This is a lecture I gave at the 2018 OCT-LOFT festival in Shenzhen, China. It included PowerPoint slides and musical examples.
ESP-Disk’ came about because founder Bernard Stollman was
passionate about justice. As a young lawyer, he often worked for jazz musicians
for free. He acutely felt that African-American musicians worked at an unfair disadvantage, and he wanted to do what he could
to correct this. His involvement moved out of the legal realm after he
was urged by Granville Lee, a Cleveland musician visiting Mr. Stollman, to go
hear Albert Ayler at a club in Harlem, the Baby Grand Café. Though the other
musicians stopped playing when Ayler stepped on the bandstand, leaving the
saxophonist to play solo, Mr. Stollman was nonetheless impressed.
Somebody once said that Ayler should have been a later development following
Ornette Coleman’s also controversial music, but he’d come along earlier than
musical evolution would seem to dictate.
Ayler
disrupted expectations for every major axis on the jazz performance graph:
rhythm, harmony, and melody. In Ekkehard Jost’s seminal 1974 study Free
Jazz, the author states of Ayler’s 1964 recordings, “In no group at this
time is so little heard of a steady beat, as in the trio and quartet recordings
of the Ayler group. The absolute rhythmic freedom frequently leads to action on
three independent rhythmic planes: Ayler improvises in long drawn-out sound
spans; Peacock hints at chains of impulses, irregular and yet swinging in a
remote sense; Murray plays on cymbals with a very live resonance, creating
colour rather than accentuation.”Regarding rhythm, it is worth noting that even
Coleman’s most radical album to that point, 1961’s Free Jazz, was full of regular pulses from both drums and bass.
Compare
this to Ayler’s famous theme “Ghosts,” performed twice on Spiritual Unity.
Ayler
practically ignored harmony; there are no chord progressions per se on Spiritual Unity. There are tonal centers, of course – all music but
12-tone composition has a tonal center or a shifting series of tonal centers –
but they are not determinative of the development of the piece. Bassist Gary
Peacock understood this on a profound level; on the “heads,” he plays a
counterpoint in roughly the same tonal center, diverging gradually, and then in
the improvised sections plays intricately serpentine contrasting melodies.
Melody
was the basis of Ayler’s compositions, and he certainly didn’t eliminate it,
but he radically revised how melody was delivered. He famously declared, “It’s
not just about notes anymore!” Though this is a rather gnomic utterance if one
attempts to parse it literally, anyone who has heard him play knows exactly
what he meant by that. Rather than playing notes with clean timbre, he distorts
and fractures notes. His notes blare, squawk, and scream. His solos quickly
move away from his themes but, with no harmony, relate to nothing but his
feelings in the moment.
To
summarize, Albert Ayler’s approach was different from not just the jazz norm of
the time, but from even other avant-gardists. This meant that the world
wasn’t quite ready for it yet. Here was a new problem for Bernard Stollman to
solve: a musician whose music was so radical that other musicians refused to
play with him. Nor, of course, were record labels rushing to issue this
challenging music. Yet there was something in the sounds that fascinated Bernard
and spoke to him in a way no music had before.
It happened that Stollman was a lifelong devotee of Esperanto and issued an LP of familiar songs sung in Esperanto, titled Ni Kantu en Esperanto (Let’s Sing in Esperanto). Thus he named the label he created to put it out ESPERANTO-Disk, then shortened the name to “ESP-Disk’.” Having a label emboldened him to proclaim to Ayler that he would issue the daring saxophonist’s music himself. But Bernard’s one experience with recording did not really prepare him for all the factors he would be dealing with. He had done pro bono legal work for the Folkways label, and therefore used the same studio they used, Variety Arts Studio, near Times Square. Immediately he had trouble with his first jazz recording session: he didn’t specify to the engineer that he wanted a stereo recording. As a result, Spiritual Unity is in mono. But as he was fond of saying, “nobody ever complained about that.”
In another noteworthy mistake, the first vinyl pressing of Spiritual Unity accidentally substituted a different track for “Spirits.” The one that is on all the CDs and the vast majority of vinyl editions is the same tune as what is titled “Saints” on Witches & Devils (also known as Spirits), recorded on February 24, 1964. The anomalous substitution, which does sound somewhat similar, is the same tune known as “Vibrations” on the album Vibrations (also known as Ghosts). Mr. Stollman had no memory of how this happened, but it was subsequently corrected and became a rarity known only to Ayler completists and dedicated ESP collectors. Martin Davidson (owner of Emanem, another indie label responsible for many groundbreaking jazz releases) suggested we include this mysterious rarity, and supplied the digital file, for which we are grateful. The session’s 50th anniversary in 2014 seemed like the perfect excuse to finally release this rare take officially.
