records. And I want to know more about why this book and how you got into this project. But before we jump into that, I just want to say how important books like this are at this moment in design history. We hear from our design community, Design Better listeners and readers that they are frustrated and feel stifled, a lot of anxiety around AI and things becoming less in their control and they want to find inspiration and new ways, fresh eyes to look at design. I often find that looking at design history, it's a rich way to reconnect with your passion and your craft. And this book is just full of it, so can't recommend it enough to listeners. Definitely check this book out. But why don't you take us into the origin story of the book and why you wrote this?

Speaker A: Well, Chris and I have been friends for years. He was into the music earlier than me, definitely, but we had always sort of enjoyed not only the music together but the graphics together. And that was sort of from the start. The way I met him was I was working at a design Firm. And I had always heard about musicians like John Coltrane or Thonius, Monk, Sonny Rollins. And I decided one day this is in the sort of crossover period between cassettes and CDs going way back. I bought a couple of jazz CDs and I had them on my desk at this design firm. And the business manager, who happened to be Chris's wife, walked by and said, what do you got there? And I said, well, these are just a couple of CDs that I just got. And on top was an Art Blakey cd. And she said, you got to meet my husband. And when somebody says that, you're sort of like, okay. And that was Friday. And, uh, I come in on Monday. And on my desk is a stack of four cassettes.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Each of which has a handmade four panel fold out piece of art with it. Half photocopied, half hand done. It looked like the paper was ripped out of some accounting ledger somewhere. It was just extraordinary. It's matching set of four cassettes. And Chris's wife comes back and she says, I told my husband about you. And he said that if you're listening to Art Blakey, you need to hear Jackie Maclean. And this was a, uh, set of four cassettes of Jackie Maclean's music. And I thought, okay, this is a guy I definitely need to meet. And it went from there. And so we would go to shows together and just enjoy the music and the graphics together. Because we both have backgrounds in design, it was always something that we liked just as much as the music was the graphics. And so one day we were sitting around listening to some albums. And on the back of many of the albums, I'm sure you guys know, there's lots of small notations. And one of the notations that we would always see on the back of these albums that we love so much was recorded by Van Gelder in Hackensack. And so we started talking, we were like, you know what, we're both in Philadelphia. And so we said, uh, why don't we go to Hackensack? Wouldn't that be cool if we could actually find where this stuff was recorded? And where it turned out to be recorded was in Rudy Van Gelder's parents living room. He had convinced his parents to allow him to turn their living room into a recording studio in Hackensack. And that was where a number of the albums that we enjoyed together were recorded. So one Saturday we went up a lot of driving around Hackensack, uh, stop at the Hackensack Public Library. And in a 1955 phone book. We found the address. We drive up to the address and get out of the car. And the only thing there is the parking lot for Hackensack Sports Medicine. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were just kind of standing in the middle of the parking lot, kind of dumbstruck that there was nothing there. Not a sign or a plaque. That so much of what had happened there, so much Seminole American music that was recorded there, you'd never know. You'd absolutely never know. So it was a very, as you might imagine, a quiet ride back down the turnpike. And we started talking about all of the things that are kind of swept under and all of the things that are worthy of exploration and, um, worthy of being shown to a larger audience. And that's where the idea for the book came from. Up until that point, there had never been anything written about the graphic design of Prestige Records. And plenty written about Blue Note. They always seem to have had a better handle on the marketing than Prestige did. I mean, it stopped being a label in the early 1970s, and there wasn't much there. So that's what sort of set us off down the road of the book. Uh, when we initially had conceived of the book, it was just a bunch of albums. And so we started looking for the albums. But one thing led to another, and it turned into what it is today. Gradually.

Speaker C: You did a fair bit of research for this from our standing almost 20 years tracking down all these copies of every Prestige release. And as you're doing that and going through that process, obviously you probably both had a bit of a design lens as well as appreciation for the music. What do you think? Maybe some other designers? Miss, as we're flipping through album covers or looking at this type of graphic

