In the early 1960s New York was the center of what a handful of musicians were calling "the new thing"—the burgeoning free jazz movement. The improvisational music was highly searching by nature and about being open to whatever new sounds came from its players' instruments, sounds that often surprised the musicians as much as the audience. It threw the rulebook out the window and invited listeners to come along for the ride. But, being revolutionary stuff, it was divisive and confrontational. Many dismissed it as a put-on by people who couldn't play—despite the fact that many of its practitioners had come from conservatory or "straight" musical backgrounds. Stollman, though, had no such prejudices and was perfectly primed to receive it on its own terms. "I could listen naively, like a native just out of the jungle; I looked at music as an art form, not as entertainment," explains the label head, who would eventually market his products with the tagline "You never heard such sounds in your life."
In December 1963, a friend from Cleveland implored Stollman to trudge through the snow to hear his high school pal, a saxophonist, at an unheated Harlem dive called the Baby Grand. The musician turned out to be Albert Ayler, who turned up to crash a gig by pianist Elmo Hope's trio. "He just hopped on stage with his horn and started blowing," Stollman recounts. "Elmo and the other guys quietly stopped playing and walked off, to listen. Albert went on for 20 or 30 minutes, but it seemed like seconds. It was just a torrent of music. When he was done and stepped off the stage, covered in sweat, I walked up to him and said, 'Your music is beautiful. I'm starting a record label, and I'd like you to be my first artist!' He said he had a session at Atlantic and I didn't think I'd hear from him, but in June he called and said he was ready to record." And so one month after Ayler's call, his trio and Stollman were at Variety Arts making Spiritual Unity, now repeatedly cited as one of jazz's top 100 albums. On the heels of that set came one out-jazz opus after another, works that, although they barely sold individually, collectively earned ESP its reputation as a label that was redefining modern music. There was Sun Ra's Heliocentric Worlds, Volumes 1 and 2; the self-titled debuts by the New York Art Quartet (with Kerhonksen's Roswell Rudd) and the Pharoah Sanders Quintet; Patty Waters's Sings and College Tour; and dozens of boldly experimental discs by Gato Barbieri, Paul Bley, Marion Brown, Burton Greene, Frank Wright, and others, all in jackets adorned with striking abstract images or stark portraits of the artists.
One artist Stollman offered to sign was a young guitarist he stumbled across in 1966. "I was strolling down MacDougal Street one July day and as I went by the [famed nightspot] Cafe Wha? I heard someone inside playing electric guitar," says Stollman. "At that time I thought the electric guitar was disgusting. I hadn't heard anyone doing anything interesting with it. But this guy, who was sitting in the corner of the empty club practicing by himself, was just incredible, like nothing I'd ever heard. I told him, 'I have a record label and I'd love to record you. Are you free?' He said, 'I like that idea, but my new manager just bought me a ticket to London and I leave tomorrow.' It was Jimi Hendrix." When the two met again, years later, Hendrix voiced his admiration for Stollman's work with the label.
Alongside its jazz offerings ESP was soon delving into other esoteric realms with albums like Timothy Leary's Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out and the soundtrack to choreographer Jean Erdman's avant-garde musical The Coach with the Six Insides (both 1966). In his quest for challenging content, Stollman also began adding weirdo folk rock acts to ESP's roster, releasing records by the Fugs (1965's First Album and 1966's The Fugs and Virgin Fugs), the Godz (1966's Contact High with the Godz and 1967's Godz 2), the Holy Modal Rounders (1967's Indian War Whoop), and Pearls Before Swine (1967's One Nation Underground and 1968's Balaklava). "I was looking for music that said something to me," Stollman explains. "Several of these bands were writing songs in opposition to the Vietnam War, which I was vehemently against. The Fugs had 'Kill for Peace' and Pearls Before Swine had 'Uncle John.' The jazz records weren't selling, but some of the rock albums were connecting with the hippie audience and actually charting."