Rudy Van Gelder

[Michael Fitzgerald]

He Helped Put The Blue In Blue Note -

The History of Jazz Runs Through Rudy Van Gelder

Super-typical article on RVG - not yet on the NYT website. It's an entire page - more than half of which is filled with Francis Wolff photos - and not the most common ones, either. It is indeed nice to see this in the NYT - their jazz coverage has declined in quantity and quality to a dismal level. This really isn't news, though.

Mike

[makpjazz57]

Mike,

Who is the author of the RVG article?

Thanks,

Marla

[Michael Fitzgerald]

J. Greg Phelan - doesn't ring a bell with me. Typically the NJ section has its own group of writers who get stuff in there but not the "regular" NYT.

Now on the website:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/nyregion/22njJAZZ.html

Unfortunately only two phohtos there - typical Miles and a modern-day RVG. The paper has Max, Benson, Dexter, Coltrane, and Herbie in addition.

===========================================

May 22, 2005

He Helped Put the Blue in Blue Note

By J. GREG PHELAN

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS

It is one of the cathedrals of jazz, Rudy Van Gelder's studio here, a sacred acoustic space where some of the music's giants and near giants have done their finest work: Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver, Art Blakey and Herbie Hancock, Antonio Carlos Jobim and George Benson and hundreds of others.

"I try not to think about who else has recorded there," Wayne Escoffery, the tenor saxophonist in Ben Riley's Monk Legacy Septet, said after a recent session. "But there was one time, I was recording 'Dedicated to You' with Gloria Cooper, and I started thinking about John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman recording that song at Rudy's. I felt like Coltrane was watching over me as I played my solo, and it was a little intimidating."

The studio even feels like a rustic chapel, its 39-foot-high cedar ceiling held up by arches of laminated Douglas fir. The space is as timeless and pristine as the music that has been captured here by Mr. Van Gelder, whom many jazz fans consider the greatest recording engineer ever. He opened it in 1959, after spending most of the 1950's recording people like Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley in his parents' living room in Hackensack and refining the sound of recorded jazz working with Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records and other producers.

But Mr. Van Gelder isn't inclined to look backward. He has not succumbed to the deification of fans, and his workplace is not yet ready to become a mere shrine. Mr. Van Gelder, who declined to give his age, still excels at his trade and makes sure that his studio remains world class.

Despite his considerable reputation in the jazz world, Mr. Van Gelder deflects any credit for the sounds he has recorded over the decades. He says that praise should go to the musicians, and to the producers who hire and direct them.

"I'm an engineer, not a producer," he said with characteristic precision during a recent interview in his studio here. "I'm the person who makes the recording process work. I built the studio, I created the environment in which they play, I selected, installed and operate the equipment. An analogy might be, someone wanted to put a man on the moon, but it was an engineer who got him there.

"My goal is to make the musicians sound the way they want to be heard."

He has certainly done that. And it's a legacy that Blue Note is preserving. The company has established "The Rudy Van Gelder Series," which consists of more than 200 classic Blue Note albums remastered by him. And Blue Note recently released "Blue Note Perfect Takes," a collection of essential tracks that Mr. Van Gelder picked for their sonic and musical excellence; the collection also includes an interview with him on DVD.

Since he began working professionally in the early 1950's, Mr. Van Gelder has recorded, mixed and mastered more than 2,100 albums, according to the All Music Guide to Jazz (there are 67 releases listed for Coltrane alone). Besides Blue Note, other major labels he has worked for include Prestige, Savoy, Verve, Impulse and CTI.

Don Sickler, the producer and trumpet player for Ben Riley's Monk Legacy Septet, has worked with Mr. Van Gelder since the 1970's. He said that he believes an essential ingredient in Mr. Van Gelder's success is his ability to seize on the individual sound of each player in his studio: "Freddie Hubbard said it, and I'll say it, too. When you record at Rudy's, you get your sound, not a quote unquote trumpet sound."

To Mr. Escoffery, a lot of that has to do with Mr. Van Gelder's deep musical knowledge, which spans most of the 20th century. "Rudy knows where I'm coming from based on his long experience with tenor saxophones," he said. "He's recorded most of the major innovators of the tenor, if not all of them."

