Ressurection of a Jazzman
by Jen Itzenson |
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Michael Anderson spent 20 years seeking out Bernard Stollman. He’d first come across Stollman’s experimental music label, ESP-Disk, in the 1970s. Anderson was playing drums in Sun Ra’s Arkestra, an avant-garde jazz ensemble that appeared on ESP. “The label was just outrageous,” Anderson says. “It seemed to answer a question for me—where was the next level of music?”
He’d written to Stollman, but never heard back. Years passed. Then, one day in the late 1990s, when Anderson was working at an HMV on 86th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, he saw a man dressed in a rainbow of colors who looked, he says, “like a real 1960s hippie.” Anderson struck up a conversation with the man and on a hunch said he was looking for Bernard Stollman. The man, it turned out, knew Stollman and offered to introduce him. The next week, Anderson at last met the man he describes as a “kindred spirit.”
Michael Anderson is now in his mid-50s. He has a trim goatee and wears his hair in long dreadlocks, and he is the director of marketing and A&R for ESP. One afternoon last winter, Anderson and his two colleagues, Rob Lake and Douglas McGregor, took a break from pushing emails to try to explain why their boss inspires such a mystical devotion. The three have worked together since the summer of 2005 and, for the last year and a half, they have worked in a dark, subletted room, carved from another company’s office, in an old SoHo office building. It is a minimalist space with little that isn’t functional. Against one wall is a pile of cardboard boxes that contain ESP recordings. They keep their Venetian blinds down, and the plain white walls appear gray. (If they didn’t lower the blinds, they explained, they would be looking at six stories of airshaft.)
Lake and McGregor are both a few years out of college. Lake, who studied experimental music and handles administration and publishing for the label, called Stollman “completely a visionary, completely a genius.” Anderson said one reason he works for ESP is to protect Stollman. “There are people who like to get next to him to take advantage of him,” he said. “He’s overgenerous.” McGregor, who handles the books, distribution and remastering, agreed. “It would be really nice to do justice and right some of the so-called wrongs.”
When asked about these wrongs, Anderson, McGregor and Lake shook their heads and laughed, as if it were a bad joke they’d heard too many times before.
“All the artists who say ‘I never got paid, I never got paid,’ well, you know, Bernard never got paid either,” McGregor said.
“Yeah, exactly,” Anderson said.
“You press 500 and you sell 200,” McGregor said.
“Bernard does not live in luxury,” Lake said.
“You don’t see all the gold records on our walls,” McGregor said.
This is the second incarnation of ESP. In its original form, the label survived 10 years, from 1964 to 1974, but in that time it released about 120 records, including many by artists still considered the greats of the era. Just about every free jazz icon appeared on the label—the saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, and the composer and bandleader Sun Ra—as did The Fugs and Pearls Before Swine, counterculture rockers who gave the tiny label its first chance at commercial success. Many were artists desperate to get their music out there, no matter the financial arrangements. In As Serious as Your Life, a history of avant- garde jazz, Valerie Wilmer writes that “Stollman became simultaneously the most hated and most needed man in the recording industry.”
Stollman, a lawyer, founded the label with the credo: “The artists alone decide what you will hear on their ESP-Disk.” To its fans and critics, ESP is the embodiment of Stollman’s personality, the physical record of his energies and tastes. To enthusiasts, ESP preserved the sound of an era—not its greatest hits, but its fringes and frayed edges.
Three years ago, Stollman made his first efforts to revive his label. It was a fight for vindication after a life waged on one simple bet: that others would hear what he hears.
He hired Anderson, McGregor and Lake, and with their help, reissued 30 of ESP’s most influential albums. And he decided to record new artists again, his first since the 1970s. Late last year, the label released an album featuring one of these new artists, a New York musician named Hans Tammen. Tammen designed an instrument he calls the “endangered guitar,” which he plays laid flat on a table or his lap. He often beats the strings with a drumstick, and sometimes attacks them with both hands, manipulating the sound with his laptop. The result is a dissonant chaos, a combination of rustling and plunking sounds and jarring screeches that most people would describe neither as beautiful nor as music.
Michael Anderson hears a story when he hears Tammen’s music. ESP gets submissions all the time, he says, but only about two out of every 10 are listenable. “There are people who love the music, but they don’t really understand it,” he says. “It just sounds like a lot of noise.”
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