Rudy Van Gelder

Rudolph Van Gelder (November 2, 1924 – August 25, 2016) was an American recording engineer who specialized in jazz. Over more than half a century, he recorded several thousand sessions, with musicians including Booker Ervin, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Smith, Art Blakey, Bud Powell, Lee Morgan, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Grant Green, and George Benson. Van Gelder worked with many different record companies, and recorded almost every session on Blue Note Records from 1953 to 1967.

He worked on albums including Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Davis' Walkin', Hancock's Maiden Voyage, Rollins' Saxophone Colossus, and Silver's Song for My Father. Van Gelder is regarded as being one of the most influential engineers in jazz.

Van Gelder was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. His parents, Louis Van Gelder and Sarah née Cohen ran a women's clothing store in Passaic. His interest in microphones and electronics can be traced to a youthful enthusiasm for amateur radio. He was also a longtime jazz fan. His uncle, for whom Rudy was named, had been the drummer for Ted Lewis' band in the mid-1930s. During his high school years, Rudy Van Gelder took trumpet lessons and played in the school band.

Van Gelder trained as an optometrist at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania College of Optometry because he did not think he could earn a living as a recording engineer. He received an O.D. degree from the institution in 1946. Thereafter, he maintained an optometry practice in Teaneck, New Jersey, until 1959 when he made the transition to full-time recording engineer.

In the evenings after work, Van Gelder recorded local musicians who wanted 78-rpm recordings of their work. From 1946, Van Gelder recorded in his parents' house in Hackensack, New Jersey, in which a control room was built adjacent to the living room, which served as the musicians' performing area. The dry acoustics of the working space were partly responsible for Van Gelder's inimitable recording aesthetic.

"When I first started, I was interested in improving the quality of the playback equipment I had," he commented in 2005; "I never was really happy with what I heard. I always assumed the records made by the big companies sounded better than what I could reproduce. So that's how I got interested in the process. I acquired everything I could to play back audio: speakers, turntables, amplifiers". One of Van Gelder's friends, the baritone saxophonist Gil Mellé, introduced him to Alfred Lion, a producer for Blue Note Records, in 1953.

In the 1950s, Van Gelder performed engineering and mastering for the classical label Vox Records. He became a full-time recording engineer in 1959. In 1959, he moved Van Gelder Studio to a larger purpose-built facility in Englewood Cliffs, a few miles southeast of the original location. An obituarist in the Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, wrote of "Van Gelder's extreme fastidiousness" as an engineer, and his insistence on "no food or drink in the studio, and on no account was anyone to touch a microphone. He himself always wore gloves when handling equipment".

Though his output slowed, Van Gelder remained active as a recording engineer into the new century. In the late 1990s, he worked as a recording engineer for some of the songs featured in the soundtracks for the Japanese anime series Cowboy Bebop. From 1999, he remastered the analog Blue Note recordings he had made several decades earlier into 24-bit digital recordings in its RVG Edition series. He was positive about the switch from analog to digital technology. He told Audio magazine in 1995: