[4] He founded two record labels, Cadence Jazz (in 1980) and CIMP (in 1995), and produced or oversaw the release of hundreds of jazz releases; among those musicians he has produced are Bill Dixon, Chet Baker, Glenn Spearman, Ernie Krivda, Ivo Perelman, Noah Howard, Dominic Duval, Steuart Liebig, Cecil Taylor, Fred Hess, Anthony Braxton, Bill Barron, Paul Smoker, Jimmy Bennington, and Steve Swell.
Rusch has donated his large, indexed collection of jazz periodicals to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
[5] A review at the time by Kevin Whitehead noted that it includes "one of the best discussions of the social realities concerning the creation of new music to have appeared in print," in an interview with the trumpeter Bill Dixon.
Whitehead wrote that "Rusch has conducted hundreds of interviews with improvisers" and considered that this collection, including interviews with "drummer Art Blakey, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, pianist Cecil Taylor, and saxophonists Billy Harper, Paul Quinchette and Von Freeman," among others, includes both valuable insights into jazz history and the thinking of the interviewee, and "some dead weight as well.
[8] On June 4, 2014, three articles appeared in The Wall Street Journal[8][9][10] accusing Rusch of "sexually abusing female students as young as 12 years old during the late 1960s and early 1970s.