I was visited by a young woman choreographer. I welcomed her to my parents’ apartment, where I conducted my practice. She said, “Why aren’t you helping Ornette and Cecil?” I said, “Ornette and Cecil who?” She was clearly taken aback. “You don’t know who Ornette and Cecil are? They’re the princes of the new music. I’ve talked with both of them, and they want you to manage them.” I met both of them to discuss their concerns.
I didn’t do very much for Cecil, except to get his pianos fixed. He had a loft on Chambers Street, and his two Steinway grands had been damaged by rain from the skylight. I contacted Steinway, and they repaired both pianos without charge. Gil Evans had made Into the Hot [Impulse, 1961], and half of it was written by Cecil Taylor, who also performed on it, but they called it a Gil Evans record. I contacted the label, and they surrendered their claim to the publishing rights to Cecil for his publishing company, whose catalog I now represent globally. The percussionist Sunny Murray, who toured for years with Cecil, reminded me recently that I was instrumental in getting them booked in Europe for the first time. In 1965 Cecil asked me to manage him. I surmised that others could do a better job for him and declined his offer. We hadn’t been in touch for many years, when I invited him to dinner at his favorite restaurant recently. As we ate, I said to Cecil, “The answer is yes.” He said, “The answer to what?” I said, “The question you asked me in 1965 was whether I would manage you. I’m sure you could use some help.” I negotiated a booking for him into the Iridium, the midtown Manhattan club. He was pleased with it. And they were pleased with my participation.
When I met Ornette, he was already famous, having been featured on a Time magazine cover with his plastic horn. But he was in a protracted depression. He had already done all those records on Atlantic. They were about to release a new one, for which they had not made a contract with him. At Ornette’s request, I called Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic, and cautioned him that he had not acquired the rights for this release. Subsequently, they paid him a substantial advance and issued the album. He never paid me for my services. In fairness to Ornette, I should mention that I never billed him. This was typical of my conduct, effectual for my clients but not self-protective. To support Ornette, I saw John Hammond at Columbia, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff at Blue Note, and Bob Thiele at Impulse. I offered Bob Thiele a license for Ornette’s self-produced concert at Town Hall for a three-year term. He liked the idea, but then he said, “You manage Ornette?” “Yes.” He looked skeptical. That was intended as a hint, which I did not pick up. I went back to Ornette and said, “Hammond is interested in working with you, Lion and Wolff at Blue Note are interested, and I have a proposal to Bob Thiele at Impulse, and this is the deal.” The following day, Ornette went to see Bob Thiele on his own. He also saw Lion and Wolff at Blue Note and made a deal with them for the Town Hall concert tapes. He then went to John Hammond, and Skies of America eventually followed from that. I had laid the groundwork. His morale improved, and his momentum was restored.
When we first met, Ornette had handed me the tape that he had produced of the Town Hall concert with David Izenzon, Charles Moffett, and a string ensemble. Izenzon couldn’t hear himself, so he turned up his amplifier. His bass track was totally distorted, and they couldn’t use the tape. I went to Dave Sarser, a remarkable engineer and a friend. At his studio, I met Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, and Horace Parlan, the gifted pianist. David compressed the track; the distortion disappeared and the bass sounded normal. I brought the tape to Ornette. He paid for the engineering work and asked to borrow the tape. I gave it to him.
During that period, in August 1964, Bud Powell returned to America with Francis Paudras. Francis and I had corresponded regarding Bud. I invited Francis to dinner at the Carnegie Hall Tavern. As we ate, I urged him to return with Bud to Paris. “How can Bud survive the pushers here?” He replied that they were bound by contract to perform for two weeks at Birdland. “They flew us here and we must go through with the deal.” I could see Birdland from our window seat, and I spotted a tall, portly man in a tan suit, running around the block, and recognized him. “Isn’t that Bud?” Shamefacedly, he explained, “On our way over, I gave him the wrong pills.”
