Great thread. I too wondered about all the praise for Van Gelder, until I recently heard an original Blue Note mono pressing of Horace Silver's Blowin' the Blues Away. I went out and bought a few, and IMHO I now can say that original vinyl pressings of RVG recordings on Blue Note in mono up to the mid-60's, and on Impulse (either stereo or mono - both great, but different) are right up there with the best recordings I have ever heard. RVG is also pretty good on Prestige but less good on Riverside (i.e., Monk) and other labels. By comparison, all RVG digital reissues are inferior and even the vinyl reissues are marginal at best. Why the difference by label? I suspect it was because RVG gave his producers what they wanted - and Alfred Lion of Blue Note and Bob Thiele at Impulse were the best of the best.
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?
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?