Mr. Stollman had figured one thing out: releasing Spiritual Unity immediately, by itself, was not a good strategy. A label with just one or two releases was not taken seriously. And he was finding other avant-garde jazz musicians whose music was also worth releasing. He stockpiled a dozen albums and then released them simultaneously in September 1965, over a year after recording Spiritual Unity in July 1964. A second Ayler album, Bells, was rushed into this first batch of releases: a twenty-minute concert recording released on one side of 12” vinyl with no music on side two – because that’s all ESP had. But Stollman claimed it was because the music was so intense that more of it would be dangerous for listeners. Later he said, “I wanted to make a point, that music is not a commodity and that a record's length has nothing to do with its artistic merit.”
These first ESP-Disk’ albums are legendary. The debut album by Pharoah Sanders, recorded the year before playing with John Coltrane brought him notoriety. Another debut, by The New York Art Quartet, the influential grouping of saxophonist John Tchicai, trombonist Roswell Rudd, drummer Milford Graves, and bassist Lewis Worrell, controversially augmented on one track by the fire-breathing poetry of Amiri Baraka. The Byron Allen Trio, led by a saxophonist recommended to Bernard by Ornette Coleman, to whom Bernard was giving unpaid legal advice. An album by Coleman himself, given to ESP-Disk’ to compensate Bernard for his work after it resulted in Coleman being signed by the most prestigious jazz label, Blue Note. The debut of eccentric multi-instrumentalist Giuseppi Logan, whose prime was only documented by his two ESP-Disk’ albums. It’s also worth noting that the Logan LP was also the recorded debut of pianist Don Pullen. Let’s listen to them play some of “Bleeker Partita.”
Some artists were encountered by Bernard at the historic October Revolution in Jazz festival in 1964. From that meeting came Paul Bley’s Barrage, a quintet release which includes Sun Ra saxophonist Marshall Allen and trumpeter Dewey Johnson, the latter only documented on Barrage, his appearance a year later on Coltrane’s Ascension, and a 1982 session led by drummer Paul Murphy. William Parker is one of the players on the scene who has heralded Johnson’s importance. You can hear Johnson especially prominently on “And Now the Queen,” and Marshall Allen as well. Let’s listen.
This is a recurring theme of early ESP-Disk’ releases: legendary figures of the early free-jazz scene recorded for the first time and rarely, if ever, afterwards. A prime example is cult favorite Lowell Davidson’s only album. Davidson was a distinctive pianist whose main profession ended up being biochemistry (which he studied at Harvard). His trio album, his only studio recording, teams him with Peacock and drummer Milford Graves, the latter a frequent presence in the early ESP discography. Davidson later switched to bass; he died at age 50 after a laboratory accident. If Coleman had not recommended him to Stollman, his music might never have been documented. Now we will listen to Davidson’s “Dunce.”
But not every ESP-Disk’ artist was fated to cult status. Pianist Bob James’s experimental album Explosions, featuring tape manipulations by avant-gardists Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma, captured much more radical music than the commercial style of pop jazz that eventually led to James doing TV theme music such as his famous Hill Street Blues intro music. Probably some of James’s albums outsold the entire ESP-Disk’ catalog.
Ran Blake’s ESP-Disk’ LP, another in the first batch of releases, was not his debut, since he’d already accompanied singer Jeanne Lee, but it was Blake’s first solo album, the format in which he has most frequently played and in which he has done his best work. It’s also the album in the initial dozen jazz releases that was most explicitly political with its stunning arrangement of “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” a title that took on an additional meaning in this context, and Blake’s originals “Vanguard” and “Birmingham, U.S.A.” all addressing the political turmoil of the times. Listen to the tension found in “Birmingham, U.S.A.”, a more overt display of dissonance than in Blake’s interpretations of standards.
