Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk’, the Most Outrageous Record Label in America

Amiri Baraka

228 Amiri Baraka Poet, playwright, essayist, music critic, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) was a proponent of the new music from its start, as a writer, polemicist, concert organizer, and even record producer (his short-lived Jihad label in the mid-’60s). He can be heard reading his poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” on the New York Art Quartet album produced by ESP, and poetry has often accompanied his passion for the music. In 1965, after the assassination of Malcolm X, he left behind the Lower East Side and moved to Harlem, launching the Black Arts Movement, which advocated the creation of black-owned publishing houses, journals, and arts institutions. Some years later, he returned to his native Newark, where he continues his work as a cultural and political activist. Was it true that you ran a series of concerts in your loft at 27 Cooper Square in 1964? They weren’t regular, but we started a series. Actually, I was writing for DownBeat at the time, and I started calling for concerts in nontraditional spaces, because the club owners were not ready for what had developed, the new music. So, we held concerts in the loft there. We all lived in the same building—Archie Shepp, myself, and Marzette Watts, who was the last person to come in. He had the actual loft space. It was the apartment under mine; he had a b ig space because he wanted to paint. So, the concerts started to be given there, but also at the same time in co ffee shops and other people’s lofts. There’s an essay in my book Black Music about that. There was a n art gallery called t he Nonagon, a coffee shop called the White Whale, a cluster of places in the neighborhood that had these concerts. How long did the concerts continue at the loft on Cooper Square? That continued even after I left. Marzette Watts was giving concerts there after I moved up to Harlem in 1965. Amiri Baraka 229 Were there any particular criteria regarding who performed in the loft? It played out based on the taste of the people who were setting up the concerts, and the people who were in need, because it was that combination. Th e people who weren’t actually in need of those kinds of concerts—that is, they could appear in the traditional clubs—were automatically not considered because they didn’t need it. There is a private recording of the New York Art Quartet playing at a Halloween party in 1964 at Marzette Watts’s loft. How much did all of you document these performances? I can’t tell you about that. I didn’t start really documenting stuff like that until the late ’60s in Harlem, and then in Newark. There might be documentation of those concerts then, but I’m not sure there are. One thing that I know I documented was in 1968, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, up in Harlem. At what point did you become aware of Bernard Stollman and the ESP label? I knew he was operating. I mean, word goes around. I knew what he was doing but, except for the New York Art Quartet, I wasn’t that clear on just who—I could see the albums popping out in that circle of young musicians that I could relate to as being close to that Lower East Side kind of thing, but that was it. Who brought you in on the New York Art Quartet date? Probably Archie. How much was your performance of “Black Dada Nihilismus” planned, or did you just go in and hit it? Well, Archie and I were closest of those folks, and it was a question of just “do something.” We probably discussed it a little bit, but it wasn’t any grand plan. It was simply, look at this poem; this is what I want to do. 230 esp-disk’ as lived and witnessed Did you have any overall perception of ESP as a label in those first years? I knew it was the label that was trying to capture the people who were the most advanced in the kind of music not already caught by the major labels. It seemed to me ESP was trying to record a trend in the music, what was happening not necessarily in the clubs, but in the actuality of the music...