Bernard Stollman
American music executive (1929-2015)
Bernard Stollman (July 19, 1929 – April 19, 2015) was an American lawyer who was the founder of the ESP-Disk' record label.
Biography
Stollman was born to a Jewish family in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and grew up in Plattsburgh, upstate New York, where his parents owned a chain of women's wear stores. When he was 16, his family moved to Forest Hills, Queens, and he later attended Columbia University and Columbia Law School. In 1960, he started work as an unpaid intern for a law firm working on the estates of Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday. Over the next few years he developed a love of jazz music, did some legal work for Moe Asch at Folkways Records, and began advising jazz and rhythm and blues musicians on copyrights and contracts.
He also learned Esperanto, and made a recording of poetry and songs, Ni Kantu en Esperanto, to promote the language, releasing it on his own label which he called ESP-Disk'. After receiving funding from his parents, he decided to establish the record label as a serious venture, to promote non-commercial and experimental music which would not otherwise be heard. In 1963, he approached free jazz pioneer Albert Ayler in a Harlem club, and offered to record an album with him. The album, Spiritual Unity, became ESP's second release. Thereafter, he recorded such jazz musicians as Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman, Paul Bley and Gato Barbieri.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bernard Stollman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.