Zev Feldman

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Episode 27 of the Burning Ambulance podcast—the first episode of Year Two of the show—is the first one not to feature an interview with a musician. Instead, I’m talking to Zev Feldman, who’s a producer working primarily with the Resonance Records label.

Resonance has been around for ten years and has mostly specialized in releasing archival music by legendary jazz artists. Their first big release was Echoes Of Indiana Avenue by guitarist Wes Montgomery—it featured some previously unheard early recordings. They’ve subsequently done several other albums of his music, including a live concert recorded on his only European tour in 1965. They’ve also put out albums by Stan Getz, Charles Lloyd, Bill Evans, Larry Young, and John Coltrane, among many others, and Zev is the guy who actually travels the world locating these lost recordings and putting in all the legwork to get them licensed, make sure they’ve got the rights, and do everything else that leads to the physical release. The thing that makes Resonance releases so great, by the way, is that they’re not just about throwing the music out there—they have really in-depth liner notes, tons of historical photographs, interviews with the surviving musicians or people connected to the recordings in some way, and beautiful packaging overall. They’re all about preserving the love of physical music formats. They do special releases for Record Store Day every year, putting out the vinyl versions before the CD edition and stuff like that.

They don’t just release archival music, either—they also put out CDs by new artists, and Zev and I talk a little bit about that in this interview. We also discuss some of the non-Resonance work he’s done, like the Thelonious Monk record Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 and a big project he did the other year, reissuing 25 titles from Xanadu Records, a small '70s label that really deserves much more attention than it’s ever gotten.

There's a lot more music in this episode than usual. Here's a full listing of everything you'll hear:

Thelonious Monk, "Well You Needn't" (Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960)

Grant Green, "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing" (Funk in France: From Paris to Antibes 1969-70)

Wes Montgomery, "Full House" (In Paris: The Definitive ORTF Recording)

Bill Evans, "Very Early" (Another Time: The Hilversum Concert)

Larry Young, "Mean to Me" (In Paris: The ORTF Recordings)

John Coltrane, "Crescent" (Offering: Live at Temple University)

Andreas Varady, "Radiska" (The Quest)