Vanguard Recording Society is an American record label set up in 1950 by brothers Maynard and Seymour Solomon in New York City. It was a primarily classical label at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, but also has a catalogue of recordings by a number of pivotal jazz, folk, and blues musicians. The Bach Guild was a subsidiary label. The label was acquired by Concord Bicycle Music in April 2015. History The newly founded venture's first record was of J.S. Bach's 21st cantata, Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, BWV 21 ("I had much grief"), with Jonathan Sternberg conducting the tenor Hugues Cuénod and other soloists, chorus and orchestra. "What speaks for the Solomons' steadfastness in their taste and their task", wrote a Billboard journalist in November 1966, "is that this record is still alive in the catalogue (SC-501). As Seymour says, it was a good performance, not easy to top. Of the whole Vanguard/Bach Guild catalogue, numbering about 480 issues, 30 are Bach records..." The label also recorded other baroque and earlier works, pieces from the English Madrigal School performed by the Deller Consort, Italian and French madrigal masterpieces, Elizabethan and Jacobean music, and Henry Purcell. In 1953, under the direction of John Hammond, the company began the Jazz Showcase series that concentrated on mainstream jazz, producing about two dozen recordings before it was closed in 1958. Recordings made at the Spirituals to Swing concerts in 1938 and 1939 were released by Vanguard in 1959. The company only intermittently pursued recording jazz after that. In the mid-1950s Vanguard signed blacklisted performers Paul Robeson and the Weavers. It continued to issue folk music with newly signed artists Joan Baez, Hedy West, the Rooftop Singers, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ian and Sylvia, and Mimi and Richard Fariña. In the summer of 1965, Maynard Solomon hired Samuel Charters to edit the tapes of the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Following that project, the company sent Charters to Chicago to capture the broad range of blues musicians there. Those sessions resulted in the 1966 three-album series titled Chicago/The Blues/Today!. The albums included Junior Wells with Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters's bandmates Otis Spann and James Cotton, Otis Rush, Homesick James, Johnny Shines, Big Walter Horton, and Charlie Musselwhite. Vanguard released numerous classical recordings, both domestically produced and imported. Many of the latter came from the United Kingdom's Pye Records label, featuring performances by the Halle Orchestra conducted by