Ed Askew

Even by the notoriously cryptic benchmarks of ESP-Disk Records, outsider folksinger Ed Askew remains a virtual unknown. Although he has been committing songs to tape since the late 1960s, the only commercially issued collection is the 1969 solo album Ask the Unicorn, on which he plays the ten-stringed lute-like acoustic instrument called the tiple. Askew first encountered this Latin instrument as a teenager after his father, a ukulele player, brought one home; it soon became his instrument of choice. While enrolled as an art student at Yale in the mid-1960s, he began appearing at local poetry readings and gradually added the tiple to his performances. Because the instrument demands that three tightly wound strings be depressed simultaneously with considerable force, Askew’s early recordings display a distinctive, somewhat constricted vocal timbre born of the physical challenge of singing while playing it. Following his graduation from Yale and his relocation to a teaching post in New York, he mailed a demo to Bernard Stollman, founder of the ultra-noncommercial and widely revered independent label ESP-Disk; impressed by the singular yet appealing character of the music, Stollman promptly offered him a recording session. Ask the Unicorn stands among the label’s most eccentric and captivating releases, a psychedelic-folk landmark whose spirit recalls the Holy Modal Rounders jamming with Alexander “Skip” Spence. In 1970 a second album, Little Eyes, was tracked for ESP-Disk and advanced to test pressing, yet mounting financial pressures prevented its release. Askew continued to paint and write poetry while occasionally performing in New Haven and Boston throughout the 1970s. No further commercial recordings have appeared, though his privately made tapes circulate within the outer reaches of the music underground. Contemporary work incorporates harpsichord, synthesizers, and drum machines alongside guitar, piano, and the ever-present tiple, yet the songs retain their essential character: eccentric yet immediately engaging, marked by strong melodic contours and emotionally resonant, reflective lyrics that resist reduction to the convenient “freaky outsider” label.