With the Ayler session, you had the studio and the engineer. How did you go about putting together the packaging, the design? How did you find people to work with?
My first art director, Jordan Matthews, had been a producer for ABC. He brought in Howard Bernstein, who did many of our covers. I found Richard L. Alderson in the course of my efforts to manage Bud Powell. When Bud returned to New York in 1964, after years in Paris, he was in terrible physical shape. He had been hospitalized in Paris for tuberculosis, he had liver problems, and he was an alcoholic. When I shook his hand, it was the strangest experience, like grasping a soft pillow. I tried to record him. I put him in the studio with two young musicians, and the tape eventually ended up with Mainstream Records in England, with a picture of me on the back [released as Ups ’n Downs, 1973]. But the session was a failure, and it should never have been issued. I have no idea how this tape got to Mainstream. Then in March 1965 two young men, producers at Mercury Records—this was before Mercury was sold to Universal—decided to stage a concert at Carnegie Hall, the Charlie Parker Memorial Concert. They invited several prominent artists, and it was going to be a recording session. I hadn’t been contacted and knew nothing about it, but I found out they had booked Bud. I went to Carnegie Hall for the concert and met Celia, his daughter, and her mother, Mary Frances Barnes, at the entrance. Bud was with them, and I noticed that his hands were bleeding. “He fell down,” Mary Frances told me. I excused myself and went backstage. An audio engineer was seated at a recording console, and two men stood behind him, the producers, listening to the concert over the speakers. I heard Bud announced. It was clear that he was unable to form chords. It was pathetic. When he finished, I said to the engineer, “I’m Bud Powell’s manager and his lawyer. I must take that tape. It can’t surface anywhere.” He turned to look at the two young men for instructions, and they said, “Give him the tape.” I destroyed it. The engineer was Richard Alderson, who would become ESP’s engineer! Most of our albums were recorded by him, and he was the producer of ESP albums by the Fugs and Tom Rapp [Pearls Before Swine]. He had a small studio that Harry Belafonte had financed, where Lincoln Center now stands.
But how did you manage to get people to do the cover art, for example, when presumably you couldn’t pay them very much?
I picked people who were unknown. They became famous, as their covers for ESP brought them recognition and commissions for major labels and other clients. In keeping with our outlook, they enjoyed complete creative freedom. The large LP format helped. Some covers featured photographs, often without words, a style that was quickly adopted by Elektra and other labels. Howard Bernstein and Dennis Pohl were inundated by offers.
The covers and liners for Spiritual Unity, [Ayler’s] Bells, and Pharoah Sanders Quintet were Jordan Matthews’s concepts. I decided that silk-screening them would have a primal quality, suitable for ESP. I personally silk-screened the first Bells LPs.
Howard and I found each other again recently after thirty-five years. Howard did the graphics for Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, the Byron Allen Trio, for the Giuseppi Logan albums [The Giuseppi Logan Quartet; More], the Holy Modal Rounders [Indian War Whoop], very phantasmagorical. He did the Fugs color cover that we used for the first album, The Village Fugs. He did the Cromagnon record. He did the original cover for Music from the Orthodox Liturgy, but it was rejected by the producer as inappropriate.
Were there ever any recordings that you decided later you didn’t like?
Not one. Many recordings were by artists I had not heard before I commissioned them. In the arts, there are circles inside of circles. If someone plays with another artist, whose work you admire, you know they’re at a certain level of creativity. By granting them carte blanche to do whatever they choose, they assume full responsibility. As a premise, it works.
And that was the same with the cover art?
I never dictated cover art. They came up with whatever they chose to do, and it reflected the vibes of the time. I didn’t want an institutional look, such as those of Blue Note and Impulse. By getting away from that, we were able to remain unpredictable.
When you were starting the label, how did you see your role with respect to the music?
I saw my role as a very limited one, as that of a curator and editor, who nurtured an emerging community of composers.
Where did your affinity for that type of music come from?
One influence was my father, who loved to improvise and harmonize. I grew up with that. During the Second World War, my parents often drove the sixty miles from Plattsburgh to Montreal in their 1941 Buick Special sedan, with their older children crowded in the back seat. My father would sing as he drove, and my mother would harmonize with him. I approached music with the tacit question, Is this art? Entertainment is something else. Bernard Berenson, the art critic, and Sol Hurok, the impresario, were among my models. I was footloose, and I had no wife or children, and my legacy after a lifetime of commitment would be this body of work that highlighted and spurred on the careers of a certain community of composers.
What did your parents say when they later heard and saw what you were doing? Did they ever meet any of the musicians?
They came to performances and met many of the musicians. Tom Rapp and his group, Pearls Before Swine, slept on their living room floor in sleeping bags. My father enjoyed talking with them.
The first time my mother heard Albert’s Spiritual Unity album, I was watching her. She was a woman of very few words, and she just smiled in pleasure. Their sensibilities were sufficiently developed that they picked up on what was going on. She never offered any kind of critical comment, but took it in stride, appreciatively, proud of my work.
Following the October Revolution concerts, why was it the musicians responded to you? What did they have to go by? Was it because you’d already recorded Albert Ayler?
The word had gotten around that there was a new label, and the artists were desperate. No major label would record them. And there weren’t any other small independents like this one. They were mature, in their twenties and thirties—they were ready to be heard. I had made a good faith serious bid, and they didn’t have a better idea. I think it was that simple. What risk were they taking? The artists I met at the Cellar Café, who accepted my invitation to record them, became the nucleus of the label. I surmise that they had probably heard of my recording Albert.
So, in those days, you didn’t encounter much distrust as an independent record producer?
There wasn’t a lot of money involved. They knew they were highly unlikely to sell thousands of LPs. No one imagined that it would be commercially viable. They didn’t look at it that way, of course, because their art was very important to them. I knew from the inception that it might be a generation before this music would be accepted. I couldn’t give them the promotion that a major label could. I didn’t have the staffing, the resources, or the expertise to do a proper job. I knew I could issue and distribute their records. What happened beyond that was out of my control. I think that they assumed they would derive income from their record. Most of them had not recorded before. So, they were naive, and I was as well. What I could not do—and never claimed I could do, but they nonetheless imagined or expected I would be able to do—didn’t happen. The vast majority of the records sold five hundred or a thousand units, while a few of the more celebrated recordings were repeatedly pressed.
However, they gained something priceless. They had an album, and it was prestigious; they could seek engagements. It was a galvanic thing that launched them. If I were the grandson of an immigrant whose father had become wealthy, it would have been an appropriate occupation for me, but I had skipped a generation. I was subjected to harsh criticism over the years and deep suspicion, and praised as well. Some of my detractors came to understand the significance of my work on their lives and careers, and I am not greatly distressed by the criticism. You do what you feel you want to do and can do, and let the chips fall where they may.
In September 1965