With his extraordinary ear and problem-solving ability, Mr. Van Gelder has spent five decades pioneering the use of technology to capture the wide range of jazz instruments, from the delicate tone of Miles Davis's mute trumpet to the hard attack of Jimmy Smith's Hammond organ. From the early days, when he had to build all his own equipment, to the advent of digital recording, he has embraced any technical advance that helps him achieve the best sound possible. One recent example is a 2004 SurroundSound recording he did for the bassist Buster Williams called "Griot Liberté."

And when he's resurrecting some of his old work, he uses a vast array of analog equipment to carry the recordings into the digital age. For just one set of CD's in "The Van Gelder Series," he used turntables, cartridges and electronics designed for recordings of that time to transfer the originals from 16-inch lacquer master disks to digital media.

But it's not always easy to maintain equipment that is no longer supported by defunct companies. When a reel-to-reel master recorder that Mr. Van Gelder uses for playback failed a few months ago, he had to call on a friend who is an aerospace engineer.

"Watching how his mind worked was a beautiful thing to see," he said. "There were two of us in the control room. He tuned me out and started leafing through the two-and-a-half-inch-thick manual, talking softly to himself, analyzing the schematics, page after page, and finally isolated the problem as a shorted diode. Keeping analog equipment working is becoming a very shaky thing."

Mr. Van Gelder clearly meets the ongoing challenge to not only remain modern, but also to maintain a constant state of readiness to capture the spontaneity of a performance, a spontaneity that is essential to jazz. When Ben Riley's septet played a sample of the next song for him, he quickly rechecked the recording levels, careful not to let them rehearse too long. "It sounds great, don't waste it," he declared, providing another track number before he captured the band's performance of Thelonious Monk's "Epistrophy."

After each take, the producer, Mr. Sickler, relied on Mr. Van Gelder to swiftly play back specific sections of the performance so the septet could make any necessary adjustments: "to fix the note coming into the bridge" or "punch up the horns on the last three bars," providing ample evidence of what Mr. Van Gelder describes as his ability to understand what the musicians are trying to do in real time.

The recording isn't finished when the session is complete: working with the producer, the tracks must be sequenced, and levels and other parameters adjusted to achieve the final mix and perform the mastering. Unlike most recordings made today, in which different engineering tasks are farmed out to different people, Mr. Van Gelder performs every stage himself. "I don't do a session without the understanding that I will do all the steps, the original recording, the mixing and the mastering," he said. "To have each of those steps done by different people, sometimes dozens, in my opinion - and this applies only to acoustic jazz - imposes an impenetrable wall between the musicians and the final result."

Sitting behind the console at the session, Mr. Van Gelder may not wear the white gloves that at least one mistaken critic claimed, but he clearly is a perfectionist. Even so, there is also evidence of the pleasure of an eminently competent man doing exactly what he wants to do.

After the third and best take of "Epistrophy," the musicians directed their satisfied glances toward the control room, only to hear the most famous recording engineer in jazz history ask dryly, "Are you ready to record it now?"

=====================================

Mike

[Dan Gould]

Thanks for posting this, Mike. Normally I'm reading the NYT on Sundays, but my schedule isn't allowing it. But since you posted the link, I was able to catch the article.

[brownie]

RVG remasters get the Reuters treatment...

JAZZ LABELS RELY ON ENGINEERS BOLD TOUCH

By Dan Ouellette

In jazz, the RVG brand has mighty clout and speaks multiple volumes on sonic purity.

It's no surprise then that Blue Note and Prestige are capitalizing on the RVG tag with a new series featuring remastered classic CDs.

The man behind the abbreviation is Rudy Van Gelder, the sound engineer who revolutionized the way jazz is recorded, beginning in 1954 in his parents' living room in Hackensack, N.J., and continuing in his own studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., from 1959 to the present. He recorded all the jazz greats who made first-class discs for all the important in-the-day indies such as Blue Note, Prestige, Impulse, Verve and CTI.

"Rudy defined the way several generations expect to hear jazz," says Michael Cuscuna, director of catalog for Blue Note and the impetus behind the label's RVG Series. "He's the one who got closest to the way jazz sounds live at front-row center. Most engineers in the '50s were timid and moved the microphones away from the musicians. Rudy miked up close, recorded with as much volume as possible to avoid hiss and got the power, clarity and individuality of all the players."

