The Secret Legacy of Rudy Van Gelder

Jesse Klapholz‘ analysis of Rudy Van Gelder’s place in recorded music history is excerpted and adapted from his upcoming textbook, The New Cyclopedia of Jazz Recording Techniques.

It offers what may be considered a controversial take on the legendary recordist, but one worth considering and debating. These are the author’s views and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of this publication, its editors or other contributors.

Rudy Van Gelder, pictured third from the left with members of the Roger Dawson Septet in 1976. Roughly 52 at the time, he had already spent more than two decades recording some of the most seminal works in modern jazz history.

If you were to attempt to listen to all of Rudy Van Gelder’s recordings back-to-back, it would take something on the order of four months to complete.

His recording repertoire is virtually the Rosetta Stone for mainstream jazz and its evolution from big bands and dance bands to small ensembles.

Van Gelder’s professional studio—which he operated in his parent’s living room from 1953 to 1958 before upgrading to a dedicated space—was a one-man operation that allowed fledgling upstart labels including Blue Note, Prestige, Verve, Impulse and Savoy, to record myriad talents of an entirely new genre.

Upon his passing, an outpouring of praise came for his engineering work, exemplified by quotes like this one from Kile Smith of WRTI FM, Philadelphia:

“Van Gelder used a mix of types and placements of microphones to bring us as close as possible to Monk, Coltrane, Miles, Horace Silver, [and] Grover Washington, Jr. He was an engineer’s engineer, but warmth and realism, pop and juiciness exude from all his work. With all his technique, what Rudy van Gelder wanted to capture, he said, was 
the human spirit.”

RVG’s true legacy however—which is often overlooked—stems not from his technical prowess, but from the economical studio time he was able to provide to these newly emerging artists. Blue Note booked sessions that typically cut an album in two days, other labels in just one. With his one-man band approach and the low overhead that went along with it, Van Gelder facilitated an overflowing fountain of new jazz recordings that otherwise would not have been possible.

Because of this, Van Gelder became almost single-handedly responsible for the recording, establishment, and dissemination of a majority of modern jazz’s recorded corpus in his era.

This is an extraordinary achievement by itself, and is somewhat masked by the syrupy prostrations of those perpetuating the myth of Van Gelder as a “pioneering” recordist or an “engineer’s engineer.”

The reality is a little bit different. In retrospect, RVG is not the engineering giant he is sometimes made out to be. Rather, he is the David to the Goliath of the huge record labels’ well-funded and well-practiced engineering legions.

Van Gelder’s real legacy is not so much in his techniques as in the sheer volume of his output—in the huge number of influential sessions that came through his suburban New Jersey doors, which provided an affordable alternative for the burgeoning independent labels outside of the big NYC studios.

Without Van Gelder, or someone like him, we might not have nearly as vast a collection of the 1950s jazz greats.

David vs. Goliath

As recorded popular music transitioned into the big band era, larger acoustical spaces came into vogue, such as the re-purposed churches employed most notably by RCA and Columbia. During these pre-magnetic tape years, RCA ribbon microphones reigned supreme.

RCA and Columbia added to the sound of these rooms by using hard-walled basements as auxiliary reverberation chambers beginning around 1934, layering their ambience on top of the natural acoustics of large spaces, thanks to the work of RCA’s John E. Volkmann.

The artists that Van Gelder is most famous for working with however, such as Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Miles Davis amongst many others, are the pioneers of smaller jazz ensembles in contrast to the much larger (and much better financed) jazz “big bands” of that era.

These artists didn’t need the massive spaces of the big studios to make their statement. Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool, arguably a milestone in smaller jazz ensemble recordings, was captured at Capitol and at The Royal Roost jazz club, located at 1580 Broadway in New York City in 1949 and 1950. The standout tracks here are mono hi-fidelity at its best.

While a current misperception is that jazz did not exist in good quality recordings before RVG, one can listen to an abundance of recordings pre-1953. For example: Diz & Getz featuring Oscar Peterson, recorded in 1953 at Radio Recorders in Hollywood and released on the Verve label. Peterson’s piano sounds like a real piano, Max Roach and his style are immediately recognizable and the tone is perfect. Of course, the horns sound great.

