Zev Feldman is an internationally recognized, GRAMMY-nominated independent record producer and the Co-President of Resonance Records in Los Angeles. He is also a consulting producer of archival and historical recordings for Blue Note Records. He’s widely known as the “Jazz Detective.” Over the last 25 years, he has worked for PolyGram, Universal Music Group, Rhino/Warner Music Group, and Concord Music Group, among others. In 2016, he was voted “Rising Star Producer” in DownBeat Magazine’s International Critics Poll, and he was voted “Producer of the Year” in 2022. In addition to his lauded work at Resonance, where he works closely with the estates of jazz icons such as Bill Evans and Wes Montgomery, he’s also involved with various other labels covering jazz, blues, and rock, including Elemental Music, Sunset Blvd Records, Real Gone Music, Reel To Real Recordings, Tompkins Square and new this year, Deep Digs. Feldman has earned accolades as producer or co-producer on major archival releases by jazz icons, including Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Ahmad Jamal, Albert Ayler, Chet Baker, Jaco Pastorius, and many more. His Feldman currently resides in Maryland after living in Los Angeles for the past 17 years.
Glide caught up with Feldman to learn more about his operation and these specific releases.
We are presenting our interview with Zev Feldman, the Jazz Detective, in two parts, the first of which focuses on his process, relationships, and teams. When reading the forewords of Feldman’s excellent, extensive for his archival jazz releases, one is struck by his passion for his work, his reverence for the artists, and the graciousness to all who helped him bring the project to fruition. In speaking with him directly, these qualities become amplified. For this Record Store Day, Feldman has a bounty of ten releases (listed below) which we’ll touch on in Part Two, but we begin by talking about the immense amount of work involved in his projects. These are excerpts from our conversation.
- Art Tatum – Jewels in the Treasure Box: The 1953 Chicago Blue Note Jazz Club Recordings (Resonance)
- Chet Baker/Jack Sheldon – In Perfect Harmony: The Lost Album (Jazz Detective)
- Cannonball Adderley – ‘Burnin’ in Bordeaux’: Live in France 1969 & ‘Poppin’ in Paris: Live at L’Olympia 1972 (Elemental)
- Yusef Lateef – Atlantis Lullaby: The Concert in Avignon – (Elemental)
- Mal Waldron/Steve Lacy – The Mighty Warriors: Live in Antwerp (Elemental)
- Shelly Manne and His Men – Jazz from the Pacific Northwest (Jazz Detective)
- Sun Ra – Sun Ra at the Showcase: Live in Chicago 1976-1977 (Jazz Detective)
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe – Live in France – 1966 Concert in Limoge (Deep Digs)
- Sonny Rollins – Freedom Weaver – 1959 European Tour (Resonance)
Your projects are massive endeavors. Generally, how long does it take from start to finish?
It really depends on the project. There are several Resonance releases – Thad Jones-Mel Lewis – All My Yesterdays and Jaco Pastorius – Truth, Liberty, Soul, and some others that took years and years to come to fruition. There are all sorts of different rights holders and people that need to be contacted and we do our best to expedite it but when you get into the weeds sometimes it can be weeks back and forth between contracting parties, negotiating and having conversations. Sometimes things move more quickly like it’s amazing that this year there are these ten titles. But sometimes it’s like a log jam effect where we’ve been working for a long time and then suddenly, they are ready.
How about the many moving parts from the rights and licensing to the recordings themselves and the work involved in your booklets which are often 40 pages long?
It’s been an amazing thing to be able to work on these projects, and it’s not work. I’m just curious about so much of it and I love this music. I get to do something I am passionate about. I feel extremely fortunate, but it’s also been a long road.
On the booklets themselves and the inspiration for such, Feldman expounded, I like to have a magazine style of editorial and I try to tell as much as I can. I really like to go in and speak with the musicians, maybe speak with producers and anyone who was involved or has something relevant to contribute. And for me, it’s just kind of personal, I’ve been inspired by so much music and the presentation, having started my career in the CD era when the CD boom was going on, working in the music business, and having the chance to collect and cherish so many box sets. I looked at the ones that inspired me like Michael Lang and Richard Seidel at Verve in the 90s were doing incredible work when you look at the many box sets they have, even the packaging – Mercury radio, the Bill Evans metal box set, and Bud Powell. And I really love the different essays that go into them. Michael Cuscuna and Charlie Lourie at Mosaic were amazing inspirations to me as well. I love music from the 40s through the 70s especially and besides Mosaic also Joel Dorn with 32 Jazz and Label M.
Feldman then expounded on working with the artists and their families, I’ve been really blessed working with families such as Evan Evans, who is Bill Evans’ son, and Robert Montgomery, who is Wes Montgomery’s son. I have a very wonderful relationship going back many years now with both families. You build relationships and you build a track record.
You have become rather synonymous with Record Store Day. Tell us about that and the logistics and financial considerations involved.
