certainly a tighter margin of operations, the independents managed paradoxically to court greater risk; having almost nothing to lose, they could afford to produce art for art’s sake, or simply for the invigorating sake of provocation. Of course, labels that started out small, as they grew and proved their singular worth, often were gobbled up by more robust companies. Yet even today, with the greatest concentration of media conglomerates, as the technology mutates into ever newer forms, and when it seems impossible for any company to survive by actually selling records, new independents still emerge in every corner of music and in every region.
Jazz, as an evolving laboratory for musical innovation, has always thrived on the daring of independent labels. Writer and record-store owner Ross Russell launched Dial Records in 1946, and for three years he produced crucial dates in Charlie Parker’s career as well as in those of other bebop artists. The musician-owned Debut Records, led by Charles Mingus and Max Roach in the late ’40s to the mid-’50s, provided the opportunity to hear not only their own early work but also that of various associates, including Paul Bley’s first outing. In 1960 the farsighted Candid Records, briefly directed by jazz critic and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, carried Roach and Mingus into a new era with more overtly political work, besides offering distinctive early sessions by younger musicians such as Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, and Steve Lacy. In the wake of such adventurous small labels came Bernard Stollman with ESP-Disk’, at the moment when a radical shift was taking hold: free improvisation as a dominant aesthetic in the new music.
Even today, some fifty years later, the unaccustomed listener will find most of ESP’s initial releases startling, an assault on traditional notions of form and content in music. And indeed, they were. The advances pioneered in jazz throughout the 1960s were arguably the most far-reaching in the history of the music, then or since; subsequent generations are still harvesting, and grappling with, that legacy. The vanguard artists were exploding open the dances and popular song forms (the blues, Tin Pan Alley, show tunes) that served as the bedrock of jazz structures, to reconfigure what was once a familiar framework in ways that focused on all that was happening inside, to highlight the playing itself. In effect, for certain practitioners, this tendency toward greater abstraction, a kind of pure expression as it were, brought jazz in line with comparable developments in visual art, literature, and even contemporary composed music.
As in previous decades, New York was the primary forge for the newest experiments in jazz. Nearly all the major innovators were based there at the time, including John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and Sun Ra. It was there too that the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild, a noble attempt to establish a self-sustaining musicians’ collective, produced several historic festivals and series of new music concerts. But the force, as well as the rage, that characterized free jazz in its original period of growth was also bound up, often enough, with the political issues of the day, notably the civil rights movement and the massive protests against the Vietnam War. This context, ultimately, provided an inherent continuity to some of ESP’s ventures further afield as it recorded provocative folk-rock groups such as the Fugs, along with other mind-expanding projects. The label thus articulated an identity, and when it came onto the scene, for those musicians it was really the only game in town. Stollman’s discovery of the new music, therefore, was a direct result not just of his presence in New York but also of his innate sympathy for a community of artists whose instincts matched his own: their independent do-it-yourself approach, a bemused irreverence for established procedure, the need to question received wisdom both historical and social, and above all, a principled integrity that was about far more than mere commercial success. In short, all these wild-sounding individuals had their reasons, however mysterious, for sounding the way they did, and to Stollman it was a blessing that they did not in fact sound like all the rest.
Prior to founding his label, Stollman was not exactly a longtime jazz aficionado. But he liked the people and the new music suited his temperament, perhaps more than he realized at first. Trained as a lawyer, a profession he adopted by default as the eldest child of immigrant parents, he had gravitated toward working with musicians, intrigued by their particular problems. He was in his midthirties when the idea first occurred to him, in 1963, that starting a record company might be not only possible but a worthwhile and necessary endeavor. However, not then or since did he learn to really treat the undertaking as a business; if he had, the label would not be what it was, or is today.
The 1950s and ’60s were a particularly rich period in American vernacular music. Jazz musicians were carrying the harmonic and rhythmic discoveries of bebop into a wealth of new directions such as cool jazz, hard bop, and Third Stream, but also into far more open-ended forms. Folk music and blues idioms were being revived, revalorized, and taken up by urban sophisticates who wrought their own inevitable transformations. Rock and roll drew fresh impetus from the British invasion (and the British, of course, had developed their styles in part by borrowing from American song forms) and soon became a phenomenon of mass audiences. The popular growth of rock, in turn, accentuated the divide that had emerged ever since bebop began to veer away from dance and turn to art music. In effect, the jazz artists had freed themselves—often at the cost of their own economic survival—to pursue the highest realms of musical thinking, much like their classical counterparts but without the institutional infrastructures of support. Audiences grew smaller where the music became most unfamiliar and demanding, and yet a devoted public remained eager to partake of the adventure. What galvanized Stollman in his commitment to the label, as he explains in his part of this book, was first hearing tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler and then, nine-plus months later at a crowded café in his own neighborhood, attending the October Revolution in Jazz. Produced by Bill Dixon and the Jazz Composers Guild in an effort to generate their own working conditions, the October Revolution’s several days of concerts featured many artists who would soon record for ESP.
So, how did Stollman decide on the name of his label? After settling back in New York at the end of the 1950s, amid attempts to establish himself in business or law, he also became involved in the Esperanto movement, which he helped to promote as a universal language. In recent years, he has even been a partner in the development of Unikom, an automated software system using Esperanto as an interlingual stage to assist in the rapid translation between languages over computer networks. In the early ’60s, he produced his first record, Ni Kantu en Esperanto (Let’s Sing in Esperanto), with that same idea of advocacy, showing the language in action using poetry, humor, and song. The label that issued the record was to be called Esperanto Disko (the Esperanto word for “records”), which became shortened to ESP-Disk’. That the name also suggests a special kind of intuition proved fortuitous when the label subsequently found its true direction. In the 1960s free improvisation became a sort of holy grail for jazz musicians who were pushing the limits, or rather a lingua franca, like Esperanto itself.
By reaching past the tradition of harmonic structures and chord progressions, improvising musicians found new points of contact, new approaches to making music together. A vast array of sound elements was increasingly put into play, in the ongoing search for whatever forms of music might evolve from the exchange. This was by no means a development limited to the United States: throughout Europe and beyond, a growing community of free improvisers was staking out undiscovered territories of music, and in their searches they sometimes joined forces with musicians schooled in other traditions (for example, Musica Elettronica Viva, the improvising electronic music collective founded by classically trained American composers in Rome in the 1960s, or Henry Cow, the British avant-rock improvisers in the 1970s).
From its inception, ESP-Disk’ remained unpredictable both in the music it offered and in its defiance of industry conventions. The new music based on free improvisation was its core identity, but the label soon diversified into rock and folk, protopunk and protest music, as well as an occasional spoken-word document reflecting the historical moment—there was little discernible pattern or design. Stollman functioned more by instinct, circumstance, opportunity, and by following his own eclectic curiosities and taste. The label quickly became known—often by word of mouth—for its challenging and eye-opening productions, as well as for its singular cover art; stories abound about how it served as the measure of hip record collections. “You never heard such
