Sound Man Of Jazz
Rudy Van Gelder
by Robin Kidson
If you take a look at the small print on the jazz album covers in your record collection, then you’ll probably find one name keeps popping up again and again: Rudy Van Gelder, as in 'Recorded by Rudy Van Gelder at Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ' or 'Recorded at the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey'.
Rudy Van Gelder was arguably the greatest, most prolific recording engineer in the history of recorded jazz. “I think I’ve been associated with more records, technically”, he once said, “than anybody else in the history of the record business”. His expertise brought some of the most iconic jazz albums ever to fruition, including A Love Supreme (John Coltrane), Saxophone Colossus (Sonny Rollins), Out To Lunch (Eric Dolphy), The Sidewinder (Lee Morgan), Somethin’ Else (Cannonball Adderley)…. He worked for a number of labels but is particularly associated with Blue Note.
2024 marks the 100th anniversary of Van Gelder’s birth so now is as good a time as any to remember the life and career of this key figure in the development of jazz. Born on 2nd November 1924 in Jersey City, he became interested in both amateur radio and jazz at an early age. When he was twelve years old, he acquired a primitive home recording device, including a turntable and blank discs. He had some musical training, taking trumpet lessons as a child and playing in his school band.
Becoming a professional recording engineer did not seem possible to Van Gelder at the time so he opted for a career as an optometrist instead. “I felt that studying optometry would give me the mental discipline I needed and a steady income after I graduated”, he said. He qualified as an optometrist in 1946, and then set up his own practice in Teaneck, New Jersey. In the evenings, however, he began recording local musicians in the living room of his parents’ house at 25 Prospect Avenue, Hackensack, New Jersey. The house had only recently been built and Van Gelder had persuaded his parents to let him incorporate various design features in the living room so that it could double up as a recording space.
Van Gelder began to develop a reputation as a recording engineer, helped by the distinctive acoustics of his parent’s living room. In 1952, he met Alfred Lion, producer and co-founder of Blue Note Records. Lion was impressed by the Van Gelder sound and from 1953 to 1959, Blue Note recorded exclusively in Mr. and Mrs. Gelder’s living room.
Other labels also began using his services, notably Savoy and Prestige. Soon, the jazz greats were making the journey out to Hackensack. To take one year at random – 1954, for example – the musicians who recorded at Hackensack that year included Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Thad Jones, Sonny Rollins and Charles Mingus. One of the Miles Davis sessions resulted in the classic Walkin’ album; and Monk recorded side one of Monk. Thelonious Monk was so taken with Van Gelder and his studio that he wrote a tribute, Hackensack. Here’s a live version from a BBC concert in 1965 with Monk on piano, Charlie Rouse (sax), Larry Gales (bass), and Ben Riley (drums):
Throughout the 1950s, Van Gelder was recording virtually every day whilst still practicing as an optometrist. “I was examining eyes one day, and Wednesday, I’d be recording Miles Davis”, he said. As well as Walkin’, Miles recorded his Relaxin’, Steamin’, Workin’ and Cookin’ albums at Hackensack. He was also part of the 1957 session that resulted in Cannonball Adderley’s great Blue Note album, Somethin’ Else. Other classics which came out of Hackensack included Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus, John Coltrane’s Blue Train and Moanin’ by Art Blakey. Here is the title track of Moanin’ , with Blakey on drums, Lee Morgan (trumpet), Benny Golson (tenor sax), Bobby Timmons (piano) and Jymie Merritt (bass). It’s strange to reflect that this icon of fifties jazz was recorded in somebody’s living room by an optometrist in his spare time. There’s a video, a “virtual tour”, showing the layout of the Hackensack studio in the 1950s together with photos of some of the sessions and extracts from the music recorded.
In the late 1950s, Rudy Van Gelder commissioned the architect, David Henken, to build him a Frank Lloyd Wright inspired house with a state-of-the-art studio attached in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. In 1959, he moved into his new house, and in 1960, gave up his optometrist practice altogether and became a full time recording engineer. The new studio was very different from the Hackensack living room. Jazz writer Ashley Kahn describes it as “a stunningly reverberant, atriumlike space, defined by two huge wooden arches intersecting far overhead. The pyramidal, ribbed ceiling – wooden slats neatly connecting the arches – leant the appearance of an inverted hull. Impressed musicians and producers would remark on how – with its vaulted effect and exposed masonry block walls (the blocks custom-made) – the studio radiated the feel of a small, modern-style church”.
Moving to the new studio did not lessen the number of producers and musicians who wanted Rudy Van Gelder as their recording engineer. Other labels began using his services, notably Impulse and Verve. Soon, the Englewood Cliffs studios were in almost constant use by the entire range of jazz genres, from traditional to the avant garde, from Bud Freeman and Pee Wee Russell to Eric Dolphy and Archie Shepp. Blues musicians also found a home there including Memphis Slim, Lightnin’ Hopkins and the Reverend Gary Davis. And classic, groundbreaking albums kept coming. One of the first to be recorded at Englewood Cliffs was Out Of The Cool by the Gil Evans Orchestra in 1960. This was also one of the first albums to be released on the Impulse label. It illustrated how much larger ensembles could be accommodated in the new studio than in the Hackensack living room. Listen to Sunken Treasure, one of the tracks from Out Of The Cool. The list of other exceptional albums recorded at Englewood Cliffs is a long one. 1964 was a particularly fruitful year with The Sidewinder (Lee Morgan), Song for My Father (Horace Silver), Out to Lunch (Eric Dolphy), Life Time (Tony Williams), and the daddy of them all, Coltrane’s masterpiece, A Love Supreme all emerging from sessions at the studio.
