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Rudy Van Gelder: Genius or just lucky?

Like any serious jazz fan, I have a lot of music produced by the "legendary" Rudy Van Gelder in that studio in Hackensack NJ during the fifties and sixties. I've always thought they were kind of thin sounding and sometimes even tinny, with poor bass and flat dynamics. As I go deeper into the era I keep finding recordings – both live and from other studios - that really blow away a lot of the RVG studio stuff. For example, yesterday I was listening to Monk's 'Live at the Blackhawk' , which is a great natural recording with the instruments sounding both lifelike and life-size, with good bass. It was recorded in 1960 live in a club, and sounds - to my ears - 100% better than the contemporary studio recordings (Monk's Music, Brilliant Corners, etc). The live recording also doesn't have any of the studio baffling that was so fashionable on early stereo recordings, that makes instruments sound isolated from each other rather than part of a unified soundstage (And RVG is certainly not the only engineer guilty of this. Has anyone really ever heard a drum kit where every piece was stacked vertically?). Although this is a Riverside release it was not engineered by RVG. It seems that there was some very good recording technology at the time that was not being utilized in RVG's studio, or the acoustics were funny - I don't know.

This isn't, of course, limited to Monk recordings. That just happens to be the example I was listening to yesterday. I find this to be the case with most RVG dates.

You can't ignore the importance of the RVG records simply because of who and what he recorded, and he recorded the best, but I've seen a lot of articles offering accolades for his productions that just seem overblown. I think a lot of those records- great music or not - sound really mediocre.

Any other opinions out there?
grimace

Showing 1 response by slipknot1

slipknot1
1,423 posts
 
A lot of Rudy Van Gelder's work was not recorded in a NY apartment, but in the living room of his parent's suburban home in Hackensack, NJ. RVG's actual studio facility, where later things were recorded is/was located in Englewood, NJ

Given the fact that you had the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones, Thelonius Monk, etc. camped out in your parent's living room, playing their instruments while you drag your mics, recorder, cables in there explains a lot of what people are hearing. While they may not be tapes that demonstrate what the audiophile community likes in a "reference recording", I like to think that they are more of a snapshot of some of the greatest musical minds of jazz, that happened to be captured for later listening.
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