![]() ![]() “I’d had a family and helped raise two kids. “Well, I partially restarted Sunjump in 2006 for my own sense of moving forward creatively,” he admits. 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. 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. Whoever would be behind such an enterprise could only be doing it for the love. And one that specializes in regional jazz? Double ouch. (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. ![]() 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. But, then, jazz has had it way harder for way longer. Most of this thievery involves pop music jazz is less of a target. TONY ESPOSITO DISCOGRAPHY TORRENT TORRENTBut 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. 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. Someone starting a record label in today’s economic wasteland would seem to be, to put it kindly, quixotic. ![]()
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