Speaker D: design, I think Mark and I both feel the same way, that we always came to this with a feeling that the design was almost inseparable from the music. Some of the people we've spoken to since we published the book were deeply into the music and enjoyed talking about the music, but they had very little feeling for the design. Or they felt as though that isn't something that influenced what they listened to. For me, from the minute I was listening to jazz, when I was first seeing this was in the 70s, I was looking at. I remember seeing the Congregation by Johnny Griffin, which is another Reed Miles, Andy Warhol cover. I remember the Cooker with Lee Morgan. And just being kind of mesmerized. Not that it looked dated. I mean, it looked very much of its time. But I just felt like this is the kind of design that sort of sustains over the years. And it wasn't nostalgic for me. And, you know, this was in an era just on the cusp of Memphis design and things like that that I think has really dated badly over the years. But somehow the stuff from this year, the prestige stuff, the Blue Note stuff, I'll even say some of the things that. Riverside, I think, has a kind of timelessness to it. It's influenced by European design movements and other things. But I always kind of felt, and Mark did, too, that this stuff would really stand the test of time and it should exist apart from the music. You should be able to look at it the same way. People would publish a book on Alvin Lustig book covers or Paul Rand design or something. You know, we just kind of felt like, let's really try to concentrate on the design. We love talking about the music. We didn't feel fully equipped to write about it, but we felt like, let's really concentrate on what these covers actually are.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: I was remarking to Eli as we were preparing to chat with you, there are a number of these that feel like they could be in a gallery, like they could just be a, uh, painting. I'm going to share one here for our YouTube folks. But this is Prez. It's all it says on the COVID which is just a beautiful, simple, curious composition that is not overly descriptive and yet piques your curiosity. Take us behind the scenes. Who are the characters that are creating these covers? Who are they? What's their background, and what do we know about them?

Speaker A: Well, when we started out, we didn't. We didn't know much of anything about anyone. Like I said, it was initially a book just of the album covers. But as we began to get deeper and deeper into the album covers, you see little credits in the corners or hiding in an image somewhere, you know, Hanon or Young. You know, you sit around long enough and look at something, you ask yourself just about every question about it. And so we were like, well, who was Hanin and who was young? And so we started to do a little bit of research and try and figure out who these people were. And it became apparent that in order to really understand the art, what would be best would be to hear from the artists and the designers in their own words. And so that sort of opened up a new facet for the project of us going, well, you know, maybe it's not just a catalog of album covers. Maybe we can get a little bit about the creators of these covers. The Photographers, the artists, the graphic designers. And that sort of expanded into what it is today, which is sort of a compendium of nine different creative processes as lenses to see the work of Prestige. But to get back to your original question, these designers were young artists, they were photographers, they were graphic designers, they were painters, they were creatives. In 1950s New York, prestige was run by Bob Weinstock, founded by Bob Weinstock, who was a record store owner. He began recording. He didn't have any employees at first. And we ended up getting an interview with his first employee, who was Ira Gitler, who ended up being, you know, one of the world's preeminent jazz historians and ended up, due to his journalism degree, that he just finished writing the album liner notes for all of the recordings of prestige in the 1950s. He was the first employee. He talks about packing boxes of records for shipping and sweeping the floors and writing promo copy and delivering records to DJs, just about everything. And Prestige was kind of run on a shoestring. It was a very sort of hand to mouth operation. One of the people who was really instrumental in this book, Dan Morgenstern, he was the director of the Rutgers University Institute for Jazz Studies and was a huge help to us for this book. He was the editor of Downbeat. And so he had a unique insight into Prestige. And he said, we've got the quote in the book. He said, you know, they were recording these world class musicians, but it was run like a mom and pop store. And so these designers, it was work for hire, they were freelancers, walked in off the street. Bob Weinstock, when we spoke with him, sharp as a tack, remembered absolutely everything and every person that he ever hired or ever worked with. But there wasn't really anything deeper than this guy walked in with a portfolio off the street. I took a look at his work, I liked it. I gave him a couple of albums to do and it went from there. Wow, that's cool.

Speaker B: It doesn't read that way.

Speaker C: The timelessness that you mentioned, Chris and Aaron, you mentioned that kind of painterliness. And in some cases there were actual paintings that went into like this Reed Miles cover. And there's this great, like sort of interdisciplinary approach there. It feels like where he was a designer, but it looks like he was also a painter and photographer. These days we maybe within different roles, tend to overly silo ourselves. Maybe we would think like, well, I'm a UI designer, UX designer, and I'm not really a painter, I'm not a graphic designer. And to some degree. We'll talk more maybe about the negative side of AI, but the positive side is that maybe it lets us kind of branch out and explore and experiment in different ways. But what do you all feel about that sort of multidisciplinary approach that made some of these so, uh, special? What played into that?

Speaker D: I think you're onto something with Reid Miles, especially because I think he was sort of an omnivore. Of all the designers at Prestige, he was the most comfortable, I think, with the idea of commercial art or graphic design. I mean, he saw what was going on in painting. He immediately hooked up with Andy Warhol and that crowd, along with Ed Wolowich and other photographers. But except for Reed Miles, all the other designers at Prestige had their origins in fine art. And if you talk about silos, when you think about the art world in the 1950s, there was not really any crossover between illustration and design, between fine art and design. And there was a prejudice toward commercial work or illustration. So people like David Young, even Tom Hannon, I think, were very opinionated about where they would do commercial art. And it was only with this music, and it was only to be involved with this music that they were doing that. When you read David X. Young's It's Not a Memoir, but when he talks about it, you can kind of get that feeling from these abstract expressionists that were condemnatory of anything but the purity of doing expressionist paintings. Which is why they had a lot of antipathy toward pop art. When it's ironic, it's a guy like Warhol that emerged in the 60s. Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg had been window dressers and commercial artists. And I think David Young and Hannon felt completely adrift in the 1960s because they felt the stuff that they had been doing that they were committed to doing was just kind of the rug was pulled out from underneath them. So they stopped doing any kind of work at that point.

