It was a matter of critical mass. Putting out one album, then a second, and a third would have lessened the impact of our emergence. One afternoon, months earlier, when I was strolling on East 57th Street, I observed a large crowd on the sidewalk outside the Sidney Janis Gallery, for the opening of a new show. Inside, I found works by Andy Warhol, George Segal, and the Chilean sculptor Marisol, among others. The gallery described them as the Pop Art movement. The message was clear: launch your enterprise with a splash and a unifying theme. Put a frame around it and give it an identity as a movement.
The tactic worked. We called it simply the new music. The critics praised our releases. We were unable to find a market in the United States, but Europeans and Japanese responded. The quantities were not substantial, but it was encouraging.
How did ESP go about promoting its releases in those first years?
We attracted college student reps at several schools. We gave them LPs, and they helped us to get publicity on college radio. There was little else that we could do, because commercial radio would not play us, and this remains true today. We were a well-kept secret, except to a few jazz publications and some exposure in the Village Voice and underground newspapers like the East Village Other.
4 While It Worked
After that initial flood of releases from ESP, the dozen titles that came out in September 1965, the label released forty-five more titles over the next eighteen months. As you continued after the first dozen, how did you figure out what to do, whom to record?
Karl Berger sent Gato Barbieri to me. I was lying on the office couch, and suddenly Gato Barbieri was there with his wife, Michele. They looked down at me and said, “Karl sent us.” And I said, “When do you want to record?” I had no idea what he sounded like, but he was very impressive in his bearing and demeanor, and I trusted Karl’s judgment. He had just recorded for ESP. It was often like that. ESP didn’t have a systematic approach that might include submission of a demo, or an audition. It was circles inside of circles.
So you hadn’t heard of Gato Barbieri, his work with Don Cherry?
No.
In the spring of 1966, a number of ESP artists embarked on a concert tour of colleges in upstate New York, which resulted in several albums [Sun Ra, Nothing Is …; Patty Waters, College Tour; Burton Greene Trio, On Tour]. How did that adventure come about?
The owner of the printing plant that was printing our album covers was a friend of Omar Lerman, a prominent music writer and a director of the New York State Council on the Arts. He introduced us, and Omar was very knowledgeable and kind. The council gave us seventy-five hundred dollars during the early months of the label, to do a one-week tour of five colleges with music departments. I hired David Jones, a highly regarded classical engineer, gave him a checkbook, and instructed him to manage the tour as well as record it. ESP sent Sun Ra and his Arkestra, Ran Blake, Patty Waters, Giuseppi Logan, and Burton Greene. When the tour was over, David returned with the tapes, and I turned the tapes over to the artists, asking them to listen to their own work and to select enough material for an album. It worked. David told me that it had been an ordeal for him, coping with the personal needs of all the musicians, and vowed he would never do it again. When ESP artists went into the studio to record, they never did second or third takes of their pieces. The sessions were brief, typically forty-five minutes, and that was it.
Did the label engage in sponsoring other concerts or tours?
Infrequently. The Fugs had an underground hit on Folkways before they joined ESP. We paid for musical instruments, posters, and a publicist, and paid the rent for the Astor Place Playhouse, where they performed for a few months. In 1968 we staged a free concert on Pier 17, which would later become the South Street Seaport, at the foot of Manhattan. Sun Ra and his Arkestra performed without charge. Jim McCarthy of the Godz gave a solo performance, and so did John Hall, who is now a member of Congress. A huge white yacht was moored along the pier on one side, and on the other side was a Portuguese full-masted training ship, with two hundred cadets in white uniforms. A macrobiotic restaurant, the Paradox, was closing on that day, and I paid them for all their remaining food. They delivered it to the pier, and ESP was able to feed Sun Ra and all of the other performers. A huge crowd formed, and the Sun Ra Arkestra played a long set. The captain of the ship allowed the cadets to join the crowd on the pier, and they danced with the local girls. The captain saw our concert as a salute to Portugal, an observation shared by Portuguese journalists who were present, and ESP has since enjoyed a highly favorable reputation in that country. A recording engineer acquaintance warned me not to try to record the event in a conventional manner, explaining that the long electric lines needed to reach the end of the pier would act as antennae, picking up radio signals and ruining the undertaking. The engineers who had been hired for the job were neophytes and unaware of the problem. I foolishly disregarded his warning, and the tapes were useless. He had bicycled down to the scene with his portable tape deck on the handlebars and recorded thirty minutes of the concert. The sound was flawless.
How did you see what you were doing at ESP with regard to the usual industry practices?
I saw the industry as an enemy to the creative process, and I drafted a new standard for the treatment of artists. Each production would be a collaborative undertaking, in which the artists would have full control over the repertoire and the recording process. Our slogan became “The artists alone decide what you will hear on their ESP-Disk’.”
The typical recording industry contract has thirty-six to forty-five pages. We use a two-page agreement, and it is for a single album. The industry agreement grants ownership of the album to the record label. ESP co-owns the album with the artists in perpetuity. By jointly owning the master and administering their publishing rights through our Global Copyright Administration, LLC affiliate, we are partners.
As the label grew, you soon branched out into other types of recordings. How did you make the transition from the free jazz that was the core of the label to other projects like the Fugs, Pearls Before Swine, even the nonmusical albums?
I didn’t want ESP to be a niche label. Art is anarchistic, and when it becomes categorized, it loses impact. I wanted people who were innovative and inspirational. The Coach with the Six Insides, the Jean Erdman theater piece based on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and other productions were selected using this criterion.
Were you concerned with avoiding a particular public perception of the label?
The label was not to become identified as representing only one particular sector of music. Art is ephemeral, and change is always under way. Any art form can become clichéd and derivative. I thought the label should be a documentary device to capture audio art. The format didn’t matter; it could be Tim Leary talking about LSD [Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out]. It was important to confound people.
Did that help enlarge the audience for the free jazz people?
I was hoping that this approach would reach a larger audience than the very small community who were interested in free improvisation. I was always surprised to find people who embraced all of our repertoire.
The label had a certain success with the Fugs. How did that affect your ongoing approach?
It meant that we were doing more business, and I could pay my staff. Our U.S. distributors stocked our free improvisation titles on consignment to obtain the rapidly selling Fugs and Pearls Before Swine, folk-rock artists. In 1968 we were forced out of business.
The success of the Fugs didn’t change what you wanted to do with the label?
No, I didn’t go out to the pop music community and recruit artists. That wasn’t our