So what made Rudy Van Gelder so special as a recording engineer? First, it was the sound he was able to create. Words used to describe it include clear, warm, immediate, crisp, dry… However it’s characterised, it was clearly a sound that both producers and musicians wanted. Van Gelder was constantly striving for the holy grail of his profession: to make the recording as close as possible to the live experience. He was always experimenting, trying out new things and seeking out the latest equipment, sometimes even making his own. In the process, he pioneered a host of new recording techniques.
Another ingredient of his success was the way in which he closely listened to what his customers – the producers and musicians – required. He gave them the sound they wanted, not the sound he thought they ought to have. “I am their messenger”, he said. Some producers, like Albert Lion, for example, had very precise requirements which Van Gelder worked hard to provide. Others, such as Bob Weinstock, were happy to let him decide the sound. His judgement was trusted.
Van Gelder was the supreme professional, meticulous in everything he did, always preparing carefully before each session. The producer, Bob Weinstock who worked extensively with Van Gelder said “There was a joke among the musicians – they’d come in the door, and they’d say, ‘Ready, Rudy?’ And of course, he was always ready, you know? I’d just tell him who was coming, and he knew what to do with the sound and all that. I never worried about the sound, the musicians never worried about the sound. They’d just say, ‘Ready Rudy?’”
He was notoriously secretive about his working methods, often hiding his equipment from public view or covering up their trade labels. He sometimes wore gloves when handling sensitive equipment and imposed strict rules on his clients: no food in the studio, no drink, no smoking and no touching the equipment. Stories about his eccentricities are legion. For example, one day, after years of working at Englewood Cliffs, Herbie Hancock was permitted by Van Gelder to plug in his headphones himself. “I looked around at the other musicians”, said Hancock, “they were staring at me. ‘Did Rudy say I could actually plug it in?’ ‘Yeah, we heard that too’. So I did. I was like ‘Wow, I finally rose to the top!’”.
On the other hand, Van Gelder wanted the musicians to feel comfortable in his studio. He wanted to create a mood that would ensure the musicians played to the best of their abilities and fitted the particular requirements of the session. To capture the right ambience, he would sometimes turn the lights down or even off altogether; and place rugs or plants in strategic places.
Finally, there was an important commercial consideration at work. Englewood Cliffs was only about 20 minutes from the centre of New York City but Van Gelder did not have the wage costs, overheads and high rents of the big city studios so could afford to charge lower rates.
To Rudy Van Gelder, being a recording engineer wasn’t just a job; it was a vocation, a passion, perhaps even an obsession. His other great enthusiasm was jazz. And he didn’t just like the music, he liked jazz musicians and they seemed to have liked him despite (or perhaps because of) his rules and idiosyncrasies. He formed a particularly close relationship with John Coltrane. Coltrane had recorded at Hackensack but it was at Englewood Cliffs that the collaboration really took off. The Studio, said Van Gelder, “created a feeling that seemed to fit the spiritual direction that his music was taking”. Coltrane recorded a number of albums there for the Impulse label. As well as A Love Supreme, these included Africa/Brass, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, and Ascension.
In 1967, the man who kick-started Van Gelder’s career, Albert Lion, retired and Blue Note began to use other studios besides Englewood Cliffs. But still work poured in. In the 1970s, for example, renowned producer, Creed Taylor, set up his own label, Creed Taylor Incorporated (CTI) and used Van Gelder almost exclusively at least in the label’s early years.
In the 1990s, Van Gelder’s jazz work began to tail off. In 1999, however, he found another string to his bow when he began remastering his old Blue Note analogue recordings into a digital format. These were then reissued as CDs in the “Rudy Van Gelder Edition” with a distinctive “RVG” logo. He also remastered his work with other labels. Always eager to embrace new technologies, Van Gelder was unsentimental about the demise of vinyl. “I’m glad to see the LP go”, he said. “As far as I’m concerned, good riddance. It was a constant battle to make the music sound the way it should”.
Rudy Van Gelder is not without his critics. One particular criticism is the way he recorded the piano – too muffled, it’s said. It’s also claimed that there were other recording engineers at work in Van Gelder’s era who were just as good but who weren’t given the same publicity and credit.
Rudy Van Gelder died at Englewood Cliffs on 25th August 2016. He was 91 years old. His Studio is still in operation owned and run by Maureen Sickler who was Van Gelder’s assistant from 1989 until his death. In 2022, the Studio was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
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Here is a video of a recording made at the Van Gelder Studio in 2021. It’s the Ray Charles number, Greenbacks, recorded for the album Michael Stephenson Meets The Alexander Claffy Trio and features Michael Stephenson (vocals and sax), Alexander Claffy (bass), Julius Rodriguez (piano), Benny Benack III (trumpet) and Itay Morchi (drums)). As well as a great performance, the video also shows something of what the Studio is like.
The development of jazz and of electronically recorded sound has gone hand in hand over the past century. Unlike past musical genres, jazz was predominantly disseminated not by word of mouth or printed sheet music or live performance but through records. As such, it reached a huge global audience and laid the ground for today’s popular music industry. An important but often overlooked enabler of this process was the recording engineer. In this, his 100th anniversary year, perhaps we could not only celebrate Rudy Van Gelder and his considerable achievements but also all those other unsung and unseen recording engineers who did so much to bring this wonderful music to our ears.
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