ESP-Disk'
US record label
ESP-Disk' is a New York–based record company and label founded in 1963 by lawyer Bernard Stollman.
History
Though it originally existed to release Esperanto-based music, beginning with its second release (Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity), ESP became the most important exponent of what is commonly referred to as free jazz. Early releases included albums by Paul Bley, Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra. ESP also released recordings by uncommercial underground rock acts including the Fugs, The Godz and Pearls Before Swine. The label's motto is "The artists alone decide what you will hear."
Bernard Stollman faced allegations of not paying royalties to the artists that were signed to ESP-Disk'. Tom Rapp of the band Pearls Before Swine claimed that: "We never got any money from ESP. Never, not even like a hundred dollars or something. My real sense is that he [Stollman] was abducted by aliens, and when he was probed it erased his memory of where all the money was". Peter Stampfel of the band Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs claimed that Stollman told him that "the contract says that all rights belong to me. You have no royalties ever, ever, ever. The publishing is mine.
“ESP-Disk'” enters the record as uS record label. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what ESP-Disk' and label can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1275949. The first chronological checks are 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “ESP-Disk'” 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.