I’m very grateful to Michael Kurtz and Carrie Colliton and their entire organization for their support. They have given birth to so many projects that would most likely not have had the opportunity to be born because in many cases the economics of these projects are very difficult. It takes a lot of generosity by investors and record labels, but we can do something that’s really the opposite of the long tail effect, especially for physical products, which is a big focus of what I do. We look at the numbers on everything that we do to see if these projects can be sustainable. The LP component, even if it’s in a really limited quantity for Record Store Day allows the project to be more sustainable. You know we’re only making a select amount and we’ll make a select quantity of CDs, and we’ll ride off into the sunset or however long the terms are on these deals when we do them for streaming or digital. Sometimes we don’t get streaming and sometimes I also like to hold back on full streaming. It’s my decision on my projects and it always has to be a group discussion, but I will often release singles that we can go with to give people a little taste. CD, streaming, downloads, vinyl especially with Elemental and Jazz Detective and Resonance we’re just really being mindful. We want to bring this music to the fans, but there’s also a lot of risk involved which can be stressful. We like to sleep at night.
You keep expanding your labels. First it was Resonance. Elemental has been a major player the last couple of years. You have Jazz Detective and this year you’ve established Deep Digs.
I like to be known for doing the curation and justice to the artist, but the reality is that we’ve been able to crack a code and it’s no big secret, but we can look on paper to what these projects take to come out to the marketplace and evaluate properly if we can make it work. Not everything works, but a lot of stuff does due the generosity of George Klabin (Resonance) and Jordi Soley and Carlos Agustin Calembert at Elemental, who also back my label, Jazz Detective, (Ahmad Jamal, and now Sun Ra and the Chet Baker/Jack Sheldon) which is part of my label group called Deep Digs. Under that Deep Digs umbrella there is also Deep Digs, basically things that are non-jazz, the first of which is this Sister Rosetta Tharpe release. That release was found in the archives of INA in France (the Insitut national de l’audiovisuel in Paris) which came from the ORTF archives in the 60s, a remarkable document that hadn’t even been bootlegged before. It had been locked away all these years. That’s another relationship because I’ve worked with the French government with Ina for about 10 years now. I feel very privileged, honored, and humbled to be able to work with these esteemed colleagues and organizations doing this sort of work. It’s dreamlike.
You also have a relationship with Cory Weeds and Reel to Real too, right?
I co-founded Reel to Real Records with Cory Weeds several years ago, so he and I produce records too – the two Cannonball releases and the Shelley Manne are with Reel to Real. We also did the Roy Brooks record.
Tell us about your “small army” of folks that bring these projects to fruition.
For an enormous part of my day-to-day I have Zak Shelby-Szysko who’s been my production coordinator and the associate producer on most of these recordings, and he project manages with me. A great part of what we do is written correspondence and spending multiple hours on the phone. He also helps with financial reports and everything that goes into one of these. I also have James Batsford, most recently in London. He has his label New Land Records and works with Chrysalis in the UK. He worked with me on several of these – Sun Ra, both Cannonball Adderleys, and Yusef Lateef. When we start getting all hot with a lot going on at the same time, I’ve been able to expand the bandwidth by having this. Now these two gentlemen are key, but you know I have the executives that I work with, as mentioned George Klabin at Resonance and Jordi Soley and Carlos Agustin Calembert at Elemental, and Cory Weeds at Real to Reel.
How about those involved in the booklets, photography, engineering, and the packaging?
For designers I have Burton Yount that does many of my album covers and John Sellards. Gordon Jee assembles many of my packages on the insides and booklets Simon Svärd is also valuable in that aspect. He is on staff at Elemental Music. There’s a variety of people I reach out for photo searches, for example John Koenig on the Resonance projects, from Contemporary Records and Martin Goldestein at Elemental. We review it, lay it out, look at it. I want to put together the sequence. I’m usually driving heavily in this capacity with all these people. It’s maddening with the number of steps but I’m usually driving. In terms of engineering, we work with several people – Michael Graves on Sister Rosetta Tharpe for example though at Resonance we have in-house engineering overseen by George Klabin. On many of my projects I will use Matthew Lutthans sometimes to do all the audio and sometimes just to master the vinyl. We also work with the studios of Bernie Grundman and Kevin Gray. Matt Lutthans works with Cohearent Audio, and he also works for the Mastering Lab, which is owned by Chad Kassem, who owns Quality Record Press. So, it’s about having those people, those gentlemen are critical.
The number of decisions that must be made seems staggering. How do you decide what tracks to include or eliminate? How important is the sequencing, for example?
Decisions on what gets included, the sequencing, what gets edited out – I am in the front seat with them when we make decisions on editing and transitions, fading tunes out, or whether to include announcements or not. I work collectively to gather opinions because we have to be most mindful of the audio – not just the sound restoration but there are philosophical decisions that go into programming – do we want someone to be able to listen to a recording maybe for an entire afternoon? Maybe it’s something they can listen to on repeat and try to remove the speed bumps. Sometimes announcements can be a speed bump with repeated listening. It’s about having the right balance in it. This is the maddening part of having to be in the driver’s seat and make these decisions but again, thankfully I have the people that I work for, always ready to accept the challenges.
In Part Two of our interview, Zev will share some insights and anecdotes on each of the ten releases.
