Archive for

Bernard Stollman and ESP-Disk’

On Friday it will be exactly 50 years since Albert Ayler and his musicians appeared at Town Hall in New York City. On May 1, 1965 Ayler’s quintet gave a performance that was released in part on an album titled Bells: a single-sided 12-inch 33rpm disc pressed on transparent plastic, with the title and the artist’s name overprinted in white. The album comprised two untitled pieces together amounting to a few seconds short of 20 minutes. If you wanted to buy it in Britain, not only did you have to pay the considerable premium demanded for records imported from the United States, in this instance you were paying for something that contained half of the standard amount of music. But what music it was.

I bought it by mail order, and I remember the thrill of opening the package. That was the effect of just about any record on ESP-Disk’, the small independent label that issued albums by Ayler, Sun Ra, the New York Art Quartet, Giuseppi Logan, Gato Barbieri, the Fugs, Pearls Before Swine and other names from the New York avant-garde scene. If the visual style of a Blue Note or a Riverside album perfectly reflected the crisp, clean sound of hard bop, the look of an ESP record reflected a wilder sensibility.

Bernard Stollman, the lawyer who founded ESP-Disk’ in 1964, died last week, aged 85. He had run it throughout the 10 years of its original lifetime and then in its subsequent, rather half-hearted, reincarnations. Stollman was a kind of cultural and political idealist — the label’s name came from his belief in the universal language of Esperanto, and he later claimed that ESP was brought down by the US government “because of our opposition to the (Vietnam) war” — but he came in for criticism from musicians who felt he had not properly rewarded them, particularly in terms of royalties.

During the course of an interview with Jason Weiss, the author of Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk’, The Most Outrageous Record Label in America (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), Stollman explained that for each recording he paid $300 to the leader and $50-100 to the other musicians. “They all shared ownership of the album,” he added, and therein, or so one imagines, lay a world of trouble once licensing agreements started to be made with record companies outside the US. He also claimed: “There is no ESP musician today with whom I can’t communicate amicably.”

Some unquestionably resented him for seeming to profit from their art. But Milford Graves, the great drummer who was a member of the New York Art Quartet on their classic ESP album, and who would start his own label (SRP, with the pianist Don Pullen) later in the decade, put an interesting viewpoint to Weiss:

I look at the positives, he said, because I can’t deal with the negatives of Bernard Stollman. I just know one thing: nobody was recording us in the ’60s other than ESP! And the pay that maybe you didn’t get from Bernard, it neutralises itself because if you had to hire a public-relations person, you were going to have to pay him. So you’re still going to come out to zero. It balances out, a plus and a minus. Now, ESP puts you out. What are you going to do after that? Albert Ayler became what, he started putting out — that’s all through ESP. Myself, through ESP, I came out… Look, ESP publicised us all over the planet, so anybody complaining about Bernard, I have to ask people, You’ve got to check yourself out. That’s over, man. Bernard was a businessman — he wasn’t a charitable organisation… With Bernard, you’ve got to say, “Hey, man, you started something, Look, you did what you did.”

ESP albums had a real counter-cultural charisma, and Bells — poorly recorded and bizarrely packaged (the sleeve of my copy has the word “stereo” redacted by someone with a marker pen in the company’s offices) — had more than most. Its sequence of blaring unison themes, wild collective improvisation and emotionally audacious solos by Ayler, his brother Don on trumpet and Charles Tyler on alto saxophone, with Lewis Worrell almost inaudible on bass through the firestorm set up by the astonishing Sunny Murray on drums, retains every ounce of the impact it must have made on the Town Hall audience half a century ago, and certainly on a teenager opening a package a few months later and three thousand miles away.

To Pimp a Butterfly: the shape of jazz to come?

Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly feels and sounds like one of the most important albums in years. I only wish I were able to explain properly why that might be so, but it would take somebody with a much deeper and more secure knowledge of the musical idiom and, more important, the social context from which it springs.

In his excellent Guardian review, Alexis Petridis invoked the names of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone. I hear something different. What it reminds me of — and this is about as high a compliment as I can pay — is a group of albums that came out in the late ’60s and early ’70s, reflecting black America’s various states of mind in that turbulent era: the proud isolationism of Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music, the deep lament of Art Ensemble of Chicago’s People in Sorrow, and the rage within the Last Poets’ debut album (the one containing “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution”). It doesn’t sound remotely like any of them, of course, but it springs from the same collective consciousness, albeit from a very individual and, as it seems to me, original viewpoint. It, too, speaks of a turbulent time.

