(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 sounds in your life,” was 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