Aural Robert

The why behind most artist-owned labels tends to be a thicket of motivations. They have more adventurous tastes. They are more artist friendly. They are anxious to be the ones in charge of the money for a change. For jazz trumpeter Charles Tolliver, co-founder of the record label Strata-East, the motivation was a combination of all these factors and more.

During a break in the hectic schedule that preceded the April 2025 release of 32 reissues from the famed Strata-East catalog—including the work of Charlie Rouse, Pharoah Sanders, and Cecil McBee—I caught up with Tolliver and his son Ched, who's now in charge of the label's rebirth. The elder Tolliver, now 83, smiles patiently when I ask why he got into the record business. "We wanted to release [session-]leader records, and we thought the only way to do it at the time was to quickly learn the record industry and do it as professionally as possible."

Tolliver's partner in Strata-East, which came into being in 1971, was pianist Stanley Cowell. The pair bonded when they played with drummer Max Roach in the period when Roach recorded his 1968 album Members, Don't Git Weary for Atlantic Records. Tolliver and Cowell's humble label, which favored avant-garde and post-bop jazz, went on to become one of the most successful artist-owned labels in music history, eventually recording the work of friend and saxophonist Clifford Jordan as well as the label's best-known title, Winter in America, by poet/singer Gil Scott-Heron. Solo records by Cowell and Tolliver were also part of the Strata-East mix, along with albums from their musical collaboration Music Inc.

Strata-East's recording catalog is now being reissued on 180gm vinyl, CD, and for the first time digitally via a licensing deal with Mack Avenue Records.

It's commonly thought that Strata-East went out of business in the 1980s, but it never really went away, Tolliver explained. "If I needed to lease some of the product, I could, so I did that through 1989. Then, when the digital format really started to take hold, I was still leasing out [Strata-East albums], mainly in Japan and Europe. That at least kept the audiophiles knowing that the label was still perking. In the late 2010s, I did a six-month trial with [German vinyl-reissue label] Pure Pleasure. That caused a few heads to perk up industry-wise, so there was interest to see about a label deal. My son Ched decided he'd tackle that, and in consultation with [Blue Note producer and Mosaic Records co-founder] Michael Cuscuna before he passed away, we fashioned a way that we could do that. ... So, here we are."

Tolliver compares the Strata-East way of doing business to the purchase of a condominium. The artists owned a unit in the building, but the management was Strata-East. "We never had artists under contract. We had their product under contract," Charles asserts proudly. "It was all based on the old wholesale model. The artist received payment when the records were sold and cleared the initial manufacturing costs. It was a simple accounting, not complicated by the accounting tools used by the major labels."

The Strata-East tape library, which according to Tolliver contains unreleased sessions that may someday see the light of day, has survived over the years in various storage facilities in the New York metro area. Those sources were used for the new reissues, mastered by Kevin Gray. The vinyl was pressed at RTI.

Ched Tolliver is audibly confident about the label's latest offerings. "There's never been a Strata-East vinyl release series that's been straight from the tapes, aside from the original releases over 50 years ago. This is gonna be the first time our fans, the connoisseurs, the audiophiles are going to be hearing it this way, I might even say better than the originals."

That judgment elicited a quick objection from his father, plus hints as to why a successful musician like Tolliver would get into the record business in the first place. "I meticulously dealt with sound along with Orville O'Brien, a young engineer I met via Clifford Jordan," Charles remembered. "He mastered live recordings and had built his own mastering board from scratch. He was brilliant. Ron Carran was an equally capable engineer, employed by Stanley to do studio recordings and master some of our later albums. I also dealt meticulously with the metallurgy with the creation of the plates. So the sound coming off the originalsthe new releases have matched that, let me put it that way.

"I knew that [the Strata-East original pressings] sounded as good as anything from CBS, Capitol Records, you name it," Charles concluded. "I had an interest because I had decided this was gonna be part of my music vocationnot only playing it on the bandstand but also offering it for sale, so I had better know. We pressed at an old mom-and-pop place out in Plainfield, New Jersey, called Peerless Plastics. Of course, I would go there quite often to watch the mechanical pressing of the records. I thought that was oh so interesting."