Читать книгу Always in Trouble - Jason Weiss - Страница 9

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 were exploding open the dances and popular song forms (the blues, Tin Pan Alley, show tunes) that served as the bedrock of jazz structures, to reconfigure what was once a familiar framework in ways that focused on all that was happening inside, to highlight the playing itself. In effect, for certain practitioners, this tendency toward greater abstraction, a kind of pure expression as it were, brought jazz in line with comparable developments in visual art, literature, and even contemporary composed music.

As in previous decades, New York was the primary forge for the newest experiments in jazz. Nearly all the major innovators were based there at the time, including John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and Sun Ra. It was there too that the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild, a noble attempt to establish a self-sustaining musicians’ collective, produced several historic festivals and series of new music concerts. But the force, as well as the rage, that characterized free jazz in its original period of growth was also bound up, often enough, with the political issues of the day, notably the civil rights movement and the massive protests against the Vietnam War. This context, ultimately, provided an inherent continuity to some of ESP’s ventures further afield as it recorded provocative folk-rock groups such as the Fugs, along with other mind-expanding projects. The label thus articulated an identity, and when it came onto the scene, for those musicians it was really the only game in town. Stollman’s discovery of the new music, therefore, was a direct result not just of his presence in New York but also of his innate sympathy for a community of artists whose instincts matched his own: their independent do-it-yourself approach, a bemused irreverence for established procedure, the need to question received wisdom both historical and social, and above all, a principled integrity that was about far more than mere commercial success. In short, all these wild-sounding individuals had their reasons, however mysterious, for sounding the way they did, and to Stollman it was a blessing that they did not in fact sound like all the rest.

Prior to founding his label, Stollman was not exactly a longtime jazz aficionado. But he liked the people and the new music suited his temperament, perhaps more than he realized at first. Trained as a lawyer, a profession he adopted by default as the eldest child of immigrant parents, he had gravitated toward working with musicians, intrigued by their particular problems. He was in his midthirties when the idea first occurred to him, in 1963, that starting a record company might be not only possible but a worthwhile and necessary endeavor. However, not then or since did he learn to really treat the undertaking as a business; if he had, the label would not be what it was, or is today.

The 1950s and ’60s were a particularly rich period in American vernacular music. Jazz musicians were carrying the harmonic and rhythmic discoveries of bebop into a wealth of new directions such as cool jazz, hard bop, and Third Stream, but also into far more open-ended forms. Folk music and blues idioms were being revived, revalorized, and taken up by urban sophisticates who wrought their own inevitable transformations. Rock and roll drew fresh impetus from the British invasion (and the British, of course, had developed their styles in part by borrowing from American song forms) and soon became a phenomenon of mass audiences. The popular growth of rock, in turn, accentuated the divide that had emerged ever since bebop began to veer away from dance and turn to art music. In effect, the jazz artists had freed themselves—often at the cost of their own economic survival—to pursue the highest realms of musical thinking, much like their classical counterparts but without the institutional infrastructures of support. Audiences grew smaller where the music became most unfamiliar and demanding, and yet a devoted public remained eager to partake of the adventure. What galvanized Stollman in his commitment to the label, as he explains in his part of this book, was first hearing tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler and then, nine-plus months later at a crowded café in his own neighborhood, attending the October Revolution in Jazz. Produced by Bill Dixon and the Jazz Composers Guild in an effort to generate their own working conditions, the October Revolution’s several days of concerts featured many artists who would soon record for ESP.

So, how did Stollman decide on the name of his label? After settling back in New York at the end of the 1950s, amid attempts to establish himself in business or law, he also became involved in the Esperanto movement, which he helped to promote as a universal language. In recent years, he has even been a partner in the development of Unikom, an automated software system using Esperanto as an interlingual stage to assist in the rapid translation between languages over computer networks. In the early ‘60s, he produced his first record, Ni Kantu en Esperanto (Let’s Sing in Esperanto), with that same idea of advocacy, showing the language in action using poetry, humor, and song. The label that issued the record was to be called Esperanto Disko (the Esperanto word for “records”), which became shortened to ESP-Disk’. That the name also suggests a special kind of intuition proved fortuitous when the label subsequently found its true direction. In the 1960s free improvisation became a sort of holy grail for jazz musicians who were pushing the limits, or rather a lingua franca, like Esperanto itself.

By reaching past the tradition of harmonic structures and chord progressions, improvising musicians found new points of contact, new approaches to making music together. A vast array of sound elements was increasingly put into play, in the ongoing search for whatever forms of music might evolve from the exchange. This was by no means a development limited to the United States: throughout Europe and beyond, a growing community of free improvisers was staking out undiscovered territories of music, and in their searches they sometimes joined forces with musicians schooled in other traditions (for example, Musica Elettronica Viva, the improvising electronic music collective founded by classically trained American composers in Rome in the 1960s, or Henry Cow, the British avant-rock improvisers in the 1970s).

From its inception, ESP-Disk’ remained unpredictable both in the music it offered and in its defiance of industry conventions. The new music based on free improvisation was its core identity, but the label soon diversified into rock and folk, protopunk and protest music, as well as an occasional spoken-word document reflecting the historical moment—there was little discernible pattern or design. Stollman functioned more by instinct, circumstance, opportunity, and by following his own eclectic curiosities and taste. The label quickly became known—often by word of mouth—for its challenging and eye-opening productions, as well as for its singular cover art; stories abound about how it served as the measure of hip record collections. “You never heard such sounds in your life,” was the banner it lived by. Just as important, printed across the bottom of every back cover, was the phrase that defined its attitude toward the people it recorded: “The artists alone decide.”

