Van Gelder Studio And The Blue Word Sound

Blue Word’s founders, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, signed among the most good musical minds in trendy jazz. From Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis to John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, they recorded the music’s greatest and largest names. However arguably, essentially the most important individual they set to work for the corporate wasn’t a musician in any respect. He was, once they first encountered him, a part-time, self-taught sound engineer named Rudy Van Gelder. An expert optometrist by day, at evening Van Gelder, additionally a jazz fan, recorded musicians in a studio he had arrange in the lounge of his guardian’s house in New Jersey. It was in that home, situated at 25 Prospect Avenue, Hackensack, that what we now know because the Blue Word sound was born.

Blue Word had been working for 13 years when Alfred Lion met Van Gelder in 1952. Lion had been impressed by the audio high quality of a session by saxophonist/composer Gil Mellé, recorded by the engineer at his Hackensack studio. Lion needed to duplicate the album’s sound on the label’s ordinary recording house, WOR studios in New York Metropolis, however was advised by its resident engineer that it wasn’t potential and that he ought to contact the one that made the Mellé recording. And that’s how Blue Word discovered the person who would give them their traditional sound.

Blue Word started recording solely at Hackensack from 1953 onwards, and the impeccable sound high quality of their Van Gelder-engineered classes – outlined by readability, depth, heat, and sonic element – didn’t escape the eye of different jazz labels. Actually, rival jazz indie Status, run by Bob Weinstock, additionally started hiring Van Gelder’s studio and providers in an try to emulate the Blue Word sound. However this didn’t bother Blue Word – somewhat, the advance in audio high quality benefitted jazz as a complete, and the label’s albums nonetheless sounded distinctive. That was a results of Alfred Lion being explicit about what he preferred. Evidently, as a producer he was extra particular than Weinstock – he preferred the music to swing, for one factor – and, consequently, was extra organized. Lion had clearly targeted objectives in thoughts and paid the Blue Word musicians for a number of days’ rehearsal earlier than the classes. In distinction, Weinstock and Status simply introduced the musicians in chilly to the studio to jam with out a lot prior preparation. There was a gulf in high quality that gave Blue Word a bonus.

A way of sophistication

Recording strategies within the 50s had been very totally different from what they’re at the moment. This was a time even earlier than multi-track reels, when mono sound copy dominated and the tools was fairly primitive. Even so, Rudy Van Gelder introduced a way of sophistication to the Blue Word sound. From 1957, he started recording musicians on to two-track tape whereas Blue Word started issuing stereo LPs alongside mono ones, earlier than the previous format took over within the 60s. However although recording a quartet on two tracks may appear a reasonably straightforward and simple job compared to the layered multi-tracking and overdubbing that got here in through the 70s, getting the precise steadiness between the devices was essential and couldn’t be altered as soon as the recording had taken place (there was no mixing that may very well be finished after the very fact). Rudy Van Gelder’s reward was for adjusting the sound steadiness whereas the musicians ran via a tune previous to doing a take, in order that by the point the pink mild got here on, all the musical components fitted collectively completely and nobody was louder than anybody else. Getting the sound balances good was an artwork, and Van Gelder was a grasp at it.

By the late 50s, Rudy Van Gelder had turn into so busy (with dates for Blue Word, Status, Savoy, Riverside, and Pacific Jazz) that it was getting more durable for him to juggle his work as an optometrist with recording classes, so he started assigning totally different document labels totally different days of the week at his Hackensack studio (Fridays had been assigned to Blue Word). Among the many many Blue Word albums recorded at Hackensack are such classics as Horace Silver And The Jazz Messengers, Hank Mobley Quintet, Introducing Johnny Griffin, Sonny Clark’s Sonny’s Crib, John Coltrane’s Blue Prepare, Artwork Blakey And The Jazz Messengers’ Moanin’, Lou Donaldson’s Lou Takes Off and Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else.

