ESP-Disk is the best and most important free jazz label of
all time. While larger labels like Atlantic, Blue Note and Impulse! dabbled in
the fresh musical territory that was free jazz in the mid-sixties, ESP-Disk was
the first record company to really devote itself to this music.
Albert Ayler, Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Patty Waters, Milford
Graves, Paul Bley, Ornette Coleman, Henry Grimes, Frank Wright, Gato Barbieri,
and the New York Art Quartet all put out some of their defining material on the
label. Artists maintained complete artistic control of their ESP discs, making
it one of the best outlets for avant-garde musicians in spite of the label’s
spotty history of actually paying its artists.
Other great labels followed ESP-Disk’s example in the late
sixties and into the seventies. India Navigation, Flying Dutchman, Delmark, and
Black Saint cropped up in the states to handle the rapidly multiplying number
of free players in a musical environment that was openly hostile toward free
jazz. In Europe musicians started their own labels, including FMP and Incus, to
release their radical explorations of free improvisation’s outer edges.
