Rudy Van Gelder

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Rudy Van Gelder (3rd from left) with the Roger Dawson Septet in front of his studio in Englewood Cliffs (around 1981)

Rudolph "Rudy" Van Gelder (born November 2, 1924 in Jersey City , New Jersey; † August 25, 2016 in Englewood Cliffs ) was an American sound engineer and operator of his own recording studio , which had specialized in jazz recordings.

During the 1950s and 1960s Van Gelder was best known for his work for the music label Blue Note Records ; he worked with almost all the important jazz musicians of the time. Since the late 1990s, Van Gelder has mainly focused on the digital post-processing of his old original recordings. For the All Music Guide he is the best sound engineer in jazz history.

Life

Even as a teenager, interested Van Gelder for sound engineering , where his interest was initially limited to the reproduction of records. Van Gelder, who had trained as an optician , later dealt with recording technology and, in addition to his actual job, worked as a sound engineer for regional radio stations and small jazz labels. He initially ran his own recording studio in his parents' house in Hackensack (New Jersey). His first recordings were made on March 2, 1952 with the jazz saxophonist led Gil Mellé Septet , which Alfred Lion released in 1953 on his Blue Note Records label. In 1959, Van Gelder gave up his job as an optician and set up a studio in Englewood Cliffs , a small town just a few kilometers southeast of Hackensack, where he worked until the end. The first recordings were made there on August 12, 1959 for Coleman Hawkins With The Red Garland Trio . Van Gelder was married twice.

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Van Gelder knew like no other how to implement the wishes of the musicians and composers with regard to the sound. He also had a keen understanding of the recording technology of the 1950s and 60s. The difficulty was that recordings were still being played live at that time, i. H. all the musicians required for a recording came to the studio and played a track in a so-called take - sometimes more than ten minutes long. If you wanted to record the music on tape , you had to consider the different volume levels, sound spectra and directional characteristics of the individual instruments, depending on the individual factors, as well as the resulting suitability of different microphone types . Van Gelder now had the ability to group musicians and microphones in such a way that the sound could be recorded on tape as optimally as possible (corresponding to the live performance). He said in an interview about his obsession with reproducing the optimal sound as follows:

“Quality is what drives the work I do. From the beginning, that's all I would think about, day and night: How could I make the recordings that I made sound better? "

“Quality is the engine of my work. From the beginning I only thought about one thing day and night: How can I make my recordings sound better? "

Logo of Blue Note Records, Van Gelder's longstanding client

Van Gelder saw himself as a sound engineer in the literal sense, i.e. H. someone who not only stands for the quality of the recording itself, but also takes care of setting up the necessary technology. Especially at the beginning, recordings were made in the studios of the major radio stations . In accordance with their actual purpose, however, these were technically and personally geared towards the production of radio reports. Special studio technology, as is common today, was hardly available at the time. The Van Gelder studio in Englewood Cliffs is still state-of-the-art today.

Van Gelder also left nothing to chance when it came to making the so-called fathers (the master negative, so to speak) for the production of records . Van Gelder mostly copied the tape recordings himself onto the lacquer film from which his father was later made. In the early days, Van Gelder gave each of these foils the signature RVG by hand . The signature was later made using a stamp.

The clients of the Van Gelder Studios were primarily the jazz label Blue Note Records. From 1953 to 1967, almost all of the studio recordings for Blue Note were made under Van Gelder's leadership, which is why he is considered the creator of the clear and balanced Blue Note sound . Although he also works for Ozzie Cadenas Savoy Records , Orrin Keepnews ' and Bill Grauer's Riverside, Bob Weinstock's Prestige and Bob Thiele's Impulse! Records and later worked for Creed Taylor's Verve , CTI Records and the classic label Vox, his name is mostly only associated with Blue Note.

Van Gelder worked with musicians such as Thelonious Monk , Miles Davis , John Coltrane, and Art Blakey . Not least because of this, Van Gelder and Alfred Lion (as producers) have had a lasting impact on bebop and the subsequent jazz styles. One of the most famous recordings from Van Gelder's studio is John Coltrane's A Love Supreme from 1964, which was produced in collaboration with producer Bob Thiele for Impulse! originated. In 1965 the album received two Grammy nominations and is referred to in jazz literature as "John Coltrane's legendary album".

Since 1999, Blue Note has published the so-called The Rudy Van Gelder Edition ( RVG Edition for short ) in collaboration with Van Gelder . Here recordings from the 1950s and 60s were remastered from the original tape recordings using modern 24- bit technology. Most of the original recordings were made under the direction of Van Gelder, but recordings such as Birth of the Cool by Miles Davis from 1949/50 were also reworked. Van Gelder later devoted himself to the digital processing of the recordings he was in charge of for Prestige Records, which have been available as the Rudy Van Gelder Series since 2006 .

Awards & honors

Awards

In 2009 Rudy Van Gelder received the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship .

In 2012 he received the Grammy Trustees Award alongside Dave Bartholomew and Steve Jobs .

In 2013 he was awarded the gold medal of the Audio Engineering Society (AES).

Dedications from musicians

An indication of Van Gelder's reputation and the mythical overtones of his name among musicians is the long list of jazz pieces dedicated to him and his studios.

Recordings (selection)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b biography ( memento of August 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) from NEA page
  2. ↑ David A. Graham: Track of the Day: 'Hackensack' by Thelonious Monk. In: The Atlantic. August 25, 2016.
  3. ↑ Steve Huey: Rudy Van Gelder - Biography . In: Allmusic.com. Retrieved December 28, 2006 .
  4. ↑ Rudy Van Gelder, Audio Engineer Who Helped Define Sound of Jazz on Record, Dies at 91. In: The New York Times . August 25, 2016.
  5. ↑ Jeff Forlenza: Rudy Van Gelder - Jazz and the Art of Technical Excellence. (No longer available online.) In: Mixonline.com. May 1, 2005, archived from the original on April 18, 2010 ; Retrieved December 28, 2006 .
  6. ↑ a b Ashley Kahn : A Love Supreme. John Coltrane's legendary album. Rogner and Bernhard Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-8077-0030-7 .
  7. ↑ The Rudy Van Gelder Edition ( Memento November 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) at: bluenote.com
  8. ↑ AES Gold Medal Award: Rudolph Van Gelder .
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 24, 2007 .
personal data
SURNAME Van Gelder, Rudy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Van Gelder, Rudolph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sound engineer and recording studio operator
DATE OF BIRTH November 2, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Jersey City , New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH August 25, 2016
Place of death Englewood Cliffs