About a month following Bud’s arrival, I got a phone call from Nica Rothschild, the Baroness de Koenigswarter, whom I didn’t know. “Bud has disappeared. Mary [Lou Williams] says that maybe you can help.” I said I would try. The New York City Police Department, Missing Persons Bureau, staff member asked, “Are you a family member?” “No.” “Well, I’m afraid we can’t help you.” “Please understand,” I said. “We’re talking about Bud Powell, an American treasure.” There was a pause. “All right, we’ll see what we can do.” Then, at 3:00 a.m. the following morning, Nica called: “Mr. Stollman, the police have found Bud, seated on a doorstep in Greenwich Village. I’ve sent my chauffeur to get him. Would you like to come visit me in Weehawken?” Nica had a beautiful, modern flat-roofed house, on the cliffs above the Hudson River, whose panoramic picture windows provided a stunning view of the New York skyline. In its huge salon was a grand piano. On a large antique couch, in the center of the living room, dozens of cats were perched. Still more cats perched on couches that lined the picture windows. A small crowd had gathered: Francis Paudras, Ornette Coleman, and my youngest brother, Steve. As we waited for Bud, his teenaged daughter, Celia, and her mother, Mary Frances Barnes, arrived. Nica served us Château Lafite Rothschild.
Ornette cornered me. “Bernard, why aren’t you helping me?” I said, “Why should I start again?” This was some months after I had done the other work for him. “We’ll make an agreement, but”—this was just before anything had been released on ESP—“you must license the Town Hall tape to me; I’ll produce the record of it myself.” Ornette had left with me a two-track tape of a portion of the concert. I sat down and I typed out an agreement, and he signed it, as we waited for Bud Powell.
That same night, Francis Paudras played me a solo performance by Bud that he had recorded on his Nakamichi professional tape recorder, while Bud stayed in Francis’s apartment in Paris. He had locked Bud in, turned on the machine, and gone out to do his work as a graphic designer. It was stunningly beautiful. When Bud arrived, he sat at the piano and played briefly. Then he pulled me aside and spoke to me in a soft voice: “Mr. Lawyer, can you help me? I don’t want to go back; I want to stay.” Mary Frances and their daughter Celia invited him to live with them in Brooklyn. Francis was dismayed, realizing that his idol would not accompany him back to Paris. Francis said to me, “I have to go back, but I need money.” He had graphic images with him that he had made of Bud. I said, “All right, Francis, I’ll give you the money you need, but I want to license this art.” It was three hundred dollars. These images were used for the covers of his ESP album Live at the Blue Note in Paris, 1961, a tape that was brought to me in 1966 by Buttercup Powell and its producer, Alan Douglas. Francis wrote to me following his return to France. Phonogram wanted to put out a record by Bud, offering a thousand dollars. I had become Bud’s manager. I wrote him back and refused, as it appeared to be too small an advance. In retrospect, I think Francis had personally assumed responsibility for the cost of Bud’s hospitalization for tuberculosis and hoped to recoup part of it. I should have approved his request. Francis eventually licensed tapes from his collection of recordings by Bud to an Italian company. Over thirty years later, in a book he wrote describing his profoundly personal relationship with Bud, he characterized me as a scheming, unscrupulous, money-grubbing liar and recalled events that had never occurred. He blamed me for booking Bud into Carnegie Hall for the Charlie Parker Memorial Concert produced by Mercury Records. I had not been contacted by the producers and had known nothing about it prior to the evening of the performance. In 1997 Francis committed suicide. His book appeared the following year.
Shortly after the visit to Nica, I read in Billboard that Blue Note Records would release Ornette Coleman at Town Hall. I called the owners of Blue Note, and one of them came to see me, a dignified and genteel individual. They had paid Ornette to issue it, and he had then gone to Stockholm. There he recorded At the Golden Circle, including “Sadness,” from the Town Hall concert. I proposed that Blue Note release the portion of the concert that Ornette had not licensed to me, and they accepted. We signed a mutual release, and ESP