Reservoir
Music
By Peter Aaron
I
got into the record business by accident,” says Mark Feldman,
66, the owner, president, and producer of Kingston’s Reservoir
Music, one of the world’s most ardently acclaimed independent
jazz labels. If that’s true, it was a happy accident, indeed.
Need proof? Just pick up a few back issues of Down Beat or Jazz
Times and check out their reams of rabid praise for the expertly
recorded, straight-ahead bebop sounds Reservoir has been blissfully
ooding the ears of jazz fanatics with for the last 20 years.
“Robert
Sunenblick, who runs [jazz reissue label] Uptown Records and I had
been friends in medical school, and I got back in touch with him
in 1981 because I was trying to nd a record by [saxophonist] J.R.
Monterose that had come out on Uptown,” recalls Feldman, a
serious man with eyes to match who serves as a gastroenterologist
by day. “We got to talking, and he asked me if I wanted to
be involved in putting out a new recording by Monterose—which
turned out be a duo date with [legendary bop pianist] Tommy Flanagan,
A Little Pleasure—and maybe try some other records. So I ended
up becoming
a partner in that label, and I did that until 1986. Then I started
Reservoir in 1987.”
To
date, Reservoir, which would eventually reissue A Little Pleasure
in 1988, has released nearly 100 titles, including albums by such
leading names as saxophonists Pepper Adams, Buddy Tate, and Gary
Smulyan, trumpeter Claudio Roditi, guitarist Joe Puma, and drummer
Dick Berk. The label’s debut release was Means of Identi
cation by Valery Ponomarev, who Feldman had been a fan of since
the years when the trumpeter was a member of Art Blakey’s
Jazz Messengers. “[Ponomarev’s] music is very well thought-out,”
Feldman says of the Russian-American horn man. CONTINUE...
|
