Rudy Van Gelder; perfected sound of jazz on record . By Peter Keepnews
New York Times . NEW YORK - Rudy Van Gelder, an audio engineer whose
work with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and numerous other musicians
helped define the sound of jazz on record, died on Thursday at his
home, which doubled as his studio, in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by his assistant, Maureen Sickler. Mr. Van
Gelder, as he took pains to explain to interviewers, was an engineer
and not a producer. He was not in charge of the sessions he recorded;
he did not hire the musicians or play any role in choosing the
repertoire. But he had the final say in what the records sounded like,
and he was, in the view of countless producers, musicians, and
listeners, better at that than anyone. The many albums he engineered
for Blue Note, Prestige, Impulse, and other labels in the 1950s and
'60s included acknowledged classics like Coltrane's "A Love Supreme,"
Davis's "Walkin', " Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage," Sonny Rollins's
"Saxophone Colossus," and Horace Silver's "Song for My Father. In the
1970s he worked primarily for CTI Records, the most commercially
successful jazz label of the period, where his discography included hit
albums like Esther Phillips's "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes" and
Grover Washington Jr. s "Mister Magic. "I think I've been associated
with more records, technically, than anybody else in the history of the
record business," Mr. Van Gelder told The New York Times in 1988. Mr.
Van Gelder was reluctant to reveal too many specifics about his
recording techniques. But he was clear about his goal: He wanted, he
told Marc Myers of the website JazzWax in 2012, "to get electronics to
accurately capture the human spirit," and to make the records he
engineered sound "as warm and as realistic as possible. Comparing Mr.
Van Gelder's approach to that of other engineers in the journal Current
Musicology in 2001, Dan Skea observed, "Whereas earlier jazz recordings
seemed to come at the listener from a distance, Mr. Van Gelder found
ways to approach and capture the music at closer range, and to more
clearly convey jazz's characteristic sense of immediacy. Mr. Van Gelder
himself put it this way: "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. He added: "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. He also prided
himself on being at the cutting edge of recording technology. He was
one of the first engineers in the United States to use the
state-of-the-art microphones made by the German company Neumann
(because, he said, a Neumann "could capture sounds that other
microphones couldn't"). He was early to embrace magnetic recording tape
and then digital recording. Rudolph Van Gelder was born in Jersey City,
N.J. He became interested in jazz at an early age - he played trumpet,
although by his own account not well - while developing a parallel
passion for sound technology. When he was 12 he acquired a home
recording device that included a turntable and discs. In high school he
became a ham radio operator. But he did not originally think he could
make a living as a recording engineer, and attended the Pennsylvania
College of Optometry in Philadelphia. For more than a decade he was an
optometrist by day and a recording engineer in his spare time. He
originally worked out of a studio in his parents' living room in
Hackensack, N.J. Not until 1959 could he afford to make engineering his
full-time oc'cup'ation, shifting his base of operations to an elaborate
home studio that he designed himself in Englewood Cliffs. In 1952,
after he had been recording 78-rpm discs of local musicians and singers
for several years, he attracted the attention of Alfred Lion of Blue
Note Records, the leading jazz label of the day. Lion began using him
regularly, and other record companies quickly followed suit. Mr. Van
Gelder was known not just for his skill as an engineer but also for his
fastidiousness, as exemplified by his insistence on wearing gloves
while working. Unlike many audio engineers, Mr. Van Gelder was involved
in every aspect of making records, from preparation to mastering, the
final stage in the process, in which the music on tape was transferred
to disc for record-plant pressing. "I always wanted to be in control of
the entire recording chain," he said. "Why not? It had my name on it.
In 1999 he began remastering many of his Blue Note sessions for CD; the
results were released to much fanfare as the Rudy Van Gelder Editions.
He later did the same for his Prestige and CTI recordings. Mr. Van
Gelder was married twice; both marriages ended with his wives' deaths.
He leaves a brother, Leon. He was named a National Endowment for the
Arts Jazz Master in 2009 and received lifetime achievement awards from
the Recording Academy in 2012 and the Audio Engineering Society in
2013.
