Rudy Van Gelder

This can be a thread for praise of his work in general, but I have a question that relates to the Blue Note "RVG Editions" remasters. I know Giddins has dissed these for Van Gelder's "destruction of his past work" or something like that, but I'm wondering what the real problem is. Is his hearing just too shot for him to be remastering things? I'm listening to the RVG of Andrew Hill's Point of Departure and the bass (Richard Davis, not exactly a slouch with no tone) is pretty thin. Thoughts?

I hate the RVG reissues fwiw. Everything sounds like it's coming out of a tin can.

I just put on Passing Ships and from the first note it's like a whole different thing, even/especially the tuba.

i've heard the complaints about the RVG editions, but for the most part I don't have a problem with them. The only one that I've been confused/disappointed in is Herbie's Maiden Voyage -- something sounds really off about that one. But who knows, it might be a problem with the master ... I don't know, I think I've been bitched out on this board for not hearing the horribleness of the RVG stuff ... Sorry, d-minor bags.

Heh, I've bought two copies of the Maiden Voyage one. I have an old comp that has the title track on it . . . have to compare.

Just heard the RVG edition of Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet.

;_;

the rvg stuff def sounds like they let a near-def dude master a record

There is no fucking RIDE CYMBAL on these records. It's atrocious. It's like he took that constant-cymbal-tapping thread too much to heart.

Given that I only really got into jazz over the last 5-7 years and that these things are impossible to avoid when tracking down new versions of classic albums, I've apparently been listening to much of my old jazz "wrong". This is sad to hear.

if you like what you've been hearing it's right - gary giddins may call it "wrong" but jack kerouac would say "blow, man..." as he wandered off down the street in search of a bar

xpost - sure the music is still great, but I'd recommend finding an older remaster of some of the ones you like and seeing if you notice the difference and what you think

yeah its just less harsh on the ears to get the older ones

i really haven't had too much of a prob with RVG editions -- i know some people hate them, but, like jon, most of my exposure to these records is through them. was reading something interesting on the steve hoffman board (not that i fully understand everything he's talking about):

hoffman: Well, it's like a constant high-pitched grating sound. Ever stick your head around the back of your TV? That 15k carrier sound can drive one to drink. Something in RVG's system was dumping a lot of high-frequency overload distortion on everything, especially when the cymbals were hit. Kevin Gray and I figured that it was RVG's limiter that was causing the overload since it was better when the drums were not being aggressively played.

Do you have an LP that was engineered by Rudy Van Gelder? Turn up the volume and lightly run your finger over the vinyl, so you slow it down a bit (making the ultra high end distortion come down to a more audible range). Hear it now? YEOW!!!!!!!!

I worked up a "system" for combating this in my mastering, naming it my "Van Gelder Anti-matter Generator" (a play on Van De Graff Generator) and if you hear any DCC Gold Rudy Van Gelder CD ( Coltrane LUSH LIFE, Rollins SAXOPHONE COLOSSUS, Miles Davis COOKIN', RELAXIN', STEAMIN', POOPIN', etc.) that I've remastered, you'll notice the absence of any high end oscillation distortion. Just one of those little nifty bits of musical history that a mastering engineer MUST deal with for the sake of your ears.

Rudy Van Gelder recorded stuff to sound good THEN, not now. THEN is what counted! People had cheap phonographs or Hi-Fi's, nothing like what we have now.

Rudy did all his "tricking" right on the master tape so he didn't have to redub and lose a generation.. In other words, he didn't record something and re-dub it adding compression, echo, EQ, etc., he did it all live in real time while the music was being recorded.

Roy DuNann and Howard Holzer at Contemporary recorded everything flat and dry and the "tricks" were added during LP disk mastering.

So, a Contemporary master tape today sounds amazing while a Prestige or Blue Note master tape needs a little "reverse trickery" to get it to sound better.

At the time though, the RVG recording technique made those Prestige and Blue Note LP's sing!

Slightly suspicious that Miles did a record called Poopin' tbh.

See I think that high-end distortion is what I really LIKED about the old RVG editions. It was like the ride cymbal fly @ u face.

Poopin', Pissin', both classic Miles.

A whole new and bad set of associations with Steamin' now. ;_;

Take it over to ILP!

Five-part Rudy Van Gelder interview

RVG: The most momentous recording of the 1960s for me was John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. It was hypnotic. It was exciting. It was different. But I didn't have those views when it was recorded.

JW: What do you mean?
RVG: I came to that realization only when I remastered the album for its digital reissue in 2002. You have to understand, I was busy making sure that the work was recorded perfectly. It wasn’t until I was working on updating the orignal master that I listened intently to the music.

JW: So in many ways you have the same appreciation of that album that any listener does listening to the recording.
RVG: That’s right. Except that I recorded it [laughs].

yeah he says something similar in an interview included with the "perfect takes" compilation -- that he could never enjoy the music as it was happening because he was so stressed out about the technical aspects of it.
funny anecdote from bob weinstock in one of those recent coltrane box sets -- he says it was a running joke for the musicians to say "Ready, Rudy?" throughout the sessions, just because Rudy was always ready.

That's funny. And I imagine his intense focus on the technical side of things was probably what allowed him to record things like Ascension and Conquistador without getting distracted. Of course, he was probably also pretty open-eared.

yeah, seems like he had nothing but respect for the musicians, but you have to wonder when he was told about the Ascension sessions if he was like, "dude, that is too many horns."

"John, maybe we should...DEscend a little bit here."

In the liner notes to The Major Works of John Coltrane one of the musicians talked about how people were screaming during the session, and marveled at how Van Gelder somehow managed to keep the screams off the recording. I did hear some background screaming once, but haven't been able to locate it again.