If you want to take your involvement further than appreciating the surface of the album, by getting to grips with the complicated issues that Kendrick Lamar is exploring, it’s worth listening to it once all the way through while reading the lyrics, which can be found here, along with a certain amount of textual analysis. Introspection is not uncommon among rappers, and there’s a refrain which crops up on several of the tracks: “I remember you was conflicted / Misusing your influence / Sometimes I did the same / Abusing my power, full of resentment / Resentment that turned into a deep depression / Found myself screaming in a hotel room.” But what’s going on here is not solipsism or self-pity. Lamar seems able to find a connection between his own soul-searching and a broader social context.

The totality of this very big and complex picture is what counts, but among the individual highlights for me are the sudden explosion of hard bop in “For Free? (Interlude)”, the appearance of Ronald Isley to sing a single resonant verse at the end of “How Much a Dollar Cost”, and the extraordinary passage in the closing “Mortal Man” where Lamar edits in sections of an interview given by Tupac Shakur, interposing his own voice in the place of the original interviewer (we don’t know whether he has rephrased the questions, or is merely repeating them). Tupac talks about the imminence of conflict: “I think that niggas is tired of grabbin’ shit out of stores and next time it’s a riot there’s gonna be, like, bloodshed for real. I don’t think America know that.” He died in 1996, almost 20 years before Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and, now, Walter Scott.

Easier for me to talk about is the contribution made by people such as the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, the pianists Robert Glasper and Brandon Coleman, the saxophonists Terrace Martin and Kamasi Washington, and the bassist Stephen Bruner (known as Thundercat) and his brother, the drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. The inclusion of these musicians in a project such as this, and in Flying Lotus’s You’re Dead from last year, might be among the best things to have happened to jazz in recent decades.

Ever since the eruption of bebop, which moved jazz away from the dancefloor, there has been a problematic relationship between jazz and the popular music of the day. Sometimes, as with the Charles Lloyd Quartet of the late ’60s, Miles Davis’s post-1968 music, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters and, in a lighter tone, the work of Ramsey Lewis, Ronnie Laws and Roy Ayers, jazz has edged closer to the relationship it enjoyed in the ’20s and ’30s, when it maintained a balance between mind and body. It may be — although I say this very tentatively — that we are seeing the beginnings of re-engagement at a more organic level.

From the jazz perspective, there are extremely interesting interviews about the making of To Pimp a Butterfly with the participants here (with Natalie Weiner of Billboard) and here (with Jay Deshpande of Slate). Martin, Steven Ellison (Flying Lotus), Washington, Coleman and the Bruner brothers are around 30 years old and, like Lamar, grew up in Los Angeles. Several of them received an informal education at the late Billy Higgins’ regular World Stage gig in Leimert Park. Akinmusire, who is a similar age, was born in Oakland. Glasper is in his mid-thirties and was born in Texas and studied in New York. They are equally familiar and comfortable with the music of John Coltrane, Public Enemy, Sun Ra, Tupac Shakur, Thelonious Monk and Snoop Dogg. They know these idioms from the inside. And they’re finding ways to make that familiarity work.

I’ve also been listening to an advance copy of Washington’s extraordinary debut album, a three-CD set called The Epic. It’s a big work in title, tone and textures, almost three hours long, divided into 17 tracks, and lining up a 32-piece string orchestra, a 20-voice choir and the occasional vocal contribution by Patrice Quinn alongside a 10-piece jazz combo. An extract from one of Malcolm X’s most celebrated speeches also makes an appearance.

In its layering of the combo and the choir, The Epic has some of the sweep of Max Roach’s It’s Time and Donald Byrd’s I’m Tryin’ to Get Home, both of which were arranged, in 1962 and 1964 respectively, by the African-American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. In jazz terms, it stays mostly “inside”: the moves are the familiar ones of modal jazz from the era of A Love Supreme, before Coltrane cut loose in 1965 with Ascension, which took him into the final phase of his career. Any disappointment at a failure to engage with those later developments is mitigated by the sheer energy with which the music is attacked, and the degree of inventiveness on display within the now-traditional forms.

Washington’s music comes at you in waves, surging and receding with the power that Carlos Santana and Mike Shrieve were looking for when they tried to harness Coltrane’s sound and spirituality to the drive of their own Latino rock on Caravanserai, Welcome and Borboletta in the early ’70s. Multiple drummers, multiple electronic keyboards and modal structures are among the common elements. This is music in search of transcendence and/or catharsis.

Forty years later, however, there’s a great deal more self-assurance about this project, and the solos — particularly those of Washington, who has a sound as big as his ideas, and the trumpeter Igmar Thomas — never lack conviction or substance. Here’s a sample, a comparatively straight-ahead 14-minute piece called “Re Run Home”. You might find that the trumpet-trombone-tenor sound puts you in mind of the front line on Coltrane’s classic Blue Train, but there’s nothing to object to in that: why not use it as an available colour, offset by a very differently orientated rhythm section? Stay with it through to the conclusion, where the textures grow sparser but the groove intensifies.

