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7. About Some Records
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57 7 About Some Records So many records in the ESP catalog are distinct and unusual. Bernard Stollman was asked to elaborate on the people and circumstances behind some of them. Jean Erdman, The Coach with the Six Insides Jean Erdman, who is ninety-two and retired in Hawaii, was a very creative choreographer w ho had p roduced a t heatrical p erformance p iece bas ed o n Finnegans Wake. Her husband, Joseph Campbell, was a famous scholar and an authority on James Joyce. She had brought together a number of talented performers , and the music was co mposed by Teiji Ito, who was ma rried to the documentary filmmaker Maya Deren. His brother was also a musician. Somewhere along the line, I met one of them and became aware of Jean Erdman and her work. Recently, I found a black-and-white video of the production. Jean Erdman herself danced in it. ESP will reissue the album with the DVD, which enhances the experience immeasurably. William Burroughs, Call Me Burroughs My youngest brother, Steve, knew Gaït Frogé, who had the English Bookshop in Paris, a cultural landmark. She had acquired the rights to do the record, from Burroughs. She wasn’t able to do anything with it—she was basically a bookstore owner. We just got the record from her—complete with the graphics, the whole thing. [This was B urroughs’s first record. It was r ecorded in t he bookshop ’s basement by Ian Sommerville and released in P aris in t he summer o f 1965. ESP released the U.S. edition in late 1966.] 58 what got into his head Movement Soul [Th e first volume, subtitled Live Recordings of Songs and Sayings from the Freedom Movement in the Deep South, 1963–1 964, was released on LP in 1 966; Movement Soul: Two was first released on CD in 200 7.] Movement Soul: One dealt with the plight of being black in Amer ica in t he ’60s, as distin guished from Movement Soul: Two, a much longer historical reference work. Movement Soul: One was just a brief documentary recorded by Alan Ribback [later known as Moses Moon], who was in his t hirties. He had come back from Montgomery, where he had tra veled with a portable tape deck. He had been at a church in Selma—a white, wooden-framed church—when it was surrounded by Klansmen who were screaming and threatening to burn it down. Th e parishioners inside, unprotected, were terrified. He had captured their voices trying to reassure each other; he was with them inside the church. It’s hair-raising, because you pick up the voices, in panic and fear, and singing gospel. You sense what they are going through. The threat abated, but that moment was emblematic of the black experience of that time. A documentary on Martin Luther King used a portion of it on the soundtrack. Th e CD Movement Soul: Two, which is not a reissue, is an anthology of different African American voices that span the century [including Mary McLeod Bethune, Ralph Ellison, Babs Gonzales, Thurgood Marshall, Bob Moses, and Fannie Lou Hamer]. It’s a far more expansive collection. Michael D. Anderson assembled i t f rom his o wn s ources. I t’s fa irly r ecent, since w e r elaunched the label. Mike wanted to do it, and I thought it was a very interesting idea, so we put it out. We haven’t marketed it wisely, but I think we still may be able to do so. Steve Lacy, The Forest and the Zoo Steve Lacy visited our 156 Fifth Avenue oἀ ce in 1966. He had j ust returned from Argentina. I had heard him in the Village years earlier, when his focus was on the work of Thelonious Monk. He said, “Bernard, I need money. I’ll sell you a master.” It was of a concert in Buenos Aires. I bought it for ESP without having heard i t. It f eatured a f ront co ver pa inting b y his f riend B ob Th o mpson. I learned only in 1991, when the tape was to be duplicated for the ZYX licensing agreement, that it was out of phase. The Sony engineer who spotted and corrected the problem, Ken Robertson, was a direct descendant of Karl Marx. [3.236.219.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:43 GMT...