Nessa Records

Before there was sound...

Art Ensemble of Chicago - People in Sorrow (Full Album) - YouTube

But if you would tell me who I am, at least take the trouble

to discover what I have been.

- Ralph Ellison

The other day, I was reading an old Op magazine - the January to February 1984 “U” issue. Out of Olympia, Washington, Op was founded by John Foster and the Lost Music Network and ended after only twenty-six issues, labeled A-Z, with music-related topics all beginning with that issue's letter. The “U” issue has articles ranging from, for example, Udder Sounds, a Wisconsin cassette label; United States of America, the forgotten 1960s experimental rock band; and Ukuleles. The “S” issue featured Sun Ra on the cover, naturally:

After issue “Z,” Foster held a conference offering the magazine's resources to parties interested in carrying it on. Then he rode off into the sunset. Brilliant.

Op is particularly interesting to me because it came about after the growth of the fat and sleek rock magazines of the post-1970s. Op bucked the system by not writing about popular music. They were dedicated to independent music. I’m not sure anyone alive today cares about Op magazine, but I’ve kept all my old copies. I love them. This is pre-internet history at its finest, and the dedication of the folks at Op is legendary.

According to Op’s editorial page, the “Lost Music Network is a national non-profit clearinghouse for information and ideas about music.” It goes on to add, “Any manuscripts/pictures must be accompanied by return postage if you ever wish to see it again. Even if return postage is included, it may be a mistake to send your only copy of a valuable picture or piece of writing.” Classic.

That reminded me of the tape made in the basement of Lester Bowie and Fontella Bass’s home at 1739 East 74th Street in the South Side of Chicago in 1967. According to Terry Martin’s notes in Nessa Records’ 2012 Art Ensemble Early Combinations:

At the beginning of September, a group that could be termed the Roscoe Mitchell/Joseph Jarman Double Trio gathered to prepare an audition tape [A to Erika] for a Polish jazz festival that had invited submissions from around the world. The tape recorded at the time and sent to Poland was unsuccessful in its purpose and has not been heard of since.

Remember, this was Poland in 1967 - when it was still a part of the Eastern Block, which makes me wonder if it ever got there. Anyway, such was the way of the world back then, and not even the infamous self-addressed stamped envelope could be trusted….

This week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll step back and take a look at the origins of Chuck Nessa’s Nessa Records, one of America’s most important record labels.

However, the story of Nessa Records doesn’t start with the first album, n-1 Numbers 1 & 2, released in 1967; it starts with n-5 Old/Quartet, released eight years later. Well, it really starts before that with those South Side double trio basement tapes. So, let’s start at the beginning.

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When Chuck Nessa was a student at the University of Iowa, he went on a trip to Chicago and met Bob Koester, who ran Delmark Records and the Jazz Record Mart. Koester offered him a job running the store. Nessa agreed if he let him make some records. With the understanding that he could sign three musicians for one record a year, he was hired. So, in April 1966, he moved from Iowa City to Chicago and started looking for musicians to record. As it turned out, Jazz Record Mart regulars John Litweiler and Jerry (Jamil) Figi alerted him to AACM events.

In a 1992 interview with CODA magazine, Nessa recalls those early days searching for musicians to record:

Pete Welding wrote a concert review on the AACM in Down Beat’s Caught in the Act section. It was on a Muhal concert with Roscoe [Mitchell]. It sounded really interesting to me. So when I got to Chicago with my new job, I wanted to check out who these guys were. I spent my first months checking out the club scene which was people like Eddie Harris, and young John Klemmer, and latter day bebop bands. Through people I met at the store I asked where I could find these AACM guys. The first concert I went to was a Roscoe Mitchell Sextet… Immediately after the concert I ran backstage, introduced myself, and asked them if they wanted to make a record. So Roscoe came downtown with me the next day and we chatted with Bob briefly and agreed to terms and then did it.