It’s too early to be definitive about all this, to claim that this new development represents the future, or to dismiss it because the kind of jazz they’re exploring/exploiting isn’t, of itself, new and challenging. What matters is that some interesting young minds are facing up to the problem of where jazz goes next, and they’re turning it into an adventure.

* The photograph is from the insert accompanying To Pimp a Butterfly. The credited photographers are Denis Rouvre and Roberto Reyes. The Epic will be released at the beginning of May on the Brainfeeder label.

Glass window

In an early chapter of Words Without Music, his new autobiography, Philip Glass remembers how, soon after his arrival in New York in 1957, while waiting for a place at the Juilliard conservatory, he called the pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano from a phone booth on the Upper West Side to ask for lessons. Tristano himself answered the phone.

“Mr Tristano, my name is Philip Glass. I’m a young composer. I’ve come to New York to study, and I know your work. Is there any chance I can study with you?”

“Do you play jazz?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you play the piano?”

“A little. I came here, really, to study at Juilliard, but I love your music and I wanted to be in touch with you.”

“Well,” he said, “thank you for the call, but I don’t know that there’s anything I can do for you.”

He was kind, almost gentle. He wished me luck.

Fifty years later, while listening to the section called “Train” from his opera Einstein on the Beach, the work that eventually made him famous, Glass found himself wondering about the source of inspiration for the piece:

A part of the music was almost screaming to be recognised. I began looking around in my record library, and I came upon the music of Lennie Tristano… I found what I was looking for. Two tracks: the first, “Line Up”, and the second, “East 32nd Street”. I listened to them and there it was. No, the notes weren’t the same. Most listeners would probably not have heard what I did. But the energy, the feel, and, I would say, the intention of the music was completely and accurately captured in the “Train”. It doesn’t sound like him, but it shares the idea of propulsion, the self-confidence, and the drive. There’s an athleticism to it, a nonchalance, an “I don’t care if you listen to it or not — here it is.”

By coincidence, I was in the middle of reading Glass’s book when a package arrived containing a two-CD set featuring a newly discovered live recording of Tristano and his sextet — Willie Dennis (trombone), Lee Konitz (alto), Warne Marsh (tenor), Buddy Jones (bass) and Mickey Simonetta (drums) — from the Blue Note club in Chicago in the spring of 1951. Tristano’s discography is sufficiently thin to make this album, with its excellent sound and impeccable annotation, a major event.

The mood is relaxed, the playing intense. Tristano was a Jesuitical figure whose insistence on technical and conceptual rigour from his students was legendary. Only the best survived. Konitz and Marsh were the best known of his acolytes, and they are close to top form here. Tristano’s own playing is as densely figured as usual, whether soloing or comping behind the horns. Dennis is the surprise: somehow he makes the trombone achieve the cliché-free agility required of Tristano’s improvisers.

All the tunes, as was Tristano’s wont, are based on his favourite chord sequences, whether he wrote them or not: “Fine and Dandy” for Marsh and Konitz’s “Sax of a Kind”, “All of Me” for Marsh’s “Background Music”, “Idaho” for Konitz’s “Tautology”. The leader’s suave spoken introductions are almost worth the price of admission alone, as when he follows Konitz’s swift, knotty “Palo Alto” (based on “Strike Up the Band”) with this: “I hope this gentlemen down here right in front enjoyed that more than he might have enjoyed ‘The Tennessee Waltz’, which he requested.”

Glass’s book provides a charmingly unpretentious portrait of an artist’s life, from the studies with Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar which shaped his conception to his productive acquaintanceships with Samuel Beckett, Merce Cunningham, Richard Serra, Chuck Close, William Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Papp and many others. There’s a valuable account of how he turned away from the post-war orthodoxy of 12-tone composition, including the following passage:

When I had returned to New York in 1967, I had discovered that the people around me at the time — painters and sculptors like Bob Rauschenberg , Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra — all listened to rock ‘n’ roll. They did not listen to modern music. It was not in their record collections.

When I asked them, “Do you listen to modern music?” I found that they weren’t interested at all. None of them listened to modern music: Stockhausen, Boulez, or Milton Babbitt — forget it. You’d never find that music there. There was more of a connection, for example, between artists and writers. What Ginsberg was doing in poetry and what Burroughs was doing in literature were not that different from what was going on in the art world.

“Why is there a disconnect here?” I asked myself.

Consciously, or to some degree unconsciously, I was looking for the music that should be in their record collection. If Rauschenberg and Johns were looking at paintings and saying, “What could go into a painting and what goes on in a painting?” I asked myself, “What is the music that goes with that art?”

I started going to the Fillmore East…

* The photograph is from the cover of Lennie Tristano: Chicago April 1951, released on the Uptown label. Philip Glass’s Words Without Music is published by Faber & Faber.