jazz records of all time.
Once you started thinking of a label, did you have a sense of what the potential could be?
Not at all. It wasn’t a thoughtful decision, just something I was drawn toward doing.
After the Ayler session, you knew you had one record. What did you do?
I was thrilled with that record, so I was very much charged up with the idea of going forward. I wanted to explore this new music. A few months later, the October Revolution in Jazz gave me an opportunity to meet the community. The festival took place in a tiny café at West End Avenue, a block from where I lived at 90th and Riverside. The Cellar Café was out of business, and there was no electricity. Bill Dixon and Carla Bley had formed the Jazz Composers Guild, which sponsored the festival. Just inside the entrance, Paul Bley was seated at an upright piano, and standing next to him was Giuseppi Logan with a wired-together clarinet. I positioned myself next to them, as it was the only way I could be certain to hear them. The only lighting was from candles on the crowded tables. I met Marion Brown, Burton Greene, Sun Ra, the entire community of free improvisation composers.
Archie Shepp stood on the steps outside, puffing his pipe: I invited him to record for the new label, but he was under contract to Impulse. I invited all of the artists I found. Sun Ra was slated to perform with his Arkestra in a Newark loft. He gave me the address, and I went. I was greatly impressed by his music, and the playing of bassist Ronnie Boykins prompted me to invite him to record. He said he would like to record when he felt ready, and would let me know. We remained acquainted, as he was repeatedly featured on other ESP albums. Ten years later, he informed me that he was ready. It would be the last album made by ESP before it suspended operations for many years [Ronnie Boykins, The Will Come, Is Now, February 1974].
Were you still working as a lawyer at that time?
Yes, I was continually working, struggling, as a lawyer. I had a private practice. I had sought employment with other lawyers, but these were depressing experiences because I knew within myself I wasn’t going to be a conventional lawyer. I wasn’t interested in the kinds of work that lawyers typically performed.
When you started ESP, how did you imagine the enterprise as a business venture? Did you have any particular business models, beyond Folkways? Were you thinking at all as a business?
I just plowed blindly ahead, without giving a great amount of thought to how it would be sustained. I had no model to go with other than Moe Asch and Folkways. He was focused on documenting our culture, and it was clearly a not-for-profit enterprise. It became my calling. It took over from my law practice very quickly, because it was closer to my heart. I wasn’t judicious in my approach to a livelihood or a career.
As the label was coming into being, how did you figure out financing?
I went to my mother, just after I recorded Albert. There was no way I could have gone forward without her help. She came up with the equivalent of a young executive’s salary for two years. ESP was possible because of her; I had no other source of financing. My law practice was skeletal.
Why did you go to your mother about this and not your father?
She was the business head of the family, a brilliant woman, pragmatic, and a Taurus. My father was an artist, and all he wanted to do was sing. He sang for anyone who would listen. If he were in a room with a group of people, he would have to sing. He needed to be the center of attention, and he sang well. One didn’t discuss anything to do with money or business with him.
You asked her for your inheritance at the time. How did you know there was an inheritance?
My parents were prosperous. They had worked hard all their lives. I felt that they would probably be able to provide funding. I wasn’t sure how much I would need or how much they could afford, and I didn’t ask for a specific sum.
With the Ayler session, you had the studio and the engineer. How did you go about putting together the packaging, the design? How did you find people to work with?
My first art director, Jordan Matthews, had been a producer for ABC. He brought in Howard Bernstein, who did many of our covers. I found Richard L. Alderson in the course of my efforts to manage Bud Powell. When Bud returned to New York in 1964, after years in Paris, he was in terrible physical shape. He had been hospitalized in Paris for tuberculosis, he had liver problems, and he was an alcoholic. When I shook his hand, it was the strangest experience, like grasping a soft pillow. I tried to record him. I put him in the studio with two young musicians, and the tape eventually ended up with Mainstream Records in England, with a picture of me on the back [released as Ups ’n Downs, 1973]. But the session was a failure, and it should never have been issued. I have no idea how this tape got to Mainstream. Then in March 1965 two young men, producers at Mercury Records—this was before Mercury was sold to Universal—decided to stage a concert at Carnegie Hall, the Charlie Parker Memorial Concert. They invited several prominent artists, and it was going to be a recording session. I hadn’t been contacted and knew nothing about it, but I found out they had booked Bud. I went to Carnegie Hall for the concert and met Celia, his daughter, and her mother, Mary Frances Barnes, at the entrance. Bud was with them, and I noticed that his hands were bleeding. “He fell down,” Mary Frances told me. I excused myself and went backstage. An audio engineer was seated at a recording console, and two men stood behind him, the producers, listening to the concert over the speakers. I heard Bud announced. It was clear that he was unable to form chords. It was pathetic. When he finished, I said to the engineer, “I’m Bud Powell’s manager and his lawyer. I must take that tape. It can’t surface anywhere.” He turned to look at the two young men for instructions, and they said, “Give him the tape.” I destroyed it. The engineer was Richard Alderson, who would become ESP’s engineer! Most of our albums were recorded by him, and he was the producer of ESP albums by the Fugs and Tom Rapp [Pearls Before Swine]. He had a small studio that Harry Belafonte had financed, where Lincoln Center now stands.
But how did you manage to get people to do the cover art, for example, when presumably you couldn’t pay them very much?
I picked people who were unknown. They became famous, as their covers for ESP brought them recognition and commissions for major labels and other clients. In keeping with our outlook, they enjoyed complete creative freedom. The large LP format helped. Some covers featured photographs, often without words, a style that was quickly adopted by Elektra and other labels. Howard Bernstein and Dennis Pohl were inundated by offers.
The covers and liners for Spiritual Unity, [Ayler’s] Bells, and Pharoah Sanders Quintet were Jordan Matthews’s concepts. I decided that silk-screening them would have a primal quality, suitable for ESP. I personally silk-screened the first Bells LPs.
Howard and I found each other again recently after thirty-five years. Howard did the graphics for Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, the Byron Allen Trio, for the Giuseppi Logan albums [The Giuseppi Logan Quartet; More], the Holy Modal Rounders [Indian War Whoop], very phantasmagorical. He did the Fugs color cover that we used for the first album, The Village Fugs. He did the Cromagnon record. He did the original cover for Music from the Orthodox Liturgy, but it was rejected by the producer as inappropriate.
Were there ever any recordings that you decided later you didn’t like?
Not one. Many recordings were by artists I had not heard before I commissioned them. In the arts, there are circles inside of circles. If someone plays with another artist, whose work you admire, you know they’re at a certain level of creativity. By granting them carte
