Reviewed By Nils Jacobson

Eremite Records head Michael Ehlers often finds himself trapped. While Eremite releases some of the most poignant statements in jazz, the listening public tends to respond with indifference. Like many of the artists on his label, Ehlers has the curse of vision: knowing the high road but walking it alone.

Webster defines an eremite as a religious recluse. A fatter dictionary will give you further meanings, but Ehlers didn’t first stumble across the word reading Paradise Lost . He ran into it reading the liner notes to Thelonious Monk’s last session. Explains Ehlers: “The version of ‘Reflections’ on that record was retitled ‘Portrait of an Eremite.’ He made that record and then he was silent for fifteen years and died.”

The word eremite embodies the fundamental concept behind Ehlers’ label. Related essential ideas include obscurity, zeal, and self-determination. “I’m dealing with that sort of aesthetic,” he explains. “I’m dealing with musicians who have been marginalized to the point where they have to practice their prayer in isolation.”

Because the audience for free jazz is so tiny, the key players in the music have been long neglected by the listening public. Ehlers’ mission: to bring the microphone in to document the past, present, and future icons of free improvisation. Eremite Records spotlights “those people who have committed 25 or 30 years to developing their personal concept in an art form that is totally ignored commercially. We’re talking about people who lived their whole lives in obscurity!”

Take Raphe Malik, for example. The 50-year-old free jazz trumpeter shared the stage for several years with Cecil Taylor and Jimmy Lyons. But somehow he never started to receive recognition as a leader until he made his first record at age 44. Two of his four records since then have been released on Eremite. Ehlers speaks glowingly about the personal meaning behind Malik’s music: “These are the frequencies that he heard when he came into the world. This is his essence we’re talking about. It’s an affirmation of who he is in the world, in a way. What choice does he have? But you know, we’ve got to recognize that that is a heavy personal price to pay, and a lot of people have walked away from it.”

Indeed, some of the key players in this music stuck it out and lost everything. Ehlers explains, “I used to tell [the late] Glenn Spearman, ‘Look at your contribution to this world. You made it, man! You’re already in the history books -- you’ve achieved a certain kind of immortality.’ And he ultimately sort of paid with his life for this. I don’t know, it never seemed to console him much.” The upcoming Eremite release Last Date documents a fiery ‘98 Spearman trio performance.

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Now 29 years old, Ehlers has been making records since he released Jemeel Moondoc’s Tri-P-Let in November 1996. The Eremite Records project grew out of a couple of Ehlers’ other interests: a serious commitment to record collecting and a special fondness for live performance.

As a teenager growing up in the midwest, his long-term interest in music developed along with the explosion of underground rock. “Free jazz, or improvised music, wasn’t the first music that I was really passionate about,” explains Ehlers. “When I really got serious about music, I was hearing bands like the Minutemen and Mission of Burma. There was a lot of good post-hardcore stuff in the midwest at that time.”

While he was working on his undergraduate degree, Ehlers received a box of records that changed his life. “[ Forced Exposure writer] Byron Coley told me, ‘Your problem is you listen to too much vocal music!’ So he loaned me this heavy box of records: Coltrane’s Kulu Se Mama , Ornette on Tenor , Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure , a couple of Ayler records ... a Roland Kirk album, and a great Joe McPhee record... It was a bomb! It opened a door into a whole ‘nother world.”

That new world, now resident in Ehlers’ home, is piled high with documents of the jazz tradition. “Yeah, I’m a heavy record collector,” he admits. “I think that’s a good way actually to get involved in record production. I came to this music as a lover... and I also was sort of familiar with the history of the documentation of the music, as something separate from the music.”

One might expect based on his label’s output that Ehlers’ personal collection might focus exclusively on free improvisation. But the situation is quite the opposite. “I’ve got a lot of Coltrane, Miles, Ornette, and Steve Lacy records,” he explains. “This is not something that’s determined by my particular interests so much as it is by how well these guys were recorded in their time. You gotta believe me, if Sonny Simmons made fifty fucking records, I would have them all!”

After college, Ehlers moved around for a while and finally settled in Northampton, Massachusetts. He found he was taking a lot of trips to New York to see music, which prompted him to wonder if it might be a good idea to bring some of the big city acts to the local area. So he started a concert series and ended up presenting free jazz performances to the community.

Contrary to what you might imagine, Ehlers did not undergo any sort of special training to learn how to present concerts. “It’s not really that big of a leap, trust me,” Ehlers states matter-of-factly. “It’s just something that you start doing, and you either figure out how to do it well enough to keep doing it, or it’s a fucking disaster.” To his credit, he’s still going strong. The fourth annual Fire in the Valley festival takes place this fall in Amherst, featuring many of the free jazz players who also appeared at New York’s hugely successful Vision Festival in late May.

In the beginning, times were rough. “The first few concerts we had, we would have to beat the goddamn bushes to get 20 or 30 people out,” Ehlers laments. “But at this point, while we still have concerts at that size, I would say the audience for it has developed four or five hundred percent of what it originally was. It’s not unusual for us to have crowds of 80 to 120 people.”

At the same time he was cooking up the first Fire in the Valley concert series, Ehlers was already hatching plans for a record label. “There’d been talk about doing a label,” Ehlers recalls. “It seemed like a way to create an event, as well as to create some master tapes for the label. And I would say that I have a preference, much of the time, for live music.”

“The idea was not to just do this one or two times, but to really be here in ten or fifteen years.” Ehlers notes. “You had to have an approach that would sort of carry you through. I’m not sure this is it, but you just sort of keep reinventing it as you go along, and just get as much out of a concert as you can.” His utilitarian survivalist concept roots itself in a grounded sense of reality.

Despite guarded optimism at the heightened attention free jazz has been receiving of late, the business end of Eremite Records remains extremely frustrating. “The music industry is so terminally loused up at this point. It’s like the death of small business in America. It’s happened on all sorts of levels. In the ‘50s and the ‘60s, there were a lot more labels that were able to support themselves doing this music... Now we’re in a situation where a label like mine, or the many hundreds of other small labels, are really shut out of the action. We’re really dealing with almost antitrust shit at the level of distribution and at the retail level.”

So what’s the score in 1999? “I am not breaking even,” Ehlers points out. “No way! But I didn’t expect to be breaking even by this point. Look, in many ways it’s a leap of faith to continue doing it, because the conventional wisdom on recording jazz is that the stuff has a longer shelf life.”

Something about his position as the underdog gives Ehlers strength. It’s an attitude shared by Raphe Malik, or any number of other players from the Eremite roster. When you’re down, you don’t have to give up. Ehlers draws his inspiration from jazz artists and the free jazz tradition itself: “One thing that’s interesting for me about this music is it has been there whether the audience has been there or not.”

“I’m interested in stubborn people,” Ehlers declares. “I’m interested in that kind of commitment.”

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Eremite Records can be found on the web at http://www.eremite.com