the banner it lived by. Just as important, printed across the bottom of every back cover, was the phrase that defined its attitude toward the people it recorded: “The artists alone decide.”
For all its underground renown, in the spirit of independent record labels it survived for barely a decade, issuing some 125 titles; more precisely, as Stollman recounts, the company was pretty much out of business after barely four years, but somehow he stubbornly kept on producing records until it folded completely. Over the next three decades, however, a curious thing happened: ESP led a series of shadow lives through foreign licensing deals as well as bootlegs. What had originally been a catalog of quite modest press runs proved attractive enough that its titles kept resurfacing in Europe and Japan. These, in turn, found their way back into the United States. Stollman, meanwhile, had mostly left the label behind after its demise, eventually taking a real job as a government lawyer. He felt he had failed the artists he recorded—for not promoting them adequately, for deficient bookkeeping, for being unable to prevent the company from going under. At last, on reaching retirement age, he happily left government work as well. But it was not until more than a decade later, in 2005, that he took control again and relaunched ESP, bringing the label fully back to life.
Behind an unassuming and nearly unmarked storefront in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, occupying the entire ground floor in what was once a laundromat, Stollman and a few full- and part-time employees and interns stay busy, on any given day, keeping to their ambitious schedule. Through 2008 and 2009, ESP-Disk’ released CDs and some vinyl five times a year, totaling more than fifty titles; these included reissues from the original catalog—remastered from the analog tapes and sometimes with additional material—alongside productions of new bands and previously unreleased archival recordings. This practice is a departure from ESP’s quite irregular release schedule back in the 1960s. The label has also come to offer most of its catalog as digital downloads for sale through its active website, a source as well for video and radio features on ESP-related artists. As a community outreach initiative, since the fall of 2008 the label has sponsored a monthly concert of ESP artists at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, and more recently a similar series in Brooklyn at the Jazz Lounge, around the corner from its offices. The label has also sponsored or co-sponsored occasional marathon concerts, such as the November 2009 benefit for the Jazz Foundation of America held at the Bowery Poetry Club and the first annual Albert Ayler Festival held on Roosevelt Island in July 2010. Additionally, every week an ongoing project of restitution is quietly carried out, in which the sales and royalty calculations for one more artist in the catalog are comprehensively brought up to date as part of its Royalty Share program; where a debt is found to be owed, the company makes payment. Perhaps age does bring a bit of wisdom, after all, or at least experience counts for something when taking up an old enterprise again: never has the label been more organized, even if it hardly resembles a normal operation.
The revived company has occupied the Brooklyn offices since 2007. The not-quite-finished remodeling of the front half of the floor, where a small record store opens onto the street and taped drywalls mark off a distinct storage room, leads past several mixed-use corners into a central area with a cluster of separate desks where the staff performs various tasks of production, promotion, layout, accounting, and research. The patchwork repair of the place grows more ragged still in the ample room at the back, with its several patterns of old tin ceiling and a motley assortment of hanging lamps; the bathroom and a small kitchen are located in the rear, while along one wall stands a row of file cabinets stacked with big boxes and a TV. Across from these, Stollman’s long desk, reflecting constant activity, is piled with CDs, papers, a computer, and a phone.
That phone is steadily occupied throughout the day. Besides representing several musicians and the estates of Eric Dolphy, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and others in the global administration of their recording and publishing rights, he is also pursuing a number of far-flung possibilities for release on ESP or a subsidiary imprint. Recently, these have included a trove of unreleased performances by Jimi Hendrix; recordings from Soviet archives of concerts in Moscow by Paul Robeson and Yves Montand in the 1950s; a recent stand-up comedy performance in an L.A. club by Mort Sahl; new archival projects of music by Horace Tapscott, Phineas Newborn Jr., and Eric Dolphy; and, surely the most unexpected, rare performances by Kate Smith. Stollman does not worry too much about diluting or confusing the label’s identity. Even as it continues to offer sounds that may never have been heard before, he clearly enjoys unearthing little-known finds, the rare jewels that deserve to be made available. Unpredictable in genre and direction, the label maintains its ability to challenge expectations, including those built by its own practices.
In light of these multiple projects, the time seems ripe to tell the story of the label, from before its beginnings right up to the ever-moving present. After meeting with Bernard Stollman for a few hours, I became convinced that the only way to present that story was straight from the source. Complaints have circulated since the original releases about royalties not paid beyond the small advance; Stollman recognizes where proper accounting was lacking and to make up for that lapse is one reason he plunged back into the fray. But he also acknowledges that most of the records never sold very much when the company previously existed. What seems certain is that he never got rich off of anyone, far from it.
As an oral history, then, this book is divided into two main parts. In the first, based on many hours of interviews through the latter half of 2008 and regular visits over the following year, Stollman gets to tell his story, the only comprehensive account possible, despite its gaps. Edited to follow a more or less chronological order, it incorporates certain thematic chapters to focus on specific areas of activity. I retain some scaled-down version of my questions to him (except in a few chapters) to help direct the narrative through its many turns but also to keep a space open for interstitial remarks. At eighty-one, Stollman stands tall, straight-backed, and strong. Though longevity runs in the family, the fact is he was always inclined toward clean living. His memory still seems remarkably clear, and his outlook remains curiously upbeat. No question, this is what he wants to be doing more than anything, running the record label that he founded long ago, before he knew better.
Inasmuch as the label is largely the story of one man’s instincts and eccentricities, it also belongs to all the musicians and others who have had a role in its history, and even to those far away in place and time, for whom ESP-Disk’ served as an example or inspiration (a full discography can be found online at the ESP website, www.espdisk.com). Therefore, the second part of the book accommodates their varied perspectives, comprising more than three dozen interviews. These are meant to recount not only their own individual share in the story but also the artistic ideas and tendencies that animated them; moreover, these interviews reflect, whether briefly or at some length, the remarkable lives that converged for a time in the singular course of ESP’s trajectory, while offering a glimpse in many instances of how those lives carried through to the present.
Brooklyn, September 2010
I
What Got into His Head
BERNARD STOLLMAN, FOUNDER OF THE LABEL
IN THE GREAT BEFORE
1 Who, Where, When
Beginnings and Departures
As the founder of a label unlike any other, Bernard Stollman shared the Jewish immigrant background of certain Hollywood moguls and also a few jazz impresarios, yet with many distinct turns. How he ended up in music, running a business that was hardly a business, seemed anything but a likely outcome. He recounts his own circuitous path along the way.
My father, David, was born at the turn of the century, in the small Polish market town of Krynki [Krinik]. He was the third youngest of nine children whose father, a devout Orthodox Jew, labored for long hours as the foreman of a local tannery owned by his brothers. The rafters of their one-story house held stacks of curing hides, which gave off a terrible
