1969 THE INSECT TRUST Concert Poster Stone Ballroom New Haven CT Yale ORIGINAL

Description

This is an original and scarce original poster for a 1969 concert by the pioneering experimental jazz based rock band The Insect Trust at The Stone Ballroom in New Haven, Connecticut.   This poster is printed one side only on cardstock and measures about 12” x 14”.  The concert has graphics of what looks like a Rorschach Test inkblot with text that reads in part:
This Week at THE STONE BALLROOM – THE INSECT TRUST – Thursday, Feb. 27 – Sunday, Mar. 2- Tickets Available at the Yale Co-Op and at the Door
The lower right hand corner is printed “The Advocate Press”.   This poster is a vintage original saved as a souvenir by someone that attended the show.   There is a small tape stain at the top center and some toning from age.  Overall condition is very good.
The Insect Trust played with Jim Morrison and The Doors among others but never achieved widespread recognition or commercial success and broke up after only two albums.  Years late the band was rediscovered and recognized for their innovation and unique performances.
The following is a review of The Insect Trust by Ed Ward from a 2012 broadcast of NPR’s Fresh Air:
One of the great fantasies of the hippie era was that new combinations of music would emerge from the experimentation that was going on. But in practice, what really happened was that a few blues bands stretched out some more and a few short-lived bands made weird noises. There were a few exceptions, though, including The Insect Trust.
The band was an odd group of people: free jazzers, hippie rockers, old-timey and country-blues musicians. The guitarist, Bill Barth, had been one of the re-discoverers of Skip James, while one of the saxophonists, Robert Palmer, had grown up next door to a black kid named Ferrell Sanders, who went on to call himself Pharoah. Partially, at least, the band's members started out in Arkansas, where, calling themselves the Primitives, they made a little splash by recording a 45 that was immediately taken off the market because Thomas Pynchon sued them. They'd taken the lyrics from his novel V without asking permission.
The band, such as it was — Barth, Palmer and vocalist Nancy Jeffries — drifted to Memphis after that and named itself after a sinister group in a William Burroughs novel: The Insect Trust. A baritone saxophonist, Trevor Koehler, joined up, as did Luke Faust, who'd made a name for himself around New York as a banjoist. Despite not having a rhythm section, the band played around town, and somehow got a recording deal with Capitol in 1968.
The band's album featured an odd mandala painted by Faust on its cover, and a bunch of songs that sounded like nothing else: mostly originals, with a nearly eight-minute rave-up on Skip James' "Special Rider Blues" that brought the free jazz right out front while flavoring it with some Memphis soul feeling.
Predictably, the album did nothing, sales-wise, although a friend of mine who'd grown up with Robert Palmer alerted me to it, and I reviewed it in Rolling Stone. The fact that so many styles of American music could coexist so peacefully and creatively seemed to me to be a goal that musicians should pursue. It was a remarkable album, and it seemed a shame that not many people got to hear it.
But what was really remarkable was that, somehow or other, The Insect Trust got a second chance a year later, thanks to a new manager who got the band signed to Atco Records. By this time, The Insect Trust was squatting in an apartment building in Hoboken, N.J., with a commanding view of the New York skyline from its roof. Barth, Jeffries and Palmer got together and wrote the album's title track, a celebration of their new home.
Hoboken Saturday Night was even better than its predecessor. The band was stretching out and finding new ground, and it recorded the Pynchon song again ("The Eyes of a New York Woman"), this time with permission from its author.
Robert Palmer's recorder solo in that song is his finest moment on record, in my opinion, and Nancy Jeffries gives the words all she's got. The band had a bigger budget on this album, too, and among the additional players are bassist Bill Falwell, who'd recorded with Albert Ayler, and one of the greatest drummers of all time, Elvin Jones.
The band toured, and I got to see it twice — once at a disastrous concert I promoted at my college. They were even better live than they were on the record, although people still didn't get what they were trying to do. Back in Hoboken, the band quietly fell apart bit by bit. I was able to get Robert Palmer some writing work at Rolling Stone, and he went on to become a star at The New York Times; he wrote a couple of excellent books about music before dying in 1997. Nancy Jeffries got a job at Elektra Records, where she eventually rose to vice-president. Trevor Koehler battled drug abuse and killed himself in 1976, and Barth was living in Amsterdam when a heart attack killed him in 2000. Luke Faust continues to live quietly in Austin. To this day, though, nobody has come close to the heart of American music traveling from the direction The Insect Trust did. I wish someone would try.
The following is the band’s Wikipedia page:
The Insect Trust was an American jazz-based[1] rock band that formed in New York in 1967.
Background
The members of the band were Nancy Jeffries on vocals,[2] Bill Barth on guitar, Luke Faust, formerly of the Holy Modal Rounders, on guitar, banjo, fiddle, and harmonica, Trevor Koehler on saxophone, and Robert Palmer (1945–1997) on clarinet and alto saxophone. Elvin Jones and Bernard Purdie both drummed with the group at times. Bill Falwell on bass and trumpet and Warren Gardner on trumpet and clarinet were part of the band by the time they recorded their second album.
According to The New York Times, the band took its name from William S. Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch, detailing a race of giant insects bent on world domination.[3] However, according to Bill Barth, the name came from the poetry journal Insect Trust Gazette, published by William Levy. Levy took the name from Burroughs, Warren Gardner then gave it to the band.
Musical style
Reviewing their 1970 album Hoboken Saturday Night, Robert Christgau wrote in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies: "The blues scholars in the group have been listening to a lot of Arabic and Eastern European music lately, but this doesn't stop Elvin Jones from sounding just like Elvin Jones. In short, these passionate humanists also sound friendly and have come up with a charming, joyous, irrepressibly experimental record."[4]
Legacy
Robert Palmer later became a well-respected and widely published rock critic and blues/jazz historian and served as the popular music editor of The New York Times in the 1980s. Nancy Jeffries became an executive at A&M, Virgin, and Elektra.
Discography
1969: The Insect Trust
1970: Hoboken Saturday Night
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