Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Rudolph “Rudy” Van Gelder was born on November 2, 1924 in Jersey City, New Jersey. His interest in microphones and electronics can be traced to a youthful enthusiasm for amateur radio. Named for his uncle who had been the drummer in Ted Lewis’s band in the mid-1930s, he took trumpet lessons and trained as an optometrist at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, in Philadelphia, thinking he could not earn a living as a recording engineer.
From 1943, after graduating, Van Gelder had an optometry practice in Teaneck, New Jersey, and moonlighted recording local musicians in the evenings who wanted 78-rpm recordings of their work. 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.
Interested in improving the quality of the playback equipment he acquired everything that could play back audio: speakers, turntables and amplifiers. One of Rudy’s friends, baritone saxophonist Gil Mellé, introduced him to Alfred Lion, a producer for Blue Note Records, in 1953. Within a few years he was in demand by many other independent labels based around New York City, such as Bob Weinstock, owner of Prestige Records. To accommodate each label – Blue Note, Prestige, Savoy, Impulse, Verve he assigned them to different days as Lion was more stringent with the sound of original music, Weinstock had essentially blowing sessions for some of the best musicians in jazz history.He also engineered and mastered for the classical label Vox Records in the Fifties.
Van Gelder worked during the day as an optometrist until the summer of 1959, when he moved his operations to a larger studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and became a full-time recording engineer. The new studio’s design was inspired by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright had high ceilings and fine acoustics with “no food or drink and do not touch microphones” policy as he himself always wore gloves when handling equipment.
By 1967 the labels were beginning to utilize other engineers more regularly but Rudy remained active engineering nearly all of Creed Taylor’s CTI Records releases, a series of proto-smooth jazz albums that were financially successful, but not always well received by critics. He was not without his detractors. Despite his prominence in the industry, like Lion who didn’t care for the overuse of reverb, and Charles Mingus refused to work with him because he change the sound of his bass. He remastered the analog Blue Note recordings into 24-bit digital recordings in its RVG Edition series and also remasters of some of the Prestige albums, and was happy to see the LP go by the wayside because it was hard for him to get the sound the way he thought it should be.
He received awards and honors being named a fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), received the society’s most prestigious award, the AES Gold Medal, named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, received the Grammy Trustees Award, and Thelonious Monk composed and recorded a tribute to Van Gelder titled Hackensack.
Producer and recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who specialized in jazz and regarded as the most important recording engineer of jazz by some observers, passed away at home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on August 25, 2016. Among the several thousand jazz sessions he recorded are the acknowledged classics John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Miles Davis’s Walkin’, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus and Horace Silver’s Song for My Father.
Take A Dose On The Road
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Delfeayo Marsalis was born July 28, 1965 in New Orleans, Louisiana into the musical family in which father and three brothers are musicians. Lying under the piano as a child while his father played, he eventually tried the bass and the drums but by the sixth grade gravitated to the trombone. His early influences were J.J. Johnson, Curtis Fuller, Al Grey, Tyree Glenn and Tommy Dorsey.
He went on to attend the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts high school and was classically trained at the Eastern Music Festival and Tanglewood Institute. He graduated from Berklee School of Music and the University of Louisville with degrees in performance and audio production.
While a gifted trombonist, Delfeayo has recorded only five albums as a leader and is more prolific and better known for his work as a producer of over 100 acoustic jazz recordings. Since the age of 17 he has produced such artists as Harry Connick Jr., Marcus Roberts, Spike Lee, Terence Blanchard, Nicholas Payton, Marcus Roberts, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and his family members – Ellis, Branford and Wynton.
Along with Tonight Show engineer Patrick Smith, he coined “to obtain more wood sound from the bass recorded without usage of the dreaded bass direct”, a phrase that became the single sentence to define the recorded quality of many acoustic jazz recordings since the late ’80s.
Forming Uptown Music Theatre in 2000, the organization has trained over 300 youth and staged 8 original musicals, all of which are based upon the mission of “community unity.” Marsalis has toured with internationally renowned bandleaders Art Blakey, Slide Hampton, Max Roach, Elvin Jones and Abdullah Ibrahim. In addition he has performed and toured with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, was a part of the Ken Burns documentary Jazz and is an integral part of Marsalis Family: A Jazz Celebration DVD.
Delfeayo Marsalis, along with his father and brothers, are group recipients of the 2011 NEA Jazz Masters Award. He continues to perform, record, tour and produce.
Dose A Day – Blues Away
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Alfred Lion was born in Berlin, Germany on April 21, 1908. His fascination and lifelong pursuit of jazz began at age 16 when he witnessed a jazz concert with Sam Wooding’s Orchestra. In 1929 he migrated to the U.S., went back to Germany, and returned to New York in ’38 where he attended a Carnegie Hall concert that inspired him to start his record label, Blue Note in 1939.
The label debuted with Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis but their first hit was Sidney Bechet’s “Summertime”. By this time childhood friend Francis Wolff joined and sustained the label while Lion served in the Army. He recorded many of the biggest names in jazz throughout the 1940s, 50s, and 60s including but not limited to Grant Green, Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane, Tina Brooks, John Patton, Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, Lou Donaldson, Andrew Hill, Cecil Taylor, Ike Quebec, and the list goes on and on.
Lion had recruited Ike Quebec as the label’s A&R man and at his insistence Lion began to explore more modern developments in jazz bringing in Thelonious Monk as the first modern jazz musician. What became known as the “hard bop” style would predominate in Blue Note’s output during the 1950s and 1960’s. Musicians like Art Blakey and Horace Silver, among others epitomized this style. Duke Pearson took over A&R duties after Quebec’s death in 1963 ensuring the label’s roster remained fresh as a whole. