Rudy Van Gelder, 1924-2016
And now he’s dead.
It is not very often that you hear the phrase “legendary jazz engineer,” but then there was no one else like Rudy Van Gelder, who has just passed away.
He recorded with legendary artists like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and more and an impressive majority of the Blue Note Records catalog. He was viewed by some as the most important jazz engineer of all time. He also worked with Prestige Records and Savoy Records.
This guy on Twitter is correct:
No non-musician had more influence on literal sound of jazz than Rudy Van Gelder. When we think of jazz, the sound in our head is a RVG LP
And there’s a great piece here.
Here’s the first track from Freddie Hubbard’s debut as leader, a Blue Note classic, Open Sesame, recorded at Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio over half a century ago.
Here’s the first track from Dexter Gordon’s Dexter Calling, recorded in the same place a year later.
And here, from 1964, is the first track of Blue Mitchell’s The Thing To Do, recorded at, yes, Van Gelder Studio.
Rudy Van Gelder was 91.