When one mic will do the job, I will never use two.
He could do things with sound that no one else could do. For this reason, Miles Davis preferred to work with him. For this reason, Charles Mingus refused to work with him. Admittedly, it can be a complicated life for a recording engineer.
There is a particular sound to post-World War II jazz. It is liminal and hard to describe, at least for me. There are tones of loneliness, heart-break, desperation, intoxication, and joie de vivre tempered with the incessant flow of mortality. In my imagination, this sound was born in poverty in the South, in the jangly rapidity of urban life, in the smoke of an after hours bar. In reality, it was born in a teenager's bedroom in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Born in 1924, Rudy Van Gelder was the product of a middle-class family that owned a women's affordable clothing store in suburban New Jersey and permitted him a life comfortable enough that he could indulge his somewhat nerdy adolescent hobby of ham radio operation. This was the beginning of his lifelong fascination with recreating electronically reconstituted sound as he fussed and fiddled with the equipment, taking it apart and putting it back together again. In addition, Van Gelder had an uncle who was a jazz drummer of some success who interested him in what was then the dominant form of music.
So, as he matured, he started recording local, small-venue musicians with no other goal than to see if he could duplicate, or even surpass, the quality on offer by the large record companies. It became such a diverting hobby that, after he had left home and begun his first career, he somehow convinced his parents to turn a portion of their living room into a recording studio.
Van Gelder wasn't making a living off of this hobby, of course, but that didn't matter as, by the mid-1940's, he had graduated from optometry school and had a working practice. One understands that patiently working the small organs and precise equipment of an eye doctor's would be perfect for one who sought to refine the small pieces and precise fittings of sound and electricity. Van Gelder invested his optometry profits into more recording equipment, with state-of-the-art microphones, amplifiers, turntables, and all of the other gear that once ruled the pre-technological recording world.
While making records for some of the nascent artists, and gaining a reputation for making even the most mediocre of amateur musician sound polished and perspicacious, Van Gelder was eventually introduced to the artist and repertoire representative of Blue Note Records, a company that was becoming known as the source of the jazz artists who were popular with youth. Blue Note realized that the quiet, bespectacled, bow-tie wearing suburban Jersey guy had managed to find the perfect balance of sound, so they hired him, repeatedly, to record their top-flight talent. What optometry lost, modern bebop found.
As of the mid-1950's, Van Gelder was the most in-demand recording engineer in the greater New York market. Not only did he supply his very particular talents to Blue Note, but also to other record labels that were once familiar to the public, especially Savoy and Prestige. Between these three labels alone, Van Gelder recorded almost all of the top musicians of this period.
What makes this all the more interesting is that, especially in jazz, there can be a variety of creative process. As the jazz of the Van Gelder period was no longer designed for ballroom dances, but for more introspective moments based on improvisation and atonal interruptions, each label permitted its artists to indulge in whatever was necessary to create the music.
Blue Note, for example, was known for its controlled recording sessions without any risk of wasting time re-arranging music or permitting overly-extended extempore solos. Prestige, on the other hand, allowed their artists to simply have an open-ended jam session in the studio, editing together the individual "cuts" on an album of those songs that had the most promise. Ordinarily, recording engineers would prefer one method over the other, but Van Gelder didn't mind how the music was made, only in how it sounded once the musicians left the studio and he had the chance to run their sounds through his equipment over and over again until it sounded even better than it did before they left.
By 1959, Van Gelder's second career had proved lucrative enough that he was able to build his own recording studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey in a building designed to reflect the modern cache of the recordings. It was particularly noted for its 39-foot ceiling, as this contributed to the secret of the Van Gelder sound: natural reverb. This became the Mecca for East Coast jazz, in no small part due to the albums that would be recorded in that leafy suburb.
Over the next decade, Van Gelder would record in his studio dozens of albums for the seminal artists of his era, including many of the recordings that still figure in jazz critics' "top ten" lists such as Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil, Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Thelonius Monk's Monk, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis' Cookbook, and much of the work of Miles Davis.
As was noted in an appreciation by Rolling Stone magazine [1]:
Born in 1924, Rudy Van Gelder was the product of a middle-class family that owned a women's affordable clothing store in suburban New Jersey and permitted him a life comfortable enough that he could indulge his somewhat nerdy adolescent hobby of ham radio operation. This was the beginning of his lifelong fascination with recreating electronically reconstituted sound as he fussed and fiddled with the equipment, taking it apart and putting it back together again. In addition, Van Gelder had an uncle who was a jazz drummer of some success who interested him in what was then the dominant form of music.
So, as he matured, he started recording local, small-venue musicians with no other goal than to see if he could duplicate, or even surpass, the quality on offer by the large record companies. It became such a diverting hobby that, after he had left home and begun his first career, he somehow convinced his parents to turn a portion of their living room into a recording studio.
