ESP-Disk Founder Bernard Stollman Has Died

Image via ESP-Disk

Bernard Stollman was the founder of the New York City-based independent record label ESP-Disk. His label released influential jazz records by artists like Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, and many others. He died last night following a battle with colon cancer, the label reports. He was 85.

Stollman started the label in 1963 with the intention of releasing Esperanto-based music, which gave the label its name. At the end of that year, he heard Ayler and decided to record him. The second-ever ESP-Disk release was Ayler's Spiritual Unity, which is widely considered a classic. In a career-spanning interview, Stollman discussed hearing Ayler and Coleman's music and deciding to release it:

“These things moved me. I had a broad but limited orientation to all art forms so I didn't look at the music as commerce ... but I didn't have any reference other than my gut feelings. I wasn't concerned about whether anyone else would like it, [ESP-Disk] was the most supreme self-indulgence. I felt if it moves me it might move other people.”

Though many of the label's most famous releases came from iconic jazz artists, ESP-Disk was also responsible for releasing outsider and underground records by the Fugs, Timothy Leary, Pearls Before Swine, William S. Burroughs, and Cromagnon.

Stollman shut the label down in the mid-1970s. He served as Assistant Attorney General of the State of New York until he retired in 1991. He relaunched ESP-Disk in 2005. 

via Evan Minsker