Speaker B: And all of these guys and, uh, I think it's all men as far as I could tell. Is that correct?

Speaker D: Actually, a couple women that didn't do sustained work. That's almost unique too. There was Carol Reef, who was a great photographer, did some early stuff on the 12 inch LPs, and Fran Scott, who did the first LP cover. First 12 inch LP cover.

Speaker B: And they're all based in the New York, New Jersey area. Is that right?

Speaker D: Entirely New York, you know, Entirely New York.

Speaker B: So they're seeing all of this art change. So for anyone who did not take art history, there's a lot happening in the 50s, the uh, late 40s and 50s in New York, the New York scene. So many artists who have come from Europe have come over. And then also there's just this cultural change that's taking place. Folk music, Bob Dylan Goes to New York. You, you mentioned Rauschenberg and Johns and all these other folks. There's just a cross pollination of a lot of creative ideas. I feel like these covers capture some of that cross pollination.

Speaker D: Absolutely. I feel that way. I feel it's almost like a panorama of those things. These guys were so clearly part of that world. And, um, the painting that you just showed of Reeve Miles looks so much like. When I think of some of the work that was being done then, even though he'd never dabbled much.

Speaker B: M. Robert Motherwell or something.

Speaker D: Exactly, exactly. It's just a source of continual inspiration to us. Even at this point, after having worked on it so long, I don't think we ever lost the sense of a kind of wonderment or we'd look at some of these covers as we'd be working on it, and we would just still feel like this stuff is just. It's remarkable. And what we talked about a little bit when we first started talking was we shot all of these album covers. I mean, these were individually pursued and shot. They're all original issue. And when you look at it, I'm not sure if the David Young that you have behind you is. Is that an original issue of, uh, like a 10 inch back there?

Speaker C: Yeah, that's an original.

Speaker D: So that's an original. So some of those 10 inches are a little different. But when you see some of the 12 inch covers that came out, they almost look like serographs. The printing is so sophisticated and the feel of it. When we first thought, well, maybe we'll be able to do, just to save us some legwork, we could maybe shoot some of these reissues or something. Mark bought, I don't know how many, 100 from a DJ of these original jazz classic reissues. It was as though you were looking at a different thing. It was like looking at something was stepped on 50 times. So we realized we were going to have to find all original issues for this.

Speaker A: We thought we had the project licked at the beginning. Buying one load of stuff out of some guy's trunk. We could get a lot of what we were after. But it became obvious to us, especially when we tried to photograph this stuff was nearly unintelligible because it had been obviously made from a copy of a copy of A cop.

Speaker B: Just like the records themselves.

Speaker A: Exactly. And so we saw a couple of original issues and like Chris said, they were completely different, completely different visuals. And so we thought, wow, you know, if we really want to do justice to these artists original vision, which was another thing that we wanted to do because a lot of these albums were printed in very, very small numbers and haven't been seen since. If we wanted to do justice to that work, we were going to have to go back all the way to the first printings of these albums, which is what we were able to do with all of them, which is one of the reasons the project took as long as it did.

Speaker B: And you also got access to some of the original artwork that was rejected. Like the Lester Young, the purple cover that I showed. I think that one was rejected.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker B: You photographed the original.

Speaker A: Right. That was an album design that David X Young had done when he was trying to break into the album cover design area. He was a fine art painter as he started out as in Boston and then came to New York City. And the album cover design for Prestige was pretty much the only creative work that he ever ended up doing. I believe that's a rejected cover for Clef Records. The corresponding article or letters in Downbeat that are across the page on that spread really shed light on what he was thinking when he was at that stage in his career. Sort of seeing these other designers and other artists visualize jazz and what his really distinctive viewpoints were about their work and about what visualizing jazz can and should be.

Speaker C: One critical component of most of these albums is the typography and mark. You teach industrial design, is that right?

Speaker A: It's industrial design. My practice kind of exists at a number of disciplines at kind of a crossroads. Industrial design, graphic design and art. So I have a degree in graphic design and industrial design and end up doing art and projects like this a lot of the time. So it's a nice mix.

Speaker C: I was curious because I also teach in the product design world and I think a lot of our students don't necessarily get that grounding in typography and graphic design. And even though it's applicable obviously to a lot of product design and physical product design, digital product design. So I'm curious, what's your perspective about what students or somebody earlier in their career or somebody who's just curious about becoming more grounded and typography might take away from a book like this?

Speaker A: The thing that stands out to me about each of those albums is the deep attention that was paid.

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