The album Nessa produced for Delmark was Roscoe Mitchell Sextet's revolutionary Sound. Nessa followed up Sound with Joseph Jarman’s landmark Song For. However, before the Abrams’ session, Nessa quit his job at the Jazz Record Mart and cut ties with Koester. Although Nessa set up Richard Abrams’ Levels and Degrees of Light recording session and attended as Muhal’s guest, he was no longer a part of Delmark Records. Shortly after the Abrams date, Mitchell came to Nessa and said it was time to make another record. After Nessa told him he wasn’t doing that anymore, Mitchell and Bowie told him to do it himself. Nessa recalled: “My grandfather had left me some bank shares from some stocks, so I called home. My parents sent me the money (around eighteen hundred dollars). I booked a studio, and we went in and did what came out as Lester Bowie Numbers 1 & 2.”

In August 1967, at Sound Studios in Chicago, Nessa recorded Roscoe Mitchell and his quartet. In the 1993 interview, he recalls this seminal session:

We went in planning on doing half a record. We knew we were going to do two long pieces. And the plan was to do one one day and the other a week later. We went in the studio and the very first take of the tune that was prepared was perfect. So we had been in the studio a half an hour and we were done and I had the studio booked for four hours. So I suggested that we do something else. And they said that they didn’t have anything prepared. So Roscoe said, “Let’s deal some long tones.” So they started holding this note and varying it and worked it into a piece of music. We wound up using that piece for the record. Then when we came back a week later Roscoe added Joseph Jarman. We redid the first tune that we had done in a quartet format which changed its character quite a bit. And Nessa Records grew from these semi-accidental circumstances.

Nessa told me the reason the album was under Lester Bowie’s name was because Mitchell was under contract with Delmark, so they decided to put Lester’s name on the record. Interestingly, he also told me, “When we went in the studio, I had plans to sell the master to Delmark as Roscoe’s next release, but Bob [Koester] freaked out, so I issued it.”

It was this pivotal recording that became the basis for starting his own record company and marked the start of one of the world’s great Jazz labels and true treasures of American art: Nessa Records, which is still operating today out of Buffalo, New York.

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Although Numbers 1 & 2 is the first Nessa Records release chronologically, it is not the release with the earliest recording dates. I find the earlier dates of particular importance, not just musically but historically, because they are the first recordings by some of the most significant jazz musicians of the second half of the 20th Century.

The earliest recording date, released in 2011 on Nessa Records as Ncd-34, is the Roscoe Mitchell quartet’s Before There Was Sound. These recordings, made in the Summer of 1965 at the WUCB, the University of Chicago campus-only radio station, are, I think, the earliest AACM recordings after their first May 1965 meeting. In the CD liner notes, Nessa states, “We finally completed the project and it only took 46 years. The group recorded the music in 1965. Roscoe told me of the tapes in 1966 and I have had dubs since the 70s. After years of talking about issuing it, here it is.”

According to Terry Martin in the CD liner notes, this configuration of AACM musicians was brought together by drummer Alvin Fielder and taped by Pete Bishop, a trumpeter with Jarman and a friend of Mitchell. The quartet featured Mitchell, Fred Berry on trumpet, Malachi Favors on bass, and Fielder on drums.

This is transitional music and not yet fully out of the post-bebop tradition, sounding at times like Ornette Coleman’s music. About this group and their transition, Fielder recalled in George Lewis’ A Power Stronger Than Itself, “…there comes a point where you go from a notion of swinging and keeping a pulse to a notion of time being something different…. Sun Ra had always told me, ‘Al, loosen up,’ I didn’t know what he meant, really.” The first time Fielder played in a so-called free group was with Mitchell, and he recalled, “None of the bebop cats would call me anymore, once I started working with Muhal and Roscoe.”

After the Before There Was Sound tapes, in 1966, as part of his deal with Delmark Records, Nessa recorded Sound and Song For. During that time, Nessa met Terry Martin, originally from Australia, who had recently arrived in Chicago from England. Nessa was impressed by his keen musical sense, and they formed a friendship. Martin began taping rehearsals in Pete Bishop’s basement at 5461 S. University Avenue on the South Side in May 1967. These recordings of Mitchell, Lester Bowie on trumpet, Malachi Favors, and Phillip Wilson on drums build on new ideas and ways of thinking about structure in improvisation that started with Mitchell’s Sound the year before.

