Bernard Stollman
Bernard Stollman (July 19, 1929 – April 19, 2015) was an American lawyer and the founder of the ESP-Disk record label. Biography He 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