Leap of Faith: John Esposito’s Sunjump Records

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, March 31, 2011

Someone starting a record label in today’s economic wasteland would seem to be, to put it kindly, quixotic. The middleman-cutting, direct-marketing accessibility of the Internet has at last wrested distribution away from the majors, and theoretically put indies on the same level as those long-monopolizing big boys. But at the same time the system is decimating many of the same smaller, integrity-driven, DIY concerns it’s been touted as helping: The file-sharing genie long ago popped out of the bottle and opened the floodgates, and now every second millions of self-professed “music lovers” plunge a knife in the hearts of the artists they profess to admire by stealing their music, without so much as a thought, via quasi-legal torrent sites. Most of this thievery involves pop music; jazz is less of a target. But, then, jazz has had it way harder for way longer. Jazz record sales reached their commercial peak during the big band era, and since then the genre has barely been able to keep going through artistically pivotal but comparatively modestly selling cult labels (this even includes the vaunted Impulse! ECM, and Blue Note) and occasional money-losing vanity releases on the majors. (There was a record-industry joke a couple decades back that went like this: “Q: How do you make a million on a jazz record? A: You spend three million.”) So those with new labels have it rough enough, but anyone running a jazz label nowadays? Ouch. And one that specializes in regional jazz? Double ouch. Whoever would be behind such an enterprise could only be doing it for the love.

Love is clearly what drives John Esposito’s Sunjump Records, an effort the Germantown pianist and educator began in 1986 and reactivated 20 years later. And, despite the odds, since the relaunch the imprint’s managed to survive while doing an exceptional job of documenting not just Esposito’s music, but that of other heretofore overlooked, Upstate-linked musicians. Obviously a selfless man. To some extent.

“Well, I partially restarted Sunjump in 2006 for my own sense of moving forward creatively,” he admits. “I’d had a family and helped raise two kids. [Esposito was the companion of singer and voice teacher Pamela Pentony, who had two children from a previous partner.] The relationship ended and I began revisiting all of these early recordings I’d been involved in, as a way of rethinking my work and figuring out where to go next. I decided I wanted to release them, and one thing led to another.”

It’s tempting to say it was the Marlborough-raised Esposito’s genetic destiny to become a jazz musician: His grandfather, Salvatore Esposito, was a violinist, saxophonist, and violin maker who played with 1920s jazz king Paul Whiteman. “But I didn’t really find out about that until after he’d died, when I’d already been playing jazz for years,” the keyboardist maintains. “And my parents were more into classical and Broadway stuff.” It was the blues that bit him first—the Delta stylings of Robert Johnson, Bukka White, and Son House, followed by the postwar Chicago greats, and, eventually, the Butterfield Blues Band and Jimi Hendrix—and in his mid teens motivated him to pick up the harmonica and sit in with neighboring guitarist Steve Geraci’s garage band. Geraci taught him some basic piano progressions and introduced him to jazz via records by Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Charles Mingus. Next came studies in composition at SUNY Albany, after which he became the house pianist at the Gemini Jazz Cafe, where he worked with the Capital Region’s two saxophone legends, J. R. Monterose and Nick Brignola, and led his first band. In 1980 he made the leap south, becoming part of Manhattan’s inspired Downtown loft scene and meeting saxophonist, guitarist, and composer Arthur Rhames, with whom he performed for five years.

Rhames, who died in 1989 at age 32, never released any recordings during his lifetime but remains an enigmatic firebrand whose all-too-briefly-burning flame is recalled with reverent nods and headshaking disbelief by those lucky enough to have witnessed it. “Arthur’s energy and technique as a musician, his prolific level as a composer. You can’t even imagine it,” Esposito says. “If you believe that John Coltrane’s and Miles Davis’s 1960s work was the pinnacle of transcendence, well, he digested that, along with what Jimi Hendrix did, and took it all to the next level. It was frightening to watch Arthur go by and know that very few people had an awareness of him.” (To date there have only been two posthumously issued Rhames-led dates, on the Ayler and DIW labels; thankfully, Sunjump is readying more material for release.) Following Rhames’s passing, Esposito formed Second Sight, a quintet that also included two other eventual Hudson Valley players, bassist Allen Murphy and drummer Jeff “Siege” Siegel, as well as saxophonist Jeff Marx, and future trumpet star Dave Douglas. At the height of the retro-nostalgic “Young Lions” era the besuited band fit right in visually, but its music, which crossed that scene’s overt bop references with more modern free-jazz influences, often displeased patrons in search of a little Wynton Marsalis to go with their cocktails.