The final recording of the first dozen jazz albums on ESP-Disk’, coming from another connection made at the October Revolution concerts, was The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra. It was also not a debut – not only had Sun Ra been releasing LPs on his self-run Saturn label, Tom Wilson – famous for his hands-off production of Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa – had released a Sun Ra LP on Wilson’s Transition label. But none of those earlier releases made the impact that The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra did. A follow-up session was quickly set up, yielding The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra volume two. Of course, Sun Ra went on to a level of fame that perhaps now surpasses any other ESP jazz artist. His work at this time was absolutely distinct from other free jazz artists. Some swinging parts remind us that Sonny wrote arrangements for the Fletcher Henderson big band, while others are as radical in their deployment of sound as anything the European avant-garde of the time had to offer. Consider, for instance, the booming percussion and blatting trombones of the opening track, “Heliocentric.”
Working with a makeshift crew of employees and family members, Stollman’s label developed several visual aesthetics that set its releases apart from other jazz albums. For economic reasons having to do with printing costs, ESP favored black-and-white artwork, or one color – red was a favorite – on a white background, giving the front covers a stark simplicity that now looks classic. Bernard’s brother Saul’s drawings of the artists were sometimes featured; his sister Sandra’s photos also were used. The most stark of the first front covers was a rough white spiral on a black background, used for the Pharoah Sanders LP; it didn’t even include the artist’s name. Commercially this was a faux pas, of course, and the name was added later, but from a purely artistic sense, the original has a beautiful purity. In later years sometimes just the artist’s photo would be on the front cover, but this also proved an impediment to sales, so names in black block letters were eventually superimposed on those covers.
Bernard was not a musician himself, and was known to claim that when he started ESP-Disk’, he owned no record albums. He came to the New York City jazz avant-garde with completely fresh and unbiased ears. He once told me the reason he wasn’t interested in a particular famous jazz musician’s music was because he didn’t hear a narrative story in the sounds. But in many cases he didn’t even know what a particular jazz musician’s music sounded like when he told them he would record them. He was documenting a scene, and if somebody was considered an integral part of that scene, that was recommendation enough.
Because this is a jazz festival, I am emphasizing ESP’s jazz releases, but it must be said that Bernard’s disregard for stylistic consistency in the label’s releases was ground-breaking. Of course, a major label such as Columbia would have multiple styles represented in its output, but independent labels almost always had more of a genre focus than ESP-Disk’ did. After that first batch of jazz releases, the other styles included the shambling, provocative rock of The Fugs, a group Bernard took over from Folkways because Folkways owner Moe Asch found them too profane; the intricate chamber rock of Pearls Before Swine, basically a Tom Rapp project that he submitted to ESP-Disk’ because he thought a label that would issue the Fugs might be the best home for his songs; and the untutored squalling of The Godz, neophyte musicians who worked for ESP (later they acquired a bit more finesse).
And there were weirder artists: the eccentric MIJ, dubbed the Yodeling Astrologer despite not actually yodeling or being an astrologer, though the alien caterwauling of his vocal style is undeniably difficult to categorize. There’s a reason one of ESP-Disk’s slogans is “You Never Heard Such Sounds in Your Life.”
The Fugs’ poet genius Tuli Kupferberg recorded an ESP-Disk’ album largely consisting of him reading advertisement texts over musical accompaniment. Another author, William Burroughs, had his French LP of readings from three novels picked up by ESP for U.S. release. Jazzy folkie Jerry Moore, with ill-fated jazz and R&B guitarist Eric Gale in his band, released an album featuring a song about the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama. A number of psychedelic bands piqued Bernard’s interest. My favorite is Octopus, who were all teenagers when they recorded their LP.
There are more, but those were the most famous non-jazz albums on ESP until the engineer of Charles Manson’s only studio recordings arranged for ESP to re-release an album he’d cobbled together. The enginner was having trouble distributing it, and but even little ESP-Disk was able to improve on its sales. Royalties were paid to the family of one of Manson’s victims by order of a French court.
How did a lawyer who often worked for free manage to release so many records? He asked his parents to give him his inheritance before they died, and his mother gave him $105,000, which was a hefty sum in 1964. But recording and manufacturing so many albums – 15 sessions in 1964 and ‘65 and many more after that – exhausted that money pretty quickly, especially since most of the jazz albums did not sell well. Nor was he a competent businessman, as he freely admitted. After he started having money problems, some sessions would sit in the vaults for several years while he waited to have enough money to press LPs and print album covers. By the way, here’s something about the record industry that you might not know: for any physical release, the costs for printing the packaging are higher than they are for the material the music is pressed on, whether that be vinyl, CDs, or tapes.
