Strata-East and Black Jazz: the year musicians became the label

Do-it-yourself record making is usually dated wrong. It tends to get filed under English post punk: tiny labels, records pressed with your own money, distribution kept away from the majors.

Manchester’s Factory Records turned it into a credo, one that JazzTimes quotes precisely to point out how little of it was new: the musicians own all the music and we own nothing.

By 1971 that sentence already existed as a contract clause. In New York, trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell founded Strata-East, where artists kept ownership of everything they released.

Within the same few months, in Oakland, pianist Gene Russell opened Black Jazz. The press release announcing the label carried one line: jazz is Black and must be kept that way.

Eighty-five and fifteen

The figure that describes Strata-East better than any adjective is a split. Eighty-five per cent to the artist who produced the record, fifteen to the label for manufacturing and distribution.

There was one condition: bring a finished tape, ready to release. Anyone who had not already recorded had nothing to put into that catalogue.

Cowell called it a condominium concept. Each musician owned their own flat, and the shared address existed so the records could sit on the shelf next to Blue Note and Atlantic.

The idea did not start in New York. In Detroit, Kenny Cox and Charles Moore had founded Strata Corporation, with a concert space and a plan to make records, and they wanted the two of them to affiliate.

Tolliver preferred a separate company, Strata-East Records Incorporated. Connected, as Cowell puts it, but independent.

The hard part was the cardboard

Before starting, Tolliver read up on how a record actually gets released. He went to Max Roach, who had kept Debut Records going with Mingus from 1952 to 1957, and asked how they had handled the sleeves.

His account is counterintuitive. Mastering could be arranged and distributors could be found: the obstacle was paper, meaning the cardboard jackets. That, he says, turned out to be the whole ballgame.

At first they ordered five hundred copies at a time, because it was their own money. The boxes sat in Cowell’s doorway at Westbeth, and in a paper filing cabinet in Tolliver’s hallway.

The first outsider was saxophonist Clifford Jordan, who was already playing on that first record. He brought seven finished tapes, a batch he called his Dolphy Series.

Records by other people came out of that batch, Pharoah Sanders’ Izipho Zam and Cecil Payne’s Zodiac. His own, Glass Bead Games, arrived in 1974.

Oakland went the other way

Black Jazz resembles Strata-East in everything except the accounts. Here too a musician made the decisions, with a stated mission: to promote the talents of young African American jazz musicians and singers.

The logo is two Black hands clasped, in black and white, with nothing else on it. The Quietus points out that Oakland was the city where the Black Panthers had been founded.

Russell, though, did not put in his own money. He got Ovation Records of Chicago, a country label, to finance and distribute the albums, keeping the role of creative director for himself.

The man with the money came from the technical side rather than from jazz: Dick Schory had worked on quadraphonic sound and on RCA’s Dynagroove process before starting his own label.

The artist with the most records in the catalogue was keyboard player Doug Carn, born in Florida in 1948, with four albums. His wife, Jean Carn, sings on the first three.

Carn did something almost nobody else was doing: he wrote words for other people’s instrumentals, from Coltrane’s “Acknowledgement” to Lee Morgan’s “Search For The New Land”.

Listen while you read

The record that broke the mechanism

One day in 1974 Gil Scott-Heron walked into the office. He and Brian Jackson had just left Flying Dutchman in a dispute over publishing rights, and they had four thousand dollars.

That was enough to make a record, and the record was Winter in America. Frankie Crocker, who had a widely followed show in New York, started playing “The Bottle”.

From then on orders for ten thousand copies were landing at a label whose records, Plunky Branch reckons, often did not sell a thousand. Strata-East had to put out a single, something it had never even considered.

Tolliver says he turned down Clive Davis, who wanted the record for Arista because he had just signed Scott-Heron. His answer was: put Strata-East into your distribution, and then we can talk.

The success did not rescue the model, it put it under strain. Cowell describes producers who felt they were owed more as they watched somebody else’s record climb.

It was a grandiose plan, a laudable plan, a culturally sophisticated plan. I’m just not sure it was a viable plan.

Tolliver is blunter: impossible to administer, because that fifteen per cent did not cover the electricity, the rent and a part-time office worker.

Cowell had meanwhile stepped away for an offer from Galaxy, which let him earn something of his own. Around 1980 Tolliver too decided to stop spending brain time on it.

What is left

The model was copied while it was still standing. In 1975 Black Fire Records started in Washington, openly following the example, but with a fifty-fifty split.

Black Jazz went first: Russell died in 1981 and the catalogue drifted out of circulation. It came back as Japanese CDs on Snow Dog from 2012, then as a full run of vinyl on Real Gone in 2020 and 2021.

Strata-East still exists as a company, and now reissues its own catalogue together with Mack Avenue Music Group. An original pressing, meanwhile, has become a collector’s object.

Ten years of activity, fifty-odd records, a rented office at 20th Street and Fifth Avenue. What outlasted the label is the clause: the tape belongs to whoever played it.

Worth hearing

• Gene Russell, New Direction (1971): the first Black Jazz release is by the label’s own founder, in a trio with percussion.
• Doug Carn, Infant Eyes (1971): the first of Carn’s four albums for the label, with Jean Carn singing over other writers’ pieces.
• Clifford Jordan, Glass Bead Games (1974): the album under his own name by the saxophonist who brought Strata-East seven finished tapes.
• Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson, Winter in America (1974): the record that forced a five-hundred-copy label to press a single.