Rudy Van Gelder builds a brand new studio

In accordance with Rudy Van Gelder, Alfred Lion “held a belief that good things happen after dark, musically,” an allusion to the alchemy that jazz musicians may create in entrance of a reside viewers. However capturing that precisely had proved nearly unattainable – particularly due to the acoustic issues that would happen – till Van Gelder discovered a manner of doing it persistently nicely. Evidently, although, it was one thing of a chore for the engineer as a result of it concerned three days of preparation and necessitated him transporting all his important studio tools by automotive to the live performance venue. Although it was a troublesome problem to seize musicians on stage in entrance of an viewers, groundbreaking Blue Word recordings resembling Artwork Blakey’s A Evening At Birdland and Sonny Rollins’ A Evening At The Village Vanguard confirmed how Van Gelder helped to make the reside album a legitimate and viable musical doc within the jazz world whereas extending the Blue Word sound past the confines of his studio.

Together with his recording work booming, it wasn’t lengthy earlier than Rudy Van Gelder gave up working towards as an optometrist altogether. In 1959, impressed by the structure of Frank Lloyd Wright and after visiting the transformed Armenian church that Columbia used for his or her thirtieth Avenue studio in New York, he elected to construct a brand new recording facility just a few miles down the highway from his Hackensack base, at 455 Sylvan Avenue in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Van Gelder bought certainly one of Lloyd Wright’s protégés, David Henken, to assemble a particular chapel-like essential room for recording. Constructed from wooden and masonry and boasting a high-domed ceiling as its pièce de résistance, Van Gelder Studio (because it was recognized) was each traditional and futuristic: a state-of-the-art facility that ushered in a brand new age for the Blue Word sound.

The studio’s excessive ceiling gave a luxurious pure reverb to Van Gelder’s recordings (although, apparently, Alfred Lion most popular a drier sound) and, from 1959 proper via to the 70s (by which era Lion and Wolff had left the label), Blue Word continued to document at Englewood Cliffs. So did different labels – particularly Impulse! (Van Gelder engineered Coltrane’s masterpiece for the label, A Love Supreme, there), Verve, and, within the 70s, CTI.

Rudy Van Gelder’s fastidiousness within the studio

One of many causes the Blue Word sound was so distinctive was because of Rudy Van Gelder’s fastidiousness within the studio. He was a boffin-like genius who introduced a scientific mindset and forensic consideration to element to the artwork of audio recording. He was additionally extraordinarily protecting of his strategies and was recognized to make use of tape to hide the producers’ names on his tools. Musicians who questioned him about his strategies bought quick shrift, and touching his tools was not permitted. Solely Van Gelder himself was allowed to maneuver microphones, which he did carrying a pair of backyard gloves. Some musicians have described him as eccentric – however as idiosyncratic as his habits and a few of his strategies had been, Van Gelder actually bought outcomes and made an indelible mark on each jazz and Blue Word’s historical past.

Rudy Van Gelder’s rationale behind his quest for sonic perfection was easy: “I tried to make these individual people be heard in a way they wanted to be heard,” he advised Blue Word producer and historian Michael Cuscuna in 2004 for a brief movie launched on the DVD portion of a Blue Word retrospective referred to as Excellent Takes. Simply as designer Reid Miles had been for Blue Word’s paintings, Van Gelder was a vital a part of Blue Word’s inventive workforce. He introduced Alfred Lion’s sonic imaginative and prescient to life and was in a position to current the label’s musicians in the very best mild.

In his later life, between the years 1999 and 2008, the veteran engineer used his experience to oversee the remastering of a fantastic many traditional Blue Word albums that he had initially recorded. They had been launched on CD in a sequence referred to as RVG Editions, which helped Blue Word to discover a new, youthful viewers but additionally reaffirmed how indispensable Van Gelder was to the Blue Word sound.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that, if it wasn’t for Van Gelder’s genius at capturing sound and his accuracy in recording musical devices, it’s uncertain whether or not Blue Word as we all know it might even exist. Rudy Van Gelder was instrumental in not solely giving the label a singular sonic identification but additionally, maybe extra importantly, modified the way in which jazz was recorded. He was a real pioneer whose musical legacy is intertwined with Blue Word’s historical past.

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