Despite all the trouble that dogged the label, there’s a reason ESP-Disk’ recordings still hold listeners spellbound 50 years later. It’s as simple as the motto that was on the back of every album: “the artists alone decide.” While that may seem to be a recipe for chaos, it often worked with Stollman’s shoestring operation, usually with just the one studio engineer, Richard Alderson, who got off one of the book’s better lines: “Sun Ra is Duke Ellington on acid”.