Van Gelder wasn't making a living off of this hobby, of course, but that didn't matter as, by the mid-1940's, he had graduated from optometry school and had a working practice. One understands that patiently working the small organs and precise equipment of an eye doctor's would be perfect for one who sought to refine the small pieces and precise fittings of sound and electricity. Van Gelder invested his optometry profits into more recording equipment, with state-of-the-art microphones, amplifiers, turntables, and all of the other gear that once ruled the pre-technological recording world.
While making records for some of the nascent artists, and gaining a reputation for making even the most mediocre of amateur musician sound polished and perspicacious, Van Gelder was eventually introduced to the artist and repertoire representative of Blue Note Records, a company that was becoming known as the source of the jazz artists who were popular with youth. Blue Note realized that the quiet, bespectacled, bow-tie wearing suburban Jersey guy had managed to find the perfect balance of sound, so they hired him, repeatedly, to record their top-flight talent. What optometry lost, modern bebop found.
As of the mid-1950's, Van Gelder was the most in-demand recording engineer in the greater New York market. Not only did he supply his very particular talents to Blue Note, but also to other record labels that were once familiar to the public, especially Savoy and Prestige. Between these three labels alone, Van Gelder recorded almost all of the top musicians of this period.
What makes this all the more interesting is that, especially in jazz, there can be a variety of creative process. As the jazz of the Van Gelder period was no longer designed for ballroom dances, but for more introspective moments based on improvisation and atonal interruptions, each label permitted its artists to indulge in whatever was necessary to create the music.
Blue Note, for example, was known for its controlled recording sessions without any risk of wasting time re-arranging music or permitting overly-extended extempore solos. Prestige, on the other hand, allowed their artists to simply have an open-ended jam session in the studio, editing together the individual "cuts" on an album of those songs that had the most promise. Ordinarily, recording engineers would prefer one method over the other, but Van Gelder didn't mind how the music was made, only in how it sounded once the musicians left the studio and he had the chance to run their sounds through his equipment over and over again until it sounded even better than it did before they left.
By 1959, Van Gelder's second career had proved lucrative enough that he was able to build his own recording studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey in a building designed to reflect the modern cache of the recordings. It was particularly noted for its 39-foot ceiling, as this contributed to the secret of the Van Gelder sound: natural reverb. This became the Mecca for East Coast jazz, in no small part due to the albums that would be recorded in that leafy suburb.
Over the next decade, Van Gelder would record in his studio dozens of albums for the seminal artists of his era, including many of the recordings that still figure in jazz critics' "top ten" lists such as Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil, Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Thelonius Monk's Monk, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis' Cookbook, and much of the work of Miles Davis.
As was noted in an appreciation by Rolling Stone magazine [1]:
Van Gelder often reiterated throughout his career that his duties differed from that of a producer; he didn't arrange the group's lineups or tell them what to play. Instead, he was charged with bolstering the sessions with the trademark vibrant, textured and robust Van Gelder sound that gave the recordings its depth.
"When people talk about my albums, they often say the music has 'space.' I tried to reproduce a sense of space in the overall sound picture," Van Gelder once said (via New York Times). "I used specific microphones located in places that allowed the musicians to sound as though they were playing from different locations in the room, which in reality they were. This created a sensation of dimension and depth."Of course, between trying to make the recording studio sound as intimate as possible, a rather important quality in post-war jazz, and countering the realities of the LP [or "long playing"] disc, a notoriously unforgiving medium that was dominant in record albums of the pre-digital decades, Van Gelder had to manipulate the studio recordings in ways that weren't always satisfying to the more persnickety musicians, such as the aforementioned Charles Mingus; those who not only didn't mind the occasionally flawed sound but regarded it is a natural feature of jazz composition and improv. As surely as musicians argue among themselves about how their music sounds, so they draw the recording engineer, often called the "extra musician", into their controversies.
Nevertheless, as long as jazz was dominant, Van Gelder created art. As jazz gave way to rock and roll, rock, RAP, and hip-hop, and as analog recording gave way to digital, Van Gelder stayed current and continued to work his magic with successive generations of musicians and composers. While his influence would be quieter after the jazz age had subsided, more than one popular musician of the 1970's and beyond would say to their producer, "I think this needs the Van Gelder sound" and, thus, find themselves along the banks of the Hudson in that cavernous studio with an old man with thick, but stylish, eyeglasses giving them exactly what they, and their fans, wanted.
Van Gelder would spend his final days re-mastering many of those original recordings into new digital presentations so that their downloadable form would be as vivid as they were when first heard by the public. He would live until his 91st year, surrendering into an eternal repose just a few miles away from that place of magic in Englewood Cliffs.
In one of this final interviews [2], Van Gelder would note:
"The idea of listening to old tapes that I made, another chance to transfer them ... this is my opportunity to present my version of how things should sound," Van Gelder said in a 2011 interview with Blue Note. "What a great job this is."
It's difficult to write of music without providing some, so we'll conclude with Theolonius Monk's Hackensack, composed as a tribute to Rudy Van Gelder and his sound.