I imagine recording live to 2 track with only minimal options for change or edits must have been pretty nerve wracking, he would be watching levels, listening for the transitions between soloists, totally *glued* to the dynamics of the music, you can hear his fader rides on A Love Supreme quite clearly.

There's a dutch book on jazz called 'jazz heroes' (jazzhelden) by Koen Schouten (published in 2008) that contains an interview with Rudy van Gelder. He refuses to tell how he made the recordings and what made them so special, but says he was happy to produce the RvG Series because he could finally make them sound 'how they supposed to sound' (I'm paraphrasing here).

I guess a lot of it depends on the state of the original masters. You can hear a lot of tape drops in 'Dialogue' from Bobby Hutcherson for example. Hancock's 'Empyrian Isles' for example sounds very good.

"...how they were supposed to sound."

Donald Fagen in Tablet:

The Van Gelder stuff on Blue Note is mostly mono though, right?

Yes, those are mono, but the balance and the image and the timbre were so perfect. Basically very straight ahead, no EQ.

Aren’t his engineering methods still largely mysterious?

Yeah, he was very secretive. I know people who have recorded at his studio said he used to wear gloves [laughs] and he was generally just very secretive about his technique

Melvin Gibbs on twitter in July ( h/t to Wayne n wax for seeing this). Interesting re how bass was recorded then

this relates to my Van Gelder h8
& the issue of recording African-derived music
& Bass

we don't REALLY know what these bands sounded like
Imagine if the engineers had decided that the bass drum was an asset that required a solution instead of a problem to be covered up https://t.co/nVELUpM6wC

— melvin gibbs (@melvingibbs) July 13, 2021

He is referring to a Max Roach quote

Max Roach: "We played the bass drum, but the engineers would cover it up b/c it caused distortion due to the technology at that time. There were never any mic's near our feet. They would have one mic above the drum set and that was it."

— melvin gibbs (@melvingibbs) July 13, 2021

Basically very straight ahead, no EQ

A strange assessment. I don't know if "straight ahead" is supposed to mean neutral or true-to-life, but RVG's sound is nothing like that at all. It's a great sound, but it's heavily processed - lots of distortion/overload, a pretty hard and some say harsh EQ (the horns especially). IIRC horn players often loved it, some pianists hated it, Roach is apparently not a fan either...I guess RVG is as close as you can get to having a bop-era jazz engineer be the Daniel Lanois of his day.

rudy van gelding

I wrote a piece about RVG in 2020 and interviewed Don Was and Nick O'Toole (co-owner of and engineer for Posi-Tone, a very retro-minded jazz label) about his sound.

Engineers for Columbia and RCA, and even small labels like Contemporary, strove to preserve the music they recorded as precisely as possible, and they succeeded. An album like Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West, recorded by engineer Ray DuNann in Los Angeles, has an extremely crisp, clear, and balanced sound, totally free of distortion.

On the flip side, a Van Gelder recording has a rough-edged wildness that’s more comparable to a Sun or Motown release. It also has some instantly recognizable sonic fingerprints. The horns and the drums are big and brash, coming right at you. The piano, on the other hand, is frequently muffled and subdued—even rinkydink at times—and unless the bassist is soloing, he’s buried, too.

...

On certain Blue Note recordings, the use of distortion can go so far beyond convention that it almost becomes noise. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ 1964 album Free For All is a prime example. Freddie Hubbard’s trumpet, Curtis Fuller’s trombone, and Wayne Shorter’s tenor saxophone all leap out of the speakers, with just a slight crackle. But Blakey’s drums are like a series of explosions, nearly blowing out the microphones and thoroughly drowning out Cedar Walton’s piano and Reggie Workman’s bass.

...

The final component of Van Gelder’s sound was the mastering, which was red-hot in order to blare out of the primary music delivery systems of the time: mono jukebox speakers, transistor radios, and car radios.

Was, who visited Van Gelder in his studio, says, “He explained [to me] that his lathe was such an important part of that sound—he had a Scully lathe, and he was buddies with Mr. Scully and they hot-rodded his lathe, basically. I don’t know how to separate that from the sound. I do know this, that if you put up the master tapes, they don’t sound like the records we know. You have to do something to them, you can’t just put them up.”

Like Was, O’Toole believes the mix of rawness and polish in Van Gelder’s classic sound draws the listener in. “You may not hear every bass note, you may lose the accents and the touch on the drums a little bit, but nowadays with the limiting and the compression, it’s too much to handle sometimes. Your brain just can’t process that much information. And not to get into vinyl versus CD, but that’s why some people like vinyl—there’s not as much information there, and it’s within the human hearing range, and that’s why people say it’s ‘warm.’ You probably don’t have 17KHz on a record, and you don’t have 50 Hz on a record either.”

Outstanding work man! That's pretty much it. Truth be told, I kind of like some of the modern audiophile reissues of RVG's engineered albums (from DCC Compact Classics and Analogue Productions) because they reel in some of the less-desirable features of his idiosyncratic methods.

good revive, really interesting stuff, thanks all

I like the fact that Rudy's son Gordon went on to be the editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, where many of Fagen's SF heroes like Alfred Bester published their best work.

^Might be the most "The Nightfly" fact imaginable!

Another fact that I enjoy is that RVG cut a Philly string band LP that's ubiquitous in midatlantic US dollar bins: https://www.discogs.com/Ferko-String-Band-Champions-Of-The-Philadelphia-Mummers-Parade-/release/6667769

When I worked in a record shop, it always used to delight me when I got to put an "RVG stamp!" hype post-it on one of those.