Rudy Van Gelder
| Rudy Van Gelder | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 2, 1924 Jersey City, New Jersey |
| Died | August 25, 2016 (aged 91) Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey |
| Occupation | Recording engineer |
Rudolph "Rudy" Van Gelder (November 2, 1924 – August 25, 2016) was an American recording engineer who specialized in jazz.
Regarded as the most important recording engineer of jazz by some observers, Van Gelder recorded several thousand jazz sessions, including many recognized as classics, in a career which spanned more than half a century. Van Gelder recorded many of the great names in the genre, including John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, and Horace Silver, among many others. He worked with many record companies but was most closely associated with Blue Note Records. The New York Times wrote his work included "acknowledged classics like Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Davis’s Walkin', Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus, and Horace Silver’s Song for My Father."
Van Gelder was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. His parents, Louis Van Gelder and the former Sarah 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. A longtime jazz fan (his uncle, for whom Rudy was named, had been the drummer for Ted Lewis's band in the mid-1930s), Van Gelder took lessons on the trumpet. Van Gelder trained as an optometrist at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, in Philadelphia, because he did not think he could earn a living as a recording engineer. From 1943, after graduating, Van Gelder had an optometry practice in Teaneck, New Jersey, and recorded local musicians in the evenings who wanted 78-rpm recordings of their work. He became a full-time recording engineer in 1959. 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 this working space were partly responsible for Van Gelder's inimitable recording aesthetic.
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