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. “Some of the best playing his side men have ever done comes out when they’re working with him. There was one session he did that [hard bop tenor great] Joe Henderson played on [1991’s Pro€ le,] and it has some of the best solos that Henderson had played in years.”

But perhaps the recordings that really put Reservoir on the map in its early years are the series of discs by renowned Albany area baritone saxophonist Nick Brignola, who passed away in 2002. “Nick was a very intuitive player,” Feldman remembers. “He played all of the reeds extremely well, not just baritone, but tenor, alto, soprano, whatever. And he was great in any style—beautiful on the ballads, but also superb on the up-tempo stuff and on blues, even ‘free’ stuff.”

A special arm of the label’s catalog has been its New York Piano series, which spotlights the many great jazz pianists working in an around the city, players like Barry Harris, Steve Kuhn, Rob Schneiderman, Dick Katz, Hod O’Brien, and Pete Malinverni. The series is also home to Feldman’s personal favorite session, The Missouri Connection, a 1992 collaboration by two of the instrument’s eternal masters: Kansas City swing pioneer Jay McShann and St. Louis hard bop icon John Hicks, both of whom died not long after the album’s release.

“Being there for that recording was just incredible,” Feldman recalls from the football €eld-sized kitchen table that also serves as the label’s of€ce. “Watching those guys interact was like seeing the two eras of jazz history coming together. I would pick up McShann from the hotel he was staying at and then drive to Hicks’ house to pick him up, and the whole length of the ride I’d get to listen to McShann talk about the early days, about when Charlie Parker was just starting out and playing with him. Really amazing. And the music on that CD is just so warm and beautiful.”

Warm and beautiful are words that have been used over and over again to describe the sparklingly pure sonics of Reservoir’s recordings; indeed, the imprint’s albums are revered worldwide for their inviting, truly “live” feel, a sound not heard enough in jazz since the 1950s and ’60s glory days of the Prestige and Blue Note labels. In fact, for the €rst several releases, Feldman, who produces and supervises all of the sessions himself, actually worked with fabled Blue Note engineer Rudy Van Gelder. Now, however, he records the majority of Reservoir’s output with Jim Anderson at Manhattan’s crack Avatar Studios. So, for someone who studied medicine instead of audio production, are there parallels between the worlds of record-making and intestinal analysis?

“I think so,” says Feldman, who grew up in Kingston and discovered jazz in high school via Dave Brubeck and Stan Kenton. “In good medicine and good music, there’s a level of professionalism and competency you have to have; you have to do it until you get it right for things to pass the test. The great musicians we’re lucky enough to work with always impress me with the way they work to get the music right, and I try to carry that attitude over into my medical work.”

Those musicians seem to feel pretty lucky about the situation, too. “The thing about Mark is that he’s doing this because he loves the music,” says guitarist Peter Leitch, who’s released eight albums on Reservoir. “He doesn’t try to make you record stupid things to try and have a hit record. He has a really good set of ears, but he’s not a producer that interferes with the music; he trusts that the musicians have it together enough to do their job. Plus, he’s one of the few honest people in the record business I’ve ever met.”

And then there’s that all-important good woman behind the good man. In Mark Feldman’s case, that rock is his wife, Kayla, who is also credited as Reservoir’s executive producer and art director. “When he did that €rst session, with J.R. Monterose and Tommy Flanagan, there was a look on his face I hadn’t seen since our kids were born,” says the mother of the couple’s two daughters and grandmother of two. “He looked at me and said, ‘Do you think I should do this, get involved with a record label?’ and there was just no way I could’ve said no. He really believes in the musicians and in the music, too. It just makes him so happy.”

And, thanks to Reservoir Music, for the last two decades a lot of other hard-core jazz lovers have been very happy, too. From the €rst note of any the label’s exceptional albums, it’s crystal-clear why.