For all its underground renown, in the spirit of independent record labels it survived for barely a decade, issuing some 125 titles; more precisely, as Stollman recounts, the company was pretty much out of business after barely four years, but somehow he stubbornly kept on producing records until it folded completely. Over the next three decades, however, a curious thing happened: ESP led a series of shadow lives through foreign licensing deals as well as bootlegs. What had originally been a catalog of quite modest press runs proved attractive enough that its titles kept resurfacing in Europe and Japan. These, in turn, found their way back into the United States. Stollman, meanwhile, had mostly left the label behind after its demise, eventually taking a real job as a government lawyer. He felt he had failed the artists he recorded—for not promoting them adequately, for deficient bookkeeping, for being unable to prevent the company from going under. At last, on reaching retirement age, he happily left government work as well. But it was not until more than a decade later, in 2005, that he took control again and relaunched ESP, bringing the label fully back to life.

Behind an unassuming and nearly unmarked storefront in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, occupying the entire ground floor in what was once a laundromat, Stollman and a few full- and part-time employees and interns stay busy, on any given day, keeping to their ambitious schedule. Through 2008 and 2009, ESP-Disk’ released CDs and some vinyl five times a year, totaling more than fifty titles; these included reissues from the original catalog—remastered from the analog tapes and sometimes with additional material—alongside productions of new bands and previously unreleased archival recordings. This practice is a departure from ESP’s quite irregular release schedule back in the 1960s. The label has also come to offer most of its catalog as digital downloads for sale through its active website, a source as well for video and radio features on ESP-related artists. As a community outreach initiative, since the fall of 2008 the label has sponsored a monthly concert of ESP artists at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, and more recently a similar series in Brooklyn at the Jazz Lounge, around the corner from its offices. The label has also sponsored or co-sponsored occasional marathon concerts, such as the November 2009 benefit for the Jazz Foundation of America held at the Bowery Poetry Club and the first annual Albert Ayler Festival held on Roosevelt Island in July 2010. Additionally, every week an ongoing project of restitution is quietly carried out, in which the sales and royalty calculations for one more artist in the catalog are comprehensively brought up to date as part of its Royalty Share program; where a debt is found to be owed, the company makes payment. Perhaps age does bring a bit of wisdom, after all, or at least experience counts for something when taking up an old enterprise again: never has the label been more organized, even if it hardly resembles a normal operation.

The revived company has occupied the Brooklyn offices since 2007. The not-quite-finished remodeling of the front half of the floor, where a small record store opens onto the street and taped drywalls mark off a distinct storage room, leads past several mixed-use corners into a central area with a cluster of separate desks where the staff performs various tasks of production, promotion, layout, accounting, and research. The patchwork repair of the place grows more ragged still in the ample room at the back, with its several patterns of old tin ceiling and a motley assortment of hanging lamps; the bathroom and a small kitchen are located in the rear, while along one wall stands a row of file cabinets stacked with big boxes and a TV. Across from these, Stollman’s long desk, reflecting constant activity, is piled with CDs, papers, a computer, and a phone.

That phone is steadily occupied throughout the day. Besides representing several musicians and the estates of Eric Dolphy, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and others in the global administration of their recording and publishing rights, he is also pursuing a number of far-flung possibilities for release on ESP or a subsidiary imprint. Recently, these have included a trove of unreleased performances by Jimi Hendrix; recordings from Soviet archives of concerts in Moscow by Paul Robeson and Yves Montand in the 1950s; a recent stand-up comedy performance in an L.A. club by Mort Sahl; new archival projects of music by Horace Tapscott, Phineas Newborn Jr., and Eric Dolphy; and, surely the most unexpected, rare performances by Kate Smith. Stollman does not worry too much about diluting or confusing the label’s identity. Even as it continues to offer sounds that may never have been heard before, he clearly enjoys unearthing little-known finds, the rare jewels that deserve to be made available. Unpredictable in genre and direction, the label maintains its ability to challenge expectations, including those built by its own practices.

In light of these multiple projects, the time seems ripe to tell the story of the label, from before its beginnings right up to the ever-moving present. After meeting with Bernard Stollman for a few hours, I became convinced that the only way to present that story was straight from the source. Complaints have circulated since the original releases about royalties not paid beyond the small advance; Stollman recognizes where proper accounting was lacking and to make up for that lapse is one reason he plunged back into the fray. But he also acknowledges that most of the records never sold very much when the company previously existed. What seems certain is that he never got rich off of anyone, far from it.

As an oral history, then, this book is divided into two main parts. In the first, based on many hours of interviews through the latter half of 2008 and regular visits over the following year, Stollman gets to tell his story, the only comprehensive account possible, despite its gaps. Edited to follow a more or less chronological order, it incorporates certain thematic chapters to focus on specific areas of activity. I retain some scaled-down version of my questions to him (except in a few chapters) to help direct the narrative through its many turns but also to keep a space open for interstitial remarks. At eighty-one, Stollman stands tall, straight-backed, and strong. Though longevity runs in the family, the fact is he was always inclined toward clean living. His memory still seems remarkably clear, and his outlook remains curiously upbeat. No question, this is what he wants to be doing more than anything, running the record label that he founded long ago, before he knew better.

Inasmuch as the label is largely the story of one man’s instincts and eccentricities, it also belongs to all the musicians and others who have had a role in its history, and even to those far away in place and time, for whom ESP-Disk’ served as an example or inspiration (a full discography can be found online at the ESP website, www.espdisk.com). Therefore, the second part of the book accommodates their varied perspectives, comprising more than three dozen interviews. These are meant to recount not only their own individual share in the story but also the artistic ideas and tendencies that animated them; moreover, these interviews reflect, whether briefly or at some length, the remarkable lives that converged for a time in the singular course of ESP’s trajectory, while offering a glimpse in many instances of how those lives carried through to the present.

Brooklyn, September 2010