Zev Feldman’s home in Montgomery Village is a shrine to the history of jazz. It’s a fitting habitat for a man who has been dubbed “The Jazz Detective” and “The Indiana Jones of Jazz.”

Feldman, the co-president of Beverly Hills’ Resonance Records, has carved out a reputation in the music industry for discovering and publishing previously unheard recordings of major jazz artists through the years, including Bill Evans, Larry Young, Wes Montgomery and Thelonious Monk.

“I just want to be producing records for as long as I can,” Feldman said. “It’s just a dream. And I never thought I would be doing this in Montgomery Village.”

Once stationed in a Beverly Hills record studio office, Feldman has moved his work and life back to his hometown. His office is adorned with framed images of music greats, including Ray Charles, John Coltrane and Andrea Bocelli, along with Recording Academy plaques and a medal from Grammy-winning and Grammy-nominated projects he’s worked on.

A downstairs storage room is adorned with wall-to-wall shelves of records, CDs and musical collectors’ items, with a portrait of Louis Armstrong standing guard outside.

Saturday is Record Store Day, a national event that encourages shopping at local record stores with exclusive album offerings. Feldman is offering a whopping 11 new albums this year, available for purchase only at participating stores.

“We’re not talking about ‘Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits’ or the new Taylor Swift record,” Feldman said. “It’s really core, but there’s a community that supports these releases, and the Record Store Day people have been so supportive. It’s turned into a whole juggernaut, which I never really expected.”

All roads lead to Montgomery County

It all began at Montgomery College.

Feldman, a longtime jazz and classical music fan who attended Watkins Mill Elementary School and Wootton High School, was studying radio communications and served as music director for the campus radio station. Those experiences later manifested into an internship at PolyGram Group Distribution, a music and video distribution company in Greenbelt. He worked his way up there from a postgrad job in the mailroom to swankier music executive gigs in New York and Los Angeles.

Working in the big leagues of the entertainment industry used to be largely confined to those two cities. But COVID proved to the industry that work can be done remotely, and Feldman moved back to the East Coast a few years ago to care for his aging parents. Doing his dream job from his hometown is just icing on the cake, he said.

“I’m just thrilled to be here. I love Montgomery County. I love Maryland and the DMV,” he said. ”And I think for a long time I was really reaching for an opportunity to come back. ... It’s kind of come full circle.”

How the Jazz Detective investigates his next album

In addition to his main gig as Resonance Records co-president, Feldman serves as co-founder of Elemental Music and founder of Time Traveler Recordings and is a consulting producer for Blue Note Records and Verve Label Group. His lineup of new Record Store Day albums spans several of the labels he works for.

Before a vinyl hits the shelf at a local record store, Feldman has to track down the original recording. Sometimes that comes in the form of an artist’s estate offering up old recordings, but he primarily sources through research and he revels in finding needles in the haystacks of old archives and databases.

He discovered one album this year, a 1967 recording of folk-jazz artist Terry Callier, while combing through nearly 10,000 cassette tapes from the archives of the late Joe Segal, one of the country’s most prolific music promoters.

“We have to be careful with a lot of these materials, because some of these tapes are over 50 years old and some of them are much older than that,” Feldman said.

He spends most of his evenings listening to old tapes, mentally scanning them to pick the select few worth putting on a record to sell to the masses. It’s no small feat for a lifelong jazz enthusiast — he may enjoy listening to it all, but he draws on his experience crunching numbers on music sales to determine which pieces have the best potential to become hits.

“Is there going to be an audience besides me and a couple of my friends?” Feldman asks himself. “It’s important to have the best of the best. We have to be adding something to the legacy.”

How to observe Record Store Day in Maryland

Feldman grew up rifling through the bins of records at Joe’s Record Paradise in Silver Spring. This year, shoppers at Joe’s will be able to purchase 11 new records that Feldman produced across three record labels:

• Joe Henderson’s “Consonance: Live at the Jazz Showcase”
• Ahmad Jamal’s “At the Jazz Showcase” 
• Mal Waldron’s “Stardust & Starlight: At the Jazz Showcase” 
• Yusef Lateef’s “Alight Upon the Lake: Live at the Jazz Showcase” 
• Bill Evans’ “At the BBC”
• Freddie King’s “Feeling Alright: The Complete 1975 Nancy Jazz Pulsation Concerts”
• Cecil Taylor’s “Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts”
• Michel Petrucciani’s “Kuumbwa”
• Roy Hargrove’s “Bern” 
• Terry Callier’s “At the Earl of Old Town” 
• Buster Williams’ “Pinnacle”

There are roughly 30 record stores in Maryland listed as participants on the official Record Store Day website. Locations in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties include Mojomala Books, Records & Cool Stuff in Silver Spring, Love People Records in Kensington, Shady Lane Records in Hyattsville and Joe’s Record Paradise in Silver Spring.

In its 19th year, Record Store Day serves to support brick-and-mortar stores by offering them new and buzzy vinyl albums to sell.

“They have given the opportunity of so many albums to be birthed that may not have come out otherwise,” Feldman said. “Record Store Day allows us an opportunity to achieve a sales threshold that normally would take a long time.”

And he’s already working on projects for next year’s Record Store Day.

Longtime vinyl lovers have always rallied around Record Store Day. But the last few years have brought a Gen Z-driven return to analog, with more and more young people collecting records, tapes and CDs. A study published last year by the Vinyl Alliance found that consumers 18-24 were a “major force” behind the resurgent popularity.

“There’s been this renaissance,” Feldman said. “There is no way of denying it for vinyl records. And I just think it reminds us all how important physical media is. It’s a tangible good. It’s something that hits us emotionally in our hearts.”