Nessa told me, “Terry Martin arrived in Chicago a couple of months after me and showed up at the Jazz Record Mart anxious to find out about the AACM. This was one week before the first ‘Sound’ session, so I invited him to attend. Terry was to become my ‘best friend,’ and he shared his recordings with me at the time.”

These '“basement tapes” would later be released as n-5 Old/Quartet in 1975:

They were also released in 2011 as the 2-CD set Roscoe Mitchell—Old/Quartet Sessions Ncd-27/28:

Nessa shared with me that it was his desire to record this particular quartet that led to the formation of his label, “Roscoe and Lester said it was time to record. I agreed and, finding no other avenue, began a search for the money to make it happen. Unfortunately, by the time I was ready, Phillip had gone on the road with the Paul Butterfield band. We decided a new drummer would disrupt the intuitive creativity the group had developed. As a result, our first session was a drummer-less trio of Mitchell, Bowie, and Favors, with a second session adding Joseph Jarman.”

This brings our journey full circle to August 1967 sessions at Sound Studios that became n-1 Numbers 1 & 2, released first in 1967 and re-released in 2009 as Lester Bowie—All The Numbers Ncd-31/32:

This is the lineup that would become the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I think the departure of Wilson was a key moment and serendipitous for two reasons. First, it forced the musicians to create a balance between sound and silence. Second, it forced the musicians to bring their own ideas for percussion instruments.

In September and November 1967, the Mitchell/Jarman Double Trios recorded the Art Ensemble Early Combinations sessions, and then the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble recorded Congliptious, a collection of three solos and an ensemble with Robert Crowder on drums, released in 1968 as n-2.

By coincidence, in the fall of 1968, both Nessa and Martin left Chicago. A few months later, Mitchell, Bowie, Jarman, and Favors left for Europe, where they became the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The next two releases by Nessa Records were of Art Ensemble of Chicago sessions recorded in Paris: People In Sorrow (1969) and Bande Sonore Originale Du Film "Les Stances À Sophie" (1970). And the Art Ensemble of Chicago never looked back. You can read more about them here:

Art Ensemble in Exile

One of the things I like most about Nessa Records is that it documents the music of Chicago, not New York, not the West Coast, Chicago. With New York City’s absolute monopoly on jazz musicians during the last half of last century, it took the leadership of Chuck Nessa to identify something new and the courage of his conviction to record it. In an interview with Mike Johnston, Nessa recalls, “It wasn’t part of the mainstream. All the new cats went to New York. But they were all following each other. Chicago, being that much removed, had time to step back and reflect on the scene and not worry about coming against someone and trying to outblow Albert Ayler tomorrow night in a loft. But they could think, ‘What are our possibilities?’ The isolation presented the opportunity.”

Here’s one more for the road. In 2003, Pi Recordings released The Meeting, an Art Ensemble of Chicago reunion studio album:

It’s a bitter-sweet affair, with the absence of Lester Bowie and one of Malachi Favors’ last recordings. Pi Recordings’ website says it best, “The Meeting is a new place for the Art Ensemble. Slowed by the death of a founder and friend, the remaining members have come together to record one of their most personal albums ever, and as Roscoe frequently says, ‘The music is at such a high place now, people should hear it. People are writing at a higher level than they ever have before.’”

Here is the Joseph Jarman song Hail We Now Sing Joy from The Meeting:

This is an all-time classic, with the alto unison playing and then the double alto solos. I hear Jackie McLean in both solos, particularly Mitchell’s first solo. Kind of a classic throwback tune.

I’ve always been a big fan of independent-minded magazines like Op and record producers like Chuck Nessa and Pi Recordings’ Seth Rosner and Yulun Wang. Without their keen vision and perseverance, we would have no record of valuable music history outside the pop culture big money machine.

I often think that without Chuck Nessa, would we ever have had the opportunity to hear and experience the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and all the other AACM musicians from the South Side of Chicago. Well, thanks to Chuck Nessa, we never had to worry about that one. In the end, we must respect Jazz and the historians who document it for us all - that’s what this journey is all about.

Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of Chicago Bluesman Paul Butterfield.

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Until then, keep on walking….