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It’s July 10, 1964. The location is Variety Arts, a tiny, low-budget recording studio near Times Square, where 35-year-old Bernard Stollman sits in the reception area. In the nearby live room, saxophonist Albert Ayler, bassist Gary Peacock, and drummer Sunny Murray are playing as the tape rolls. The engineer has left the control room door open so that Stollman and singer-composer Annette Peacock, then Gary’s wife, can hear the session. The sounds come surging in like a hard rain. The music is primal, elastic, frequently dissonant, and marked by a frayed cry that conjures the deepest gospel blues. Stollman, who hired the musicians and the studio, is elated. He turns to Annette, dazed, and says, “What an auspicious beginning for a record label!” And how. Released that year as the Albert Ayler Trio’s Spiritual Unity, the recording stands as a landmark of free jazz and the first officially recognized title of Stollman’s ESP-Disk Records imprint.
One of the most influential record companies of all time, ESP-Disk deserves mention alongside names like Sun, Chess, Folkways, Blue Note, and Impulse! (the latter actually features many former ESP artists). Its releases famously bear the legend “The artist alone decides what you will hear on their ESP-Disk”—a radical concept in the years predating the indie explosion. In addition to more works by Ayler, ESP produced ground-shattering albums by artists like the Fugs, Sun Ra, Pearls Before Swine, Ornette Coleman, the Holy Modal Rounders, Pharoah Sanders, and William S. Burroughs, as well as archival efforts by Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Yma Sumac. Such was ESP’s reputation as the world’s hippest and most artistically uncompromising label that its vocal followers have included the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin (Stollman maintains the latter wanted to record for ESP but was inked to Columbia by her manager Albert Grossman). Stollman’s vision has also been a powerful touchstone for dozens of underground labels that have followed in ESP’s wake.
“I first became aware of ESP when I lived in the USSR,” says Leo Feigin of Leo Records in Jason Weiss’s book Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk, the Most Outrageous Record Label in America (Wesleyan University Press, 2012). “At the end of the 1960s, a friend showed us a record that was pressed on transparent vinyl with music on one side only. That record was [1965’s] Bells, by Albert Ayler. The music was absolutely shattering. By that time we were listening to Impulse! and Blue Note records, but this was something else, absolutely shocking!”
The oldest of five children, Stollman grew up along the shores of Lake Champlain in Plattsburgh, from where his Polish immigrant father and Lithuanian immigrant mother operated a chain of women’s clothing stores. “They’d met in the balcony of a Yiddish theater in the Lower East Side,” says Stollman, who describes Plattsburgh as a paradise. “My father only sang for pleasure by the time I came along, but as a boy he’d been part of a group that toured with a traveling cantor.” When he was 16 the family moved to Queens, from where Stollman, still not yet much of a music fan, later attended Columbia University and Columbia Law School. “I hadn’t expected to become a lawyer, but the Korean War was happening then and I figured I’d be drafted if I didn’t find a career.”
Stollman was drafted nevertheless, although the notice came when the war had entered its armistice phase. After being stationed in Germany and France (his legal background helped land him a position in Paris at NATO’s Claims Office, which handled claims by French citizens against the U.S. Army), he returned to America and passed the bar. It was while he was working as an unpaid intern at a practice handling the estates of Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday that he first fell in love with jazz. “It was the spirit of the artists themselves, as people, that attracted me,” says Stollman, who did legal work for Dizzy Gillespie, Mary Lou Williams, and others. “They came across as major figures, serious, heavy-duty people.” Another revelation was the discovery of Esperanto. “I was struck by the idea of a universal language,” he recalls. “I didn’t even know there was one until I heard some people speaking it in a coffeeshop. They offered to teach it to me, which took all of three hours. It’s very easy to learn. Utopian, yes, but practical.” To help his newfound cause Stollman decided to use his inheritance to start a label that released Esperanto-based recordings, and in 1963 ESP-Disk—short for Esperanto Disko—was born. While ESP 1001, Ni Kantu en Esperanto (Let’s Sing in Esperanto), an album of songs and poetry, didn’t spark the linguistic revolution he’d hoped for, it provided Stollman with an invaluable introduction to the world of making records.
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.”
It was at this juncture that, according to Stollman, steps were taken by the establishment to shut ESP-Disk down. “In 1968 Warner Brothers offered to buy the label and I said no, and not long after that the pressing plant we were using began bootlegging our own albums and selling them to distributors without our knowledge,” he asserts. “It wasn’t until 1974 that federal laws against bootlegging were enacted. It ended up putting us out of business, and I believe it was done by the Johnson regime to silence our criticism of the war.” Stollman married soon after and moved full-time with his wife to a farm they purchased near Woodstock, occasionally releasing the odd folk or hippie-rock LP and, infamously, an album of 1960s recordings by mass murderer Charles Manson (Charles Manson Sings, 1974). “ESP exists to document music and art, and I found Manson’s music interesting,” he says. “Maybe you can compare it to Alfred A. Knopf, the Jewish publisher who published Hitler’s Mein Kampf in America.” By 1975, ESP had effectively been wound down, and in 1979 Stollman became a staff lawyer with the New York State Department of Transportation. He eventually became an assistant state attorney general and retired in 1991.
There have been criticisms of Stollman from some of ESP’s former rock artists, who complain about unpaid royalties. “It was never my intention to run ESP as a business, it was always about the music itself,” says Stollman, now 85 and subsisting on a state pension. “Some of the records in the 1960s did sell a little, but never enough to make back what I put into making them.”
ESP’s back catalog was licensed twice by European labels before Stollman, who today lives alone in a small Hudson apartment, decided to resume control of the label in 2005, reissuing digitally and on CD all 115 original titles and producing select contemporary acts. One such signing is Maine psychedelic folk duo Arborea, whose Fortress of the Sun appeared last year. “I’d known about ESP-Disk for quite a while beforehand, and was familiar with their amazing catalog,” says the band’s Buck Curran. “Ornette Coleman’s Town Hall, 1962 is one of my absolute favorite albums. We’re a good fit on the label, with the ‘free’ aspect of our artistic creativity and the fact that ESP has always pushed boundaries. It feels very special to be a part of that vibrant musical legacy.”
“When I started ESP I looked at what the major labels were doing and I was aghast—the music was their last consideration. So I decided to break every rule they had,” says Stollman, a mischievous flicker in his still-vibrant, pastel-blue eyes. “My main concern with the artists I work with is ‘Are they saying something, and can I hear what they’re saying?'”
An expanded 50th anniversary edition of the Albert Ayler Trio’s Spiritual Unity, which includes an unheard bonus track, is out now. Espdisk.com.
This article appears in September 2014.
