Bernard Stollman, toujours des nôtres

Retour sur Bernard Stollman, l'homme de ESP-disk. Ph!l attire mon attention sur un entretien passionnant publié il y a dix ans par allaboutjazz.com. Vous en trouverez le début un peu plus bas. Il y en a dix pages. Si vous voulez la suite, vous devrez cliquer sur le lien. En attendant, voici in extenso The Machine Gun de Peter Brötzmann. Un disque formidable, dit Berny à qui il fut proposé. Vous saurez en lisant l'entretien pourquoi il n'a pas pu le produire.

You never heard such sounds in your life, c'était la devise d'ESP.

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Founder of the iconoclastic jazz and protest-music label ESP-Disk, Bernard Stollman initially commenced recording and releasing new music in 1964 with Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity, a classic of modern improvised music, and continued in a stylishly off-the-cuff yet wholly documentary vein releasing contemporary jazz, folk, rock, punk and outsider art music until the threat of bankruptcy forced the label close down in 1974. Plagued by soured licensing deals in Europe and Japan in the '70s, '80s and '90s, ESP-Disk' has returned to the fore under the direction, once again, of its founder. Mr. Stollman and All About Jazz New York writer Clifford Allen conversed on the history, the mission, and the future of the label last May. Here is the result of that conversation.

All About Jazz: I'd like to start out with a bit of your pre-ESP personal history. Were you born in New York?

Bernard Stollman: I was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey but when I was an infant my parents moved to Plattsburg, New York, on the Canadian border, and I grew up there. My father had been a child prodigy; he was an improvisational singer who toured Eastern Europe with another young boy and a cantor until his voice changed with adolescence and World War I erupted. When he had settled in America and had a family, he would sing everywhere an opportunity arose. He would drive from Plattsburg to Montreal during World War II with our mother, and we children were squeezed in the back seat, and he would sing as he drove to his captive audience, while our mother harmonized with him. I was the first of seven children, and my parents worked hard all their lives. We weren't poor, we weren't rich, but we were well off.

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