If you own twenty classic jazz albums, there is a fair chance the same man recorded eight of them — in his parents’ living room, or in a church-like building he designed on a hill in New Jersey. This is his story.
Rudy Van Gelder was born in Jersey City in 1924 and qualified as an optometrist. He practised for years, fitting glasses during the day and recording jazz musicians in the evenings and at weekends, and did not go full-time into engineering until the end of the 1950s.
By then he had already recorded a substantial portion of the music the rest of us think of as the canon.
The living room in Hackensack
The first studio was his parents’ house on Prospect Avenue in Hackensack, New Jersey.
His father had built the living room to Van Gelder’s specification, with a control room attached. Musicians would arrive at a suburban family home, set up among the furniture, and make records that sounded better than anything coming out of the major studios in Manhattan.
Blue Note’s Alfred Lion started bringing sessions there in the early 1950s. Prestige followed.
Savoy too. For most of that decade, if you were making a hard bop record on the East Coast, you were very likely doing it in a house in Hackensack.
Englewood Cliffs
In 1959 Van Gelder opened a purpose-built studio a few miles away in Englewood Cliffs, and it is one of the few recording spaces that is genuinely famous in its own right.
The building has a high arched ceiling supported by laminated wooden arches, and photographs of it look more like a modern chapel than a studio. Musicians consistently described the atmosphere as quiet and slightly reverent.
He worked there for more than fifty years, until his death in 2016 at the age of 91.
The records
The list is close to absurd. A partial version: John Coltrane‘s Blue Train and A Love Supreme, Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, Art Blakey’s Moanin’, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Horace Silver’s Song for My Father, Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder, Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil, Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch!, Grant Green’s Idle Moments, and the four Miles Davis Prestige albums from 1956.
He also recorded for Impulse!, Verve and CTI, which means the range runs from 1950s hard bop through to 1970s jazz-funk.
The sound
What people mean by “the Van Gelder sound” is fairly specific.
Horns are close-miked and present, with a slight forward edge to the tenor saxophone in particular. Drums are crisp rather than roomy, and the cymbals have a shimmer that became a signature. The bass is usually firm and well-defined at a time when a great many jazz records had almost no bottom end at all.
Not everyone admires it. His piano sound has been criticised for decades as hard and somewhat clangy, and some audiophiles prefer the work of engineers like Roy DuNann at Contemporary. Bill Evans is said to have disliked how he was recorded.
The counter-argument is simply that the records sound like themselves. A Blue Note session from 1964 is identifiable within about two seconds, and that identity is substantially his.
The secrecy
Van Gelder was famously unwilling to explain how he worked.
He wore gloves when handling microphones. He discouraged photographs of his equipment, declined to name the gear he used, and did not welcome questions about technique. Musicians who recorded with him for twenty years reported knowing almost nothing about his methods.
Whether this was protectiveness, professional discretion or straightforward temperament depends on who is telling the story. The effect was to turn a working engineer into a mystery, which in turn did no harm to the mystique of the records.
The RVG Editions
From the late 1990s, Van Gelder remastered a large number of his own recordings for CD reissue, released as the RVG Edition series by Blue Note and Prestige.
These divide opinion sharply. His stated position was that he was finally able to realise what he had originally intended, having been limited by the technology of the time. Critics argued the remasters were brightened and compressed relative to the original pressings.
The practical upshot is that if you buy a reissue, the mastering is worth checking. A great many listeners prefer the earlier CD transfers or the analogue-sourced vinyl reissues such as Blue Note’s Tone Poet series.
Why it matters
Recording engineers are usually invisible, and the fact that one became a household name among jazz listeners tells you something about how much of the music’s character lives in the room rather than the notes.
Van Gelder’s studios shaped what a jazz quintet was supposed to sound like for at least two decades. When contemporary musicians talk about wanting a warm, dry, close-up sound, they are describing a room in New Jersey, whether they know it or not.
Where to go next
For the sound, compare directly. Put on a Blue Note session from the mid-1960s and then something recorded elsewhere in the same period — a Contemporary date from Los Angeles, or an Atlantic session — and the differences are obvious within a chorus.
For the story, the Blue Note documentary It Must Schwing and the label’s own archival material cover the Hackensack and Englewood Cliffs years, and photographs of the Englewood Cliffs interior are worth looking up on their own.
Which Van Gelder recording sounds best to you? Let us know in the comments below.
More on the people and places behind the records in the Jazzfuel archive — or sign up for the Weekend Edition newsletter for a jazz reading list every Saturday.
