responsibility. As a premise, it works.
And that was the same with the cover art?
I never dictated cover art. They came up with whatever they chose to do, and it reflected the vibes of the time. I didn’t want an institutional look, such as those of Blue Note and Impulse. By getting away from that, we were able to remain unpredictable.
When you were starting the label, how did you see your role with respect to the music?
I saw my role as a very limited one, as that of a curator and editor, who nurtured an emerging community of composers.
Where did your affinity for that type of music come from?
One influence was my father, who loved to improvise and harmonize. I grew up with that. During the Second World War, my parents often drove the sixty miles from Plattsburgh to Montreal in their 1941 Buick Special sedan, with their older children crowded in the back seat. My father would sing as he drove, and my mother would harmonize with him. I approached music with the tacit question, Is this art? Entertainment is something else. Bernard Berenson, the art critic, and Sol Hurok, the impresario, were among my models. I was footloose, and I had no wife or children, and my legacy after a lifetime of commitment would be this body of work that highlighted and spurred on the careers of a certain community of composers.
What did your parents say when they later heard and saw what you were doing? Did they ever meet any of the musicians?
They came to performances and met many of the musicians. Tom Rapp and his group, Pearls Before Swine, slept on their living room floor in sleeping bags. My father enjoyed talking with them.
The first time my mother heard Albert’s Spiritual Unity album, I was watching her. She was a woman of very few words, and she just smiled in pleasure. Their sensibilities were sufficiently developed that they picked up on what was going on. She never offered any kind of critical comment, but took it in stride, appreciatively, proud of my work.
Following the October Revolution concerts, why was it the musicians responded to you? What did they have to go by? Was it because you’d already recorded Albert Ayler?
The word had gotten around that there was a new label, and the artists were desperate. No major label would record them. And there weren’t any other small independents like this one. They were mature, in their twenties and thirties—they were ready to be heard. I had made a good faith serious bid, and they didn’t have a better idea. I think it was that simple. What risk were they taking? The artists I met at the Cellar Café, who accepted my invitation to record them, became the nucleus of the label. I surmise that they had probably heard of my recording Albert.
So, in those days, you didn’t encounter much distrust as an independent record producer?
There wasn’t a lot of money involved. They knew they were highly unlikely to sell thousands of LPs. No one imagined that it would be commercially viable. They didn’t look at it that way, of course, because their art was very important to them. I knew from the inception that it might be a generation before this music would be accepted. I couldn’t give them the promotion that a major label could. I didn’t have the staffing, the resources, or the expertise to do a proper job. I knew I could issue and distribute their records. What happened beyond that was out of my control. I think that they assumed they would derive income from their record. Most of them had not recorded before. So, they were naive, and I was as well. What I could not do—and never claimed I could do, but they nonetheless imagined or expected I would be able to do—didn’t happen. The vast majority of the records sold five hundred or a thousand units, while a few of the more celebrated recordings were repeatedly pressed.
However, they gained something priceless. They had an album, and it was prestigious; they could seek engagements. It was a galvanic thing that launched them. If I were the grandson of an immigrant whose father had become wealthy, it would have been an appropriate occupation for me, but I had skipped a generation. I was subjected to harsh criticism over the years and deep suspicion, and praised as well. Some of my detractors came to understand the significance of my work on their lives and careers, and I am not greatly distressed by the criticism. You do what you feel you want to do and can do, and let the chips fall where they may.
In September 1965 the label released its first dozen titles all at the same time. These included dates by Paul Bley and Sun Ra; first records by Pharaoh Sanders, the New York Art Quartet, Giuseppi Logan, Bob James, and Ran Blake; as well as Albert Ayler’s first American record and Ornette Coleman’s Town Hall concert. What was your purpose in launching the label that way?
It was a matter of critical mass. Putting out one album, then a second, and a third would have lessened the impact of our emergence. One afternoon, months earlier, when I was strolling on East 57th Street, I observed a large crowd on the sidewalk outside the Sidney Janis Gallery, for the opening of a new show. Inside, I found works by Andy Warhol, George Segal, and the Chilean sculptor Marisol, among others. The gallery described them as the Pop Art movement. The message was clear: launch your enterprise with a splash and a unifying theme. Put a frame around it and give it an identity as a movement.
The tactic worked. We called it simply the new music. The critics praised our releases. We were unable to find a market in the United States, but Europeans and Japanese responded. The quantities were not substantial, but it was encouraging.
How did ESP go about promoting its releases in those first years?
We attracted college student reps at several schools. We gave them LPs, and they helped us to get publicity on college radio. There was little else that we could do, because commercial radio would not play us, and this remains true today. We were a well-kept secret, except to a few jazz publications and some exposure in the Village Voice and underground newspapers like the East Village Other.
4 While It Worked
After that initial flood of releases from ESP, the dozen titles that came out in September 1965, the label released forty-five more titles over the next eighteen months. As you continued after the first dozen, how did you figure out what to do, whom to record?
Karl Berger sent Gato Barbieri to me. I was lying on the office couch, and suddenly Gato Barbieri was there with his wife, Michele. They looked down at me and said, “Karl sent us.” And I said, “When do you want to record?” I had no idea what he sounded like, but he was very impressive in his bearing and demeanor, and I trusted Karl’s judgment. He had just recorded for ESP. It was often like that. ESP didn’t have a systematic approach that might include submission of a demo, or an audition. It was circles inside of circles.
So you hadn’t heard of Gato Barbieri, his work with Don Cherry?
No.
In the spring of 1966, a number of ESP artists embarked on a concert tour of colleges in upstate New York, which resulted in several albums [Sun Ra, Nothing Is …; Patty Waters, College Tour; Burton Greene Trio, On Tour]. How did that adventure come about?
The owner of the printing plant that was printing our album covers was a friend of Omar Lerman, a prominent music writer and a director of the New York State Council on the Arts. He introduced us, and Omar was very knowledgeable and kind. The council gave us seventy-five hundred dollars during the early months of the label, to do a one-week tour of five colleges with music departments. I hired David Jones, a highly regarded classical engineer, gave him a checkbook, and instructed him to manage the tour as well as record it. ESP sent Sun Ra and his Arkestra,