Perhaps the starkest illustration of the recording quality that was available to jazz artists already comes from listening to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, recorded at Van Gelder’s new studio in Englewood Cliffs in 1964 for Impulse Records, and comparing it to the recording of Coltrane’s Giant Steps made by Tom Dowd years earlier, at Atlantic Records in NYC in 1959. Van Gelder’s 1964 recording sounds like 1954, and Dowd’s 1959 recording sounds like 1969.

To my ear, Van Gelder’s tenor sax sound has a tone that is thin and top-heavy in comparison, while on Dowd’s recording of Giant Steps, the piano sound is much clearer and more natural sounding, with a better balance overall.

These are both stereo recordings. RVG’s new studio at the time had rising cathedral ceilings, while Atlantic’s studio sat in a low-rise concrete building with 12-foot high ceilings. Still, the cymbals on the RVG recording are slightly sibilant with exaggerated stick attack compared to Dowd’s older recording in what may have been a more compromised space. (My best guess is that this effect owes to the microphones being placed a bit too close to the cymbals on Van Gelder’s recording compared to Dowd’s.)

The premiere studios of this era, located in LA and NYC, including RCA, Columbia, and Capitol’s, could churn out even higher quality still. Until the 1960s, the studios these labels employed were equipped, almost invariably, with sizable spaces, large diaphragm condenser microphones, custom mixers, and professional “suit-and-tie engineers.” The major label recordings of this era are decidedly hi-fi and clean-sounding, owing to these exemplary acoustic spaces, the low count of moderately-closely placed condenser and ribbon microphones, and the minimal signal processing and signal paths.

The title for the first mainstream American hit record in jazz belongs to Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, which emerged from this system. It was recorded in Columbia’s 30th Street recording studios 5,500 square foot church, with its 60 foot hight ceilings. Featuring a mighty and memorable solo by Joe Morello, the sound quality here is astounding, and becomes even more so when compared to Van Gelder’s recordings from around the same time.

But whatever Van Gelder may have lacked in space, technology, technique and trappings, he made up for in both affordability and sheer volume, cementing his place in the history of recorded music forever.

The Phantom of Englewood Cliffs—The Three Lives of RVG

Van Gelder’s first studio was located inside of his parents’ newly-constructed home in suburban Hackensack NJ, where he was able to offer recording services at far lower rates than those found across the East River in New York City. Image courtesy of JazzWax.

The RVG legacy can be classified into three eras, both technically and musically: The Blue Note/Prestige Years; The CTI Records Years; and The Sony/Columbia Remaster & Reissue years.

Van Gelder’s beginnings in jazz date to around 1950, when he started listening to jazz in small nightclubs, buying bits and pieces of recording gear, working with local non-label musicians, and by 1953, taking on professional recording sessions in a studio he built in his parent’s living room.

These first sessions were strictly made with small ensembles, owing to the size of the space. The provenance of the early “Blue Note Sound” comes from the size and closeness of the musicians to one another, as well as the closeness of the few microphones used, and the close reflections in that hard-surfaced room.

The second era is marked by Rudy’s opening of a new studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey in 1959. By this time, RVG was beginning to lose his 1950s clients, as many of them moved on to the major labels, and business was waning.

At the same time, Creed Taylor (later the owner of CTI Records) was working at A&M Records, building his jazz repertoire, and RVG’s affordable studio outside of the city, with its nicely-sized room was just what he needed. Armed with Don Sebesky—a great jazz pianist, composer, and arranger—Taylor began a long relationship with Van Gelder. By this time, the new RVG studio had a new trademark sound, owning in great part to Taylor and Sebesky’s contributions, as well as some of his new upgrades.

Later on in his third phase, Van Gelder, now already in his 80s, began remastering older releases for Sony and Columbia. These re-masters did not attract universal acclaim and remain controversial to this day. Some ask “how can an octogenarian make critical precision digital audio decisions?” Other reviewers opine much more positively about them.

The Early Years in Hackensack

When Van Gelder’s parents decided to build a new home in 1952, he convinced them to allow him to expand on his early experiments with his recording hobby. At the time, he had been working professionally as a optometrist for nearly a decade, in a practice he started in 1943, shortly before he turned twenty years old.

