I would also like to thank Alan Sondheim for his ongoing advice and reflections in the development of this book; Gérard Terronès, for the time and music he so freely offered me at his home in Paris, which reconfirmed for me his lifelong dedication to the music and musicians’ rights; Ken Wissoker, editorial director at another press, for his early enthusiasm, which helped propel the project further; and for assorted gestures of assistance and answering of questions: Pierre Crépon, Philippe Carles, Pete Gershon, Marshall Reese, Ali Alizadeh, David Stoelting, Franck Médioni, Matt Lavelle, Steven Joerg, Byron Coley, Filippo Salvadori, Christian Gauffre, Antoine Prum, Richard Meltzer, Kurt Gottschalk, Bruno Guermonprez, Guy Klucevsek, Fumiko Wellington, and Suzannah B. Troy.
Finally, but not least, I must thank my editor at Wesleyan, Parker Smathers, as well as the Music/Interview series editor, Daniel Cavicchi, and my fine-eyed copyeditor, Susan Silver, for their helpful guidance along the way.
A Note on the Photographers
While doing a bit of research on ESP at the Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark, I came across an interview that had appeared in Jazz Hot during the label’s heyday (“Qui êtes-vous, Bernard Stollman?” Jazz Hot 33, no. 230 [1967]). Among the more informative pieces on ESP from that time, it was written by Daniel Berger, a young Frenchman who also included half a dozen photos that he himself had shot in New York. I was lucky enough to find him, via the phonebook, still alive and well and thriving in Paris. We maintained an intermittent e-mail correspondence over the next ten months about the possibility of using some of his photos for my book. At last, in July 2009, we met while I was visiting Paris. He suggested I count on at least a few hours to go through his various boxes of negatives and prints from forty-three years earlier. How much could there be, I wondered. In the end, we spent over five hours together, and in his great generosity he not only gave me whatever prints I chose but also lent me the negatives for other shots I wanted to have printed.
As it happened, Daniel never became a professional photographer. Through the 1960s and ’70s, he worked as a journalist and in the music industry and as a producer for French television, before becoming a business consultant, most recently to the wine industry; he recently directed a documentary on wine and Europe for European television. But from February to May 1966, in his mid-twenties, he had gone off to New York with his friend Alain Corneau, the future film director (who recounted these efforts in his 2007 memoir Projection privée), to do initial research for a documentary on free jazz. Though subsequently abandoned, it was to have been produced by Claude Lelouch, who won the grand prize at Cannes that May for A Man and a Woman and thus went on to bigger projects. Diligent in their task, every day for three months the two visitors went out to meet the new musicians at their homes, at clubs, wherever they could, while getting acquainted with the Lower East Side and other neighborhoods. Daniel took well over a thousand photos along the way. As the reader can see by my selection, I appreciated especially the casual moments captured with the musicians. Some of these photos have never been published; others have appeared over the years in books, museum exhibits, and films.
During that same visit to Paris, I also looked up Guy Kopelowicz, a professional photographer for the Associated Press for forty years and now retired. His photos had graced covers in the original ESP catalog, and he was also present at Albert Ayler’s Spirits Rejoice session. What I hadn’t realized was how active he had been in documenting free jazz and a lot of other music, as a passionate sideline (with a record collection to match). He sent me a long list of the people he had photographed just through the latter half of the 1960s, mostly around Paris and in two visits to New York: few notable jazz musicians had escaped his lens. On our first meeting, I set aside a number of shots from the boxes of prints that he found readily at hand. But much more of his archives lay in storage in his basement, and he had to search around there to find what other prints might be available. Within days, he had located another batch of photos, and when I saw him again I marveled that such a trove lay quietly among his shelves, mostly unseen by the greater public. As with Daniel, Guy was utterly generous in letting me use whatever I wanted for my book.
Subsequently, I located another small archive of period photos. Sandra Stollman, youngest sibling of Bernard by fifteen years, had taken many shots of ESP artists in the 1960s. Her work was featured on nine album covers, including records by Byron Allen, Noah Howard, Frank Wright, the Godz, and the iconic photo of Sonny Simmons in Central Park for his debut Staying on the Watch; when Ayler saw her double-image portrait of him at a concert, he insisted that would be the cover for Spirits Rejoice. Though a substantial portion of her photos has been lost over the years, she knew just where the folder was that contained what did remain. From her home in Florida, where she moved in the late 1990s to care for her mother, she scanned and sent me copies of some prints and a number of contact sheets, the negatives in many cases no longer available. Again, I was honored to count on her participation.
I should also briefly mention the provenance of a few other photos to be found in these pages. Piotr Siatkowski, a jazz photographer in Krakow, Poland, had first contacted me about my book on Steve Lacy. When I told him of the ESP project, he responded enthusiastically, and so I mentioned a few musicians of whom I still did not have photos. Before long, he sent me the shots of Sonny Simmons and William Parker, each taken during performances in Krakow. And then, wondering where I might find a worthy shot of the determined survivor that is Giuseppi Logan, reemerged from decades of oblivion, I discovered on the Internet an incredible dossier of photos taken by Margo Ducharme, in which Giuseppi had been hired to model the debut line of clothing designed by her boyfriend, Greg Armas, for Assembly New York, his shop on the Lower East Side. The photos were taken on East 9th Street in New York, near Tompkins Square Park, where Giuseppi goes nearly every day to play his horn. Like the other photographers in this book, Margo did not hesitate when I asked to use her work. As the reader can see, I have been most fortunate in that regard.
Introduction
The history of independent record labels, in the United States and abroad, has run like a fleet-footed spirit alongside the larger, more commercial enterprises since the beginning of the industry. Less burdened by grand designs, and keeping a sharper focus and certainly a tighter margin of operations, the independents managed paradoxically to court greater risk; having almost nothing to lose, they could afford to produce art for art’s sake, or simply for the invigorating sake of provocation. Of course, labels that started out small, as they grew and proved their singular worth, often were gobbled up by more robust companies. Yet even today, with the greatest concentration of media conglomerates, as the technology mutates into ever newer forms, and when it seems impossible for any company to survive by actually selling records, new independents still emerge in every corner of music and in every region.
Jazz, as an evolving laboratory for musical innovation, has always thrived on the daring of independent labels. Writer and record-store owner Ross Russell launched Dial Records in 1946, and for three years he produced crucial dates in Charlie Parker’s career as well as in those of other bebop artists. The musician-owned Debut Records, led by Charles Mingus and Max Roach in the late ’40s to the mid-’50s, provided the opportunity to hear not only their own early work but also that of various associates, including Paul Bley’s first outing. In 1960 the farsighted Candid Records, briefly directed by jazz critic and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, carried Roach and Mingus into a new era with more overtly political work, besides offering distinctive early sessions by younger musicians such as Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, and Steve Lacy. In the wake of such adventurous small labels came Bernard Stollman with ESP-Disk’, at the moment when a radical shift was taking hold: free improvisation as a dominant aesthetic in the new music.
Even today, some fifty years later, the unaccustomed listener will find most of ESP’s initial releases startling, an assault on traditional notions of form and content in music. And indeed, they were. The advances pioneered in jazz throughout the 1960s were arguably the most far-reaching in the history of the music, then or since; subsequent generations are still harvesting, and grappling with, that legacy. The vanguard artists