To understand why black musicians founded their own labels, you have to read why they were forced to. A. B. Spellman's book, first published in 1966 and reissued by the University of Michigan Press as Four Jazz Lives, explains it better than anything else.
Spellman — poet, critic, a founder of the Black Arts Movement — builds the book on four long portraits: Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols, Jackie McLean. These are not celebratory biographies but case studies, drawn largely from interviews, in which the musicians describe for themselves the precarious, demeaning conditions of what Spellman calls "the bebop business": the meagre fees, the exploitation by club owners, the industry's indifference to the most ambitious black music.
It is the prequel to the independent-label story. The conditions Spellman documents are precisely the ones Strata-East, Tribe and Black Jazz answered a decade later, with a simple, revolutionary idea: that musicians should own their own music. Without the picture Spellman paints, the founding of those labels looks like an aesthetic choice; with it, you see it was a matter of survival.
The portrait of Herbie Nichols — a composer of huge gifts ignored by the industry, reduced to sideman work in conservative bands, dead at forty-four — is among the hardest pages ever written on the human cost of this music.
Spellman wrote not about the glory of jazz but about its price. That is why, sixty years on, the book still matters.