Now approaching thirty and consumed by his interest in music, Van Gelder installed a large pane of glass between the living room and an adjacent room, which he enlisted into service as his control room. All of the mixing equipment there was built from kits and parts he had cobbled together based on the advice he found at nearby electronic parts stores.

Into the 1950s, he began buying some of the early Neumann mics, similar to those in use at the big studios. The major studios already had AKG C-12s, ELAM/Telefunken 250 and 251s, and Neumann U-47 and 49s in their arsenals, and Van Gelder was eager to keep up.

Through the 1950s, RVG switched from direct-to-disk recording to magnetic tape, using Ampex tape machines—mono at first, and then stereo two-track. His first professional-level recordings, musically speaking, were in 1953 and 1954. These early recordings have little reverberation, and some close-reflections from the room, putting the sound of the instruments right up in your face, for a very intimate effect.

In this early Hackensack studio—where Van Gelder squeezed in a piano, a set of drums, and several other musicians—there was little room for large mic stands and little room to position them, leaving precious few choices for mic placement. In a small space like this one, with its 10-foot ceilings, an engineer will be apt to place the mics close in to the instruments thereby reducing the reflected sound, which could be very deleterious in such a small room.

Van Gelder was secretive about his recording methods, leading to much speculation among fans and critics about particular details. His recording techniques are often admired by fans for their transparency, warmth and presence. Richard Cook called Van Gelder’s characteristic method of recording and mixing the piano “as distinctive as the pianists’ playing” itself. But he also attracted his critics.

The grand piano recorded in this early room is one of Van Gelder’s “sound fingerprints.” For those who know what real grand pianos sound like in person, Van Gelder’s early tone may seem tantamount to converting a grand piano to a spinet through mic placement and some compensating over-compression.

These early recordings arguably lacked depth and presence by standards of that time, with some of the Wayne Shorter and John Coltrane sax tones recorded there lacking bottom-end and body, and overemphasizing the upper harmonics. (One noteworthy exception is the sax sound on the Jazz Messenger recordings of that era, which sound pleasantly full-bodied to me.)

Despite his prominence in recording jazz, some artists avoided Van Gelder’s studio. Bassist and composer Charles Mingus, for instance, refused to record with him. Taking one of the “Blindfold Tests” created by jazz musician and journalist Leonard Feather in 1960, Mingus said:

“[Van Gelder] tries to change people’s tones. I’ve seen him do it; I’ve seen him do it; I’ve seen him take Thad Jones and the way he sets him up at the mic, he can change the whole sound. That’s why I never go to him—he ruined my bass sound.”

Blue Note president and producer Alfred Lion criticized Van Gelder for what he felt was Van Gelder’s occasional overuse of reverb, and would jokingly refer to this trait as a “Rudy special” in his markings on tape boxes.

Regardless of any of these shortcomings, by 1955, Miles Davis started recording in Van Gelder’s Hackensack and would track over a dozen LPs there before moving on to work with Columbia for the 1960s. Other Jazz greats who recorded in this living room studio included Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and Milt Jackson (with and without his Modern Jazz Quartet).

Still, by the end of the 1950s, Van Gelder clearly began feeling the pressure from the big NYC studios. They had large acoustic spaces, large collections of prestigious microphones and electronic gear, often put out a far richer-sounding product, and artists there could be raucous all night long! It was time to build something new.

Phase 2: The New Studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ

Van Gelder eventually built a more professional dedicated space in Englewood Cliffs NJ, pictured here. Image courtesy of JazzWax.

In 1959, Van Gelder built a significantly larger new space which was much closer in its acoustics to what one would expect to find in a contemporary commercial recording studio.

He knew that he had to build a studio with a main space comparable in size to the major operations across the river in New York in order to remain competitive. He also knew he had to build some isolation booths and that he needed a good reverb in his arsenal. During his design phase, he attended a session at Columbia where he met engineer Frank Laico, and he would later credit that visit with heavily influencing the new studio’s design.

