WILL POWER: Though he is rightfully credited...

WILL POWER: Though he is rightfully credited as the person who brought gentle, soothing music to a vast, lucrative market, Windham Hill Records founder Will Ackerman isn’t exactly fond of the term New Age that is attached to it.

“If I catch the guy who coined the phrase, I’m going to nail his forehead to the wall,” he says.

So it’s not surprising that he’s taking the offensive when coming up with a term to describe his newest venture, a series of releases under a new label called Gang of Seven, which falls under the category that is often saddled with the heading spoken word . “The industry has an enormous prejudice against that term to overcome, so hence my aversion to spoken word ,” he says. “The industry ranks it just behind polkas of the world.”

Gang of Seven, he says, will not be the usual spoken word offerings, but more a series of storytelling. A May album, “First Words,” will include work of such artists as Spalding Gray, Lynda Barry, Tom Bodett and Wallace Shawn, all of whom have developed distinctively artistic and colorful styles of storytelling. He also is planning releases of almost ethnographically collected tales from the likes of cab drivers.

“The last thing I want is for people to feel this is an extension of something academic,” he says. “It’s vastly entertaining and complex emotionally.”

So what to call it? He hopes that the name of the label may suffice, just as the name Windham Hill is sometimes applied to describe its genre. “I hope Gang of Seven may become a generic term like Windham Hill is.”