Curated by North Star Sounds co-host Jon Greenbaum
Previous Articles:
Ethan Iverson
Black Artist Group (BAG)
International Anthem
MLK’s Essay on Jazz
There’s quite a bit of buzz about the upcoming reissue of more than half the Strata-East catalog on the Mack Avenue label in late April. More than 30 Strata-East albums will be digitally released and four albums will be reissued on vinyl and CD:
- Charles Tolliver and Music Inc’s Live at Slugs’ Vol. I & II
- Stanley Cowell’s Musa: Ancestral Streams
- Pharoah Sanders’ Izipho Zam
- Charlie Rouse’s Two is One.
All four of these albums were originally released in the early 1970’s and have sparked renewed interest in the Strata-East story.
Arthur Taylor’s Notes and Tones, Musician-to-Musician Interviews captures Black jazz musicians’ deep frustration with the white-controlled labels and venues as well as white jazz critics during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Taylor recorded trumpeter Charles Tolliver’s sentiments on the subject in 1970, just a year before he launched the Strata-East label with pianist Stanley Cowell:
Charles Tolliver: …our music has been clouded so much, dirtied, washed out and dried by the people who are in control of it. Until we gain control over our music, it’s always going to be like that.
Art Taylor: Do people in other fields of music own these things?
Charles Tolliver: They certainly do. Take Herb Alpert, for instance. He took a form of our music, put it together, promoted it, directed it and made millions off it, formed a record company, publishing company and anything else you want to name.
Tolliver’s emphasis on self-determination and self-reliance was not a new notion, specific to the late 1960s/early 70s. In fact, Tolliver met his future label collaborator, Stanley Cowell a couple of years earlier during recording sessions for Max Roach’s Members Don’t Git Weary. Roach and Charles Mingus had launched their own Debut Records in the early 1950’s, and Cowell and Tolliver filed away their example.
Tolliver and Cowell’s first album, Music Inc, was a big band album that they produced on their own. But they couldn’t get record companies to put the record out. Tolliver recalls the record company executives explaining that there was only room for one big band (Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra) in the marketplace. However, Tolliver and Cowell were confident enough in their own recording to put the record out on their own. And their confidence was not misplaced – the album would be one of the label’s best sellers, with steady sales up to the present.
Strata-East’s origin story begins in Detroit:
Stanley Cowell – Around 1970 or so, they came to me. They had founded Strata Corporation in Detroit, and they had a concert space, and they were going to produce records. They were all part of this spreading entrepreneurial movement: Musicians should have self-determination in terms of what they put out, not always be beholden to some other people who don’t look like us and probably are ripping us off.
Charles Tolliver: … they wanted to put on concerts, that was their thing. They were trying to sell stock to family and friends to raise funds to do that. And when we got back to New York, I said to Stanley, I’m not interested in selling stock to friends. But I incorporated the name Strata-East. – Jazz Times, July 2024
After Music Inc came out they were approached by Clifford Jordan, who had produced a handful of albums on his own (Pharaoh Sanders’ Izipho Zam, Cecil Payne’s Zodiac, Charles Brackeen’s Rhythm X, and Jordan’s own In The World) and was looking to get the records pressed and distributed. Jordan would later bring to the label Wilbur Ware’s Super Bass, Shades of Edward Blackwell, as well as his own Glass Bead Games. With these albums, and Tolliver and Cowell’s own releases, the label had achieved the critical mass that would draw dozens of other musicians looking for an outlet for their own recordings.
Strata-East was never a traditional record label. It was a conduit for musicians to get their recordings to market in the leanest DIY way possible. Their approach turned the traditional corporate music arrangement on its head – musicians kept the masters and publishing rights, and kept about 85% of the sales. The musicians were their own promoters. Strata-East kept only 15% for manufacturing and distribution. It is important to keep in mind that during this time jazz artists were typically getting about 5-20% of record sales and, in most cases, never saw a dime after their initial advance.
The boxes of records were initially stored in Tolliver’s rent-controlled apartment in the Village. Cowell’s apartment hallway was lined with cardboard file boxes that were filled with contracts. Within a couple of years, however, they were able to reclaim their apartments after clearing enough profit to rent a small cheap office. That’s where they conducted business and stored the growing number of albums. Part of the distribution process consisted of musicians coming by the office to grab an armload of albums to sell on the road.
The process of taking musicians’ self-produced analog tape masters to vinyl records in stores included many steps that Cowell and Tolliver had to figure out. As Tolliver told Giles Peterson in a podcast, the master is cut into a lacquer off of an analog tape, which then goes to a metallurgy plant to get dipped, which creates the metal plate which then goes to the presser. Each of these steps was a separate contract that Strata-East had to negotiate. Then there’s the artists and printers for the album covers, not to mention the “paper guys” who supply the sleeves and the company that assembles everything. As Tolliver says, “this is left brain right brain stuff. Most of my colleagues would never consider something like that.”
Although musicians were mostly responsible for their own sales, Strata-East was also able to do some distribution. Tolliver was able to get his hands on a list of mom-and-pop one-stop record stores that the distributors and large record companies used. Having the individual artists’ albums united under the Strata-East corporate brand helped them find space in the record store bins.
And then Gil Scott Heron knocked on their office door.
With the release of Heron’s massively popular Winter in America, the label was now in more record stores and Tolliver was able to require that the stores take other albums in the catalog.
It is important to keep in mind that even after Strata-East became more successful, it was never more than Cowell and Tolliver, working as full time musicians, touring on the road, dragging their file boxes around and conducting business out of hotel rooms.
By the late 70’s, Tolliver was feeling the label start to intrude on his life as a trumpet player and band leader. New production was halted. The label, however, never folded. Tolliver continued contracting with Japanese and European labels for reissues and in 1989 reissued half the catalog on CD.
The Mack Avenue reissues are a welcome and eagerly-anticipated development. Original Strata-East pressings sell on the internet for hundreds of dollars and foreign reissues can also command a day’s wages or two. More importantly, the legacy of the label lives on in the current marketplace as jazz musicians follow the Strata-East example, circumventing corporate consolidation in the music business with their own DIY enterprises.