Adds freelance engineer Joe Ferla, who started recording in 1971 and has worked with a range of musicians from drummers Paul Motian and Bobby Previte to guitarists John Scofield and Charlie Hunter: "Rudy changed the way we perceive jazz recordings and the way engineers approach jazz."

Bassist Ron Carter, who recorded many of his own albums as well as hundreds of session dates at Van Gelder's studio, says, "Rudy not only set and maintained the standard of jazz recordings, but he also set the standard for recording the acoustic bass."

Blue Note's RVG Series, which started years ago, continues with February's release of more than a dozen gems including Dexter Gordon's "Dippin"' and Lee Morgan's "Tom Cat." Two more batches arrive September 12 and 26, including dates by Donald Byrd ("Off to the Races") and Horace Silver ("Doin' the Thing at the Village Gate").

Meanwhile, Prestige Now, an imprint of Concord Music Group, inaugurated its own RVG series in March with 10 masterworks, including Sonny Rollins' "Saxophone Colossus" and the Miles Davis Quintet's "Relaxin'."

Van Gelder, in an e-mail exchange, says that he remembers the sessions and the artists well, and that today he still "feels strongly that I am their messenger." More Prestige RVG remasters arrive June 13 and July 18, including discs by Etta Jones ("Don't Go to Strangers") and Oliver Nelson ("Screamin' the Blues").

Here's how the labels work with Van Gelder: They send him the masters that he originally recorded. "First I examine the tapes to see if they're playable," he explains. "Next step, I hook up a chain to do an analog transfer. Every tape is different, so I do a lot of listening."

When asked if he has any favorites in the upcoming Prestige series, Van Gelder at first says, "I can't have a favorite." Then he notes, "But anything with Miles Davis is OK with me. And Etta Jones is pure emotion on this album." As for the Blue Note series, he says, "They're all great music. I love them all, but Horace Silver is something special."

Cuscuna says that when he first approached Van Gelder to revisit the masters, he was hesitant: "Rudy was reticent to look to the past. But then it kicked in how much more he could do with the new equipment and what he had learned. He saw it as a challenge and opportunity. He's given a new lease on life to some of these titles as Rudy brings the music out of the tape."

Reuters

[mgraham333]

RVG remasters get the Reuters treatment...

...Van Gelder, in an e-mail exchange, says that he remembers the sessions and the artists well, and that today he still "feels strongly that I am their messenger."...

Interesting.... he also "says" that on the back of the Prestige RVG Remasters.

[chris olivarez]

RVG describing himself as the artists "messenger" is a valid claim no matter how many times he says it.

[mr jazz]

interesting articles. thanks for posting.

[clifford_thornton]

I'm bumping this because I've been thinking recently about RVG remasters vs. McMasters. There are a lot of RVG-related threads and discussions, and maybe I'm beating a dead horse (1) and bringing it up in an irrelevant topic (2).

How much compression is RVG using vs. McMaster?

It seems like Rudy is using more to me, but not being an expert in this end of things, I don't know. Having compared RVG editions of the Ike Quebec records with the McMaster Conns, I prefer the latter - to me, they seem "hotter."

Anybody care to weigh in or point me to a better discussion of this topic?

[Big Al]

Current thread at Hoffman forums

[sheldonm]

...what is a "gort"?

[Christiern]

...what is a "gort"?

As far as I can tell, "gorts" are members of a protective group who keep one finger on the "thread closed" button and use it at the slightest sign of a poster departing from a norm that defies reason. They are generally frequency freaks who greet each other with sound waves.

[Chuck Nessa]

Never hung around enough to learn the lingo.

[jazzbo]

Gorts are probably Trogs.

[clifford_thornton]

So if RVG wasn't ramping up the compression, the trebly sound wouldn't be as much of a problem, and v.v.

[BruceH]

...what is a "gort"?

Overactive moderators, I believe.

("Once given over, this power cannot be revoked.")

Edited October 2, 2008 by BruceH

[sheldonm]

...what is a "gort"?

Overactive moderators, I believe.

("Once given over, this power cannot be revoked.")

....guess I'll just stay here where I'm a "funkateer"!