Sunday, September 27, 2015

Prestige Lively Arts, a mostly spoken-word sub-label of the jazz, blues and folk recording company...: Saturday Music and Spoken Word Club on Sunday

Prestige Records was first and foremost a jazz label, one of the many interesting small jazz labels of the 1950s, but one which also branched out over the course of that decade and the next, to include considerable blues, folk and what would now be classed as world music...and a small line of what eventually became a spoken-word sub-label, though the first release, in 1961, was an attempt at a pop album, one by Billy Dee Williams...Prestige was bought up by Fantasy Records as one of its early major purchases in the 1970s, and now as a result belongs to Fantasy's inheritor, Concord Jazz. (The links below are to online archives of the albums' content, or at least samples.) List below courtesy of the Prestige Records Discography Project.
I'm just old enough to remember her best from the sitcom Maude...

Prestige Lively Arts 30000 series (12 inch LP)

LA 30001   Billy Dee Williams: Let's Misbehave

1. A Taste of Honey
2. Let's Misbehave
3. Don't Cry
4. Life's a Holliday
5. I Like It Here
6. Warm Tonight
7. Nothin' for Nothin'
8. I Wonder What Became of Me
9. House of Flowers
10. Red Sun Blues

LA 30002   A Taste Of Hermione Baddeley

Hermione Baddeley (reading) 1961
I Changed My Sex A Week Ago Today
Winter In Torquay
Poor Little Cabaret Star
Missing The Bus
Je Suis
Lonely Little Lotus
Old Girls
You
Reprieve

LA 30003   Roddy McDowall Reads The Horror Stories Of H.P. Lovecraft

"The Outsider"
"The Hound"
Bradbury's own 22 copies of the Meredith reading LP.

LA 30004   Burgess Meredith Reads Ray Bradbury

LA 30005   Larry Storch Reads Philip Roth's Epstein

from Goodbye, Columbus

LA 30006   James Mason Reads The Imp Of The Perverse And Other Stories By Edgar Allen [sic] Poe

The sleeve proofreading at Prestige was perhaps not all it should've been...

LA 30007   James Mason Reads Herman Melville's Bartleby, The Scrivener

LA 30008   Morris Carnovsky Reads Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground

LA 30009   Norman Mailer Reads Norman Mailer

at

4 comments:

  1. Kelly RobinsonSeptember 27, 2015 at 8:36 PM

    Fun stuff! If I could ever get a handle on the blogs I have, I'd love to add Record Dirt to the mix. I find so much great stuff at the record store where I work on Saturdays.

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  2. Todd MasonSeptember 27, 2015 at 8:53 PM

    Probably a pity they didn't get any further than this with the line...they did reissue the Storch/Roth in '69 to capitalize on PORTNOY and the film from GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, as the poster at the link notes.

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  3. Jim C.September 27, 2015 at 10:16 PM

    I'd love to see at least some of these reissued -- not much hope, I'm afraid. Roddy McDowall and H.P. Lovecraft, Burgess Mededith and Ray Bradbury, James Mason and anything...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Todd MasonSeptember 27, 2015 at 11:55 PM

    I'd certainly enjoy hearing the James Mason items, as well...but I've just begun to listen to the Storch reading Roth, and that sounds interesting...Mailer congratulating himself is about what you'd expect...the items with hotlinks have been archived at those links, in whole or in part. So you can hear McDowall right now. As I've mentioned elsewhere, his reading is almost perfect for Lovecraft's tortured, fussy prose.

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