On Thursday night at his Englewood Cliffs home in New Jersey, which also doubled as his studio, Van Gelder passed away, his assistant Maureen Sickler told the New York Times.
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The National Endowment for the Arts, in a tribute to Van Gelder, noted that he was “considered by many the greatest recording engineer in jazz” who “recorded practically every major jazz musician of the 1950s and 1960s”.
The key point, according to music expert Dan Skea: “Whereas earlier jazz recordings seemed to come at the listener from a distance, Van Gelder found ways to approach and capture the music at closer range, and to more clearly convey jazz’s characteristic sense of immediacy”.
An optometrist by training, Van Gelder in the 1940s became determined to be a recording engineer – a profession that barely existed at the time – as he discovered live jazz in NY and became fascinated by radio. He selected how they should play. “I used specific microphones located in places that allowed the musicians to sound as though they were playing from different locations in the room, which in reality they were”.
Of his own work at the Englewood Cliffs studio, he said: “I felt like I was working with a giant”.
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One of Van Gelder’s biggest contributions to the genre was recording Coltrane’s definitive A Love Supreme over 50 years ago in December of 1965. “When Coltrane was here, I was too anxious about capturing the music”, Van Gelder recalled in his 2012 interview with Myers. In the 1970s, Van Gelder worked as the engineer for producer Creed Taylor’s commercially successful crossover jazz label, CTI, recording such albums as trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay” and saxophonist Grover Washington Jr.’s “Mister Magic”. Later in life, as digital technology seeped into the music industry, Van Gelder revisited the jazz classics to oversee their digital remastering, resulting in the Van Gelder Editions.