The label’s releases tilted more towards rock and folk after Bernard and his wife of the time moved from New York City to the Woodstock area in the early 1970s, because those were the musicians who were around him. But he never stopped issuing jazz. In 1974 and ’75, the last year or so that ESP-Disk’ was still sporadically issuing LPs before it ran out of money, Bernard gave the world two more classic avant-jazz albums: Sea Ensemble’s We Move Together, a duo of husband and wife Donald Rafael Garrett, who had recorded with Coltrane, and Zusaan Kali Fasteau, and The Will Come Is Now, the only album as leader by Sun Ra bassist Ronnie Boykins.
Then Bernard became a full-time lawyer working for the State of New York. Until he retired, ESP-Disk’ was basically inactive, though he agreed to several licensing deals with European labels and occasionally would put out new albums as part of a deal, notably a pair of Ayler concert LPs from Lower East Side club Slugs Saloon, a live Sun Ra album received in return for paying for the Arkestra to get back from a money-losing overseas tour, and the Sorgen/Rust/Windbiel Trio.
None of the licensing deals worked out as he had wished, so after he had retired, he used his pension to restart the label in 2005. At first he just reissued various classic titles, and put out a shelved album by Norman Howard and Joe Phillips, but of course newer artists wanted the honor of being on ESP-Disk’, so the people he hired to help him run the label started signing newer artists. Especially notable in this regard is that Tom Abbs, a jazz bassist himself, attracted many excellent artists such as guitarist Joe Morris. Then in 2010 Abbs and the other employees left to start their own label, Northern Spy.
When I heard about their departure, I was working at a record store in Williamsburg, the ultra-hip Brooklyn neighborhood home to dozens of indie-rock bands. I made myself available to Bernard and he found room for me writing press releases and doing PR. He hired me partly because we had both gone to Columbia University, though of course decades apart, and partly because in the 1990s I had worked for the Italian labels Black Saint and Soul Note, owned by the Bonandrini family; at the time, they had opened a New York office to distribute themselves after severing their deal with Polygram because Polygram wouldn’t keep all the albums in print regardless of how few copies they sold of some titles. I had also worked as a music critic since 1990, writing for The Wire, Jazziz, and other magazines, and had built relationships with many New York jazz artists.
When Bernard promoted me to manager in 2013, through my relationships I was able to bring well-known artists such as Matthew Shipp and Defunkt to the label. I also focused on reissuing some of the old titles that hadn’t already been revived by previous regimes, starting with the Ran Blake album. But the most important thing to me is to continue ESP-Disk’s legacy of promoting artists just starting their careers or, at least, artists whose only existing albums were things they had self-released, examples of this being the powerful sax/bass/drums trio Tiger Hatchery, who mix Frank Wright-style hard-blowing free improvisation with a punk aesthetic, and the avant-garde vocalist Fay Victor.
Here is a Fay Victor song, “Funky Dunk.”
Here is a bit of a typical high-energy Tiger Hatchery track, “Chieftain.”
More unknown was Polish saxophonist, flutist, and clarinetist Mat Walerian, who Matthew Shipp told me about. Walerian was the last new artist approved by Bernard before cancer took him from us in 2015. Walerian’s lack of fame means his albums don’t sell many copies, but it is not the ESP-Disk’ way to worry about that; if the music deserves to be heard, we put it out! Here is the first half of a duo track by Walerian and Shipp, “Blues for Acid Cold.”
I also brought Alan Sondheim back to the label. He had released two albums on ESP-Disk’ in its heyday, and was working with a saxophonist, Christopher Diasparra, who had been the manager of ESP when I started in 2010. Alan is not a jazz musician per se, but he is a fearless improviser on instruments from around the world. First came a trio with two saxophonists in 2014; then in 2017 I put out an album that I believe is unique in the world, Sondheim and Stephen Dydo playing free improvisation on qins. I’m sure I don’t have to tell this audience that the qin is a traditional Chinese stringed instrument, and a variety of other stringed instruments including viola, banjo, guzheng, rababa, and erhu. Their approach is NOT traditional, though Dydo is a past president of the New York Qin Society. That album is called Dragon and Phoenix, and here’s a track from it called “Zhuo.”
My presentation at OCT-Loft Jazz Festival with translator Susan (left) and Midori (right) handling the music and PowerPoint.
