![]() ![]() The engineer also captured atmospheric concert recordings in Manhattan clubs for the likes of Rollins and Blakey. Moreover, the sound of these records has served as the sonic ideal for jazz - and much other music - up to the present day.īefore Van Gelder opened his purpose-built Englewood Cliffs studio in 1959, he fashioned a studio in the living room of his parents’ house in nearby Hackensack, where he first started recording in the late ’40s - taping Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Jimmy Smith and the Modern Jazz Quartet there with unprecedented depth and dimension. But the list goes on and on, with Van Gelder recording evergreen albums by Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Grant Green, Red Garland, Eric Dolphy, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Stanley Turrentine, Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean, Andrew Hill and Wayne Shorter, among many others. ![]() The classic albums Van Gelder put to tape include Coltrane’s Blue Train and A Love Supreme, Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else, Kenny Burrell’s Midnight Blue and Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay. Working in the heyday of recorded jazz, he set the standard by capturing artists for such other top labels as Prestige, Riverside, Verve and Impulse. Van Gelder didn’t only engineer magical sessions for Blue Note. Van Gelder was the architect of what become known as “the Blue Note sound,” which author Richard Havers described in Uncompromising Expression, his book on Blue Note, as a sound so present that it “makes you feel as if it were recorded just a few minutes before you hear it, almost as though the musicians were next door.”Īchieving such musical realism on record was both a science and an art: “part technology, part architecture… part alchemy.” The rich detail of the drums, the organic tone of the double-bass, the warmth of the piano and the ravishing, almost vocal sound of horns and guitar - all that was lightning Van Gelder bottled for future generations to enjoy. It was in his studios there that Rudy Van Gelder engineered albums for, most famously, Blue Note Records in the 1950s and ’60s. Some of the greatest recordings in jazz history - by such artists as John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Herbie Hancock - were made in the unlikely locale of suburban New Jersey. ![]()
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