The word “cathedral” is often seen in descriptions of the Englewood Cliffs studio design. This word typically conjures up images in one’s mind of some vast and holy space, but this may be overstating the case. “Cathedral” is routinely used in the building disciplines and real estate business to reference an architectural element of a vaulted beam-and-purlin construction. Though large, the space was nowhere near the scale found in the major studios just a few miles east in New York City.

Though he was secretive about his process, in building this studio Van Gelder undoubtedly drew on the work published by prominent acousticians like Vern Knudsen of UCLA, Leo Beranek of MIT, John Volkmann and Michael Rettinger of RCA—some of the “grandfathers” of modern studio acoustics.

Their texts and lectures, widely available at the time, set criteria for maximum permissible noise levels, as well as methods for taming HVAC systems to meet them; methods to mitigate and control vibration and mechanical-borne sound; reverberation time criteria; room volume; and guidelines for ratios of length, width, and height.

The new studio was an immediate sonic success and a dramatic improvement over his earlier space. However, when his first major proponent and client, Alfred Lion of Blue Note, left the label, both Blue Note and Prestige Records almost immediately began using other engineers as some musicians were vocal in complaining about Rudy’s methods and mannerisms.

Fortunately at the same time, producer Creed Taylor started working with arranger/composer Don Sebesky at Van Gelder’s new Englewood Cliffs studio under the A&M Record label, which was later spun off as CTI Records.

The more impressive “New Rudy Van Gelder Sound” owes much to the larger space, the exclusive use of close condenser microphones, the recently-acquired EMT Plate Reverb, and the producers, arrangers and performers of CTI.

Epilogue

So, the question remains: Was Rudy a pioneer, a giant, a teacher? To the dismay of many hi-fi aficionados, music critics and recordists, Van Gelder was not a pioneer in any technical sense. He has no inventions to his credit, nor any techniques that can be traced back to him. He was certainly not a teacher or mentor, and kept his approach mostly to himself.

While any criticism of Van Gelder will seem sacrilegious to many jazz fans, that does not change the reality that there is much speculation but no real documentation to support painting a portrait of Van Gelder’s work as “groundbreaking” in the realms of technique or technology—nor are there any “audio artifacts” in his recordings that seem to lead to any such conclusion.

True technical pioneers of this era might include Bill Putnam at United Recorders in Chicago, Les Paul, and Jack Mullin, who brought magnetic tape recording to the US post-WWII and spearheaded its further development at Rangertone and then at Ampex. RCA’s Dr. John E. Volkmann developed much of the practical science of acoustics and mentored men like Michael Rettinger who designed LA’s Capitol Recording Studios. They shared their wealth of knowledge with the world, because that is what pioneering scientists are inclined to do.

Van Gelder, for all his contributions to the rich history of recorded music did not share his approaches or techniques, did not belong to Audio Engineering Society or give interviews or contribute papers about his work. But for all his famed secrecy, nothing in Van Gelder’s hardware inventory lends much or any credence to speculations of “secret” microphones or mic techniques.

What Van Gelder did have however, was a good working knowledge of audio equipment and the interest, energy, and ability to capture the moment of a burgeoning new music explosion.

The myriad sessions that came through Van Gelder’s studio are his legacy. It is the sheer volume and vastness of exciting recordings from the “Birth of the Cool” era that stands the test of time more than any technique or technical insight. The new sounds that these musicians made are the basis of all the success that would later be attributed to Van Gelder’s “secret” methods.

His deepest legacy is ultimately in the music he was witness to, and which he recorded for the enjoyment of and fascination of generations to come. This was music so new and unique that one does not come to listen for the audio quality—rather, they are in rapture over the music.

Despite Van Gelder’s lack of any technical legacy that anyone can confidently confirm, he shall remain a giant and benefactor of the golden age of Jazz.

How so? His relatively low rates allowed smaller independent labels including Blue Note and Verve to produce countless landmark albums that otherwise may never have been cut.

This is the real Van Gelder legacy. Without his passion for capturing this rich and enduring musical history, the world of music would have been left a much poorer place.

Jesse Klapholz is a former Executive Editor of The Journal of the Audio Engineering Society and is now retired and mixing and mastering jazz projects in his home studio, Melrose Mixin’ Masters.

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