Raiders of the Lost Archival Jazz Recordings

Zev Feldman has been called the Indiana Jones of jazz, but he’s never run away from an exploding Nazi biplane or snatched a golden idol from an altar in the Amazon. What he hunts for are archival photographs, and memories that reside exclusively in the minds of a senescent genre’s elders—and, most of all, unreleased live recordings. Years ago, he heard a rumor about a cache of DAT cassettes by Wes Montgomery, the great jazz guitarist from Indianapolis, who died in 1968. Feldman’s boss at Resonance Records sent him to investigate. “I spent a few days with the family,” Feldman said. They listened to some live cuts of Montgomery at the Hub Bub club—now a Shell station. The music sounded great, but to release it Feldman would need to piece together details, starting with who else was playing on it. “I went to the Indiana Historical Society for clues,” he said. “Photos of who Wes would have been gigging with at the time, that sort of thing.” He enlisted David Baker, a musicologist at Indiana University. “We sat in his basement and played the tapes,” Feldman went on, “and he’d perk up and go, ‘You hear that bass, that fingering? Gotta be Mingo Jones.’ ” After Feldman made a few more visits to Indianapolis, and a side trip to Sedona, Arizona, Resonance put out “Echoes of Indiana Avenue,” a double LP with extensive liner notes. “First new Wes in twenty-five years,” Feldman said. Indiana Jones never looked prouder.

Feldman also specializes in Bill Evans, Larry Young, and Lee Morgan; he was passing through New York after interviewing Herbie Hancock and just before interviewing Ron Carter. (Both musicians are in their eighties; Feldman is fifty, but in his line of work he often comes across as a bright-eyed intern.) He lives in the D.C. suburbs, alone, unless you count his fifty-three hundred records and seventy-five hundred CDs. “I’ll come back from L.A. or Paris with a suitcase full of records and have nowhere to put them,” he said. “Japan is dangerous for me.”

Heedless of the danger, he walked toward the Jazz Record Center, on the eighth floor of a mixed-use building in Chelsea, down the hall from a real-estate agent’s office and a rumba studio. Fred Cohen, the Center’s proprietor since 1983, greeted him with the sort of familiar tone you might use with a neighbor—Feldman stops by only once every few months, but, over the decades, every few months starts to add up. (The two also consistently cross paths in the comments section of a Facebook group called Jazz Vinyl Lovers.)

“What’s this?” Feldman said, referring to the background music.

“Toshiko Akiyoshi,” Cohen said.

Feldman made a stink face of approval. “Saw her trio at Smalls. Cookin’.”

He browsed, starting at the “A”s. Albert Ayler: “Revelations,” a live box set recorded in France, co-produced for release by Zev Feldman. Roy Brooks: “Understanding,” a live triple LP recorded in Baltimore, co-produced for release by Zev Feldman. “Your stuff, Zev, I gotta say, people actually buy it,” Cohen said. “Some stuff, I put it out and it sits for ten years.”

Feldman is now co-president of Resonance Records, and a few years ago he got a concurrent gig as a consulting producer for Blue Note. “I do my thing, digging for stuff, and if I find something good by a Blue Note artist, something unreleased, I’ll put it on their radar,” he said. In 2011, a friend told Feldman he’d heard that Bob Falesch, an audio engineer, had a bunch of unreleased live recordings by the late drummer Elvin Jones. “This was a set from 1967, when Elvin was at the absolute height of his powers, recorded at a dumpy little place called Pookie’s Pub, down on Hudson Street,” Feldman said. He got in touch with Falesch, who handed over the recordings, but it took a few more years—multiple trips to Japan, a search for Jones’s widow, and several phone calls to court Jones’s children—before he got control of the rights. Once he did, he sent the tape to Don Was, the president of Blue Note, who sat on it for a long time. “I started to get nervous,” Feldman said. Finally, he got an e-mail from Was: “On a plane listening to the Elvin Jones Pookie’s recording you gave me a while back . . . it’s pretty fucking great . . . should we do this one???”

“You can imagine how that lifted my spirits,” Feldman said.

He riffled through the “J”s, and there it was—“Revival: Live at Pookie’s Pub,” produced by Zev Feldman. Feeling sentimental, he carried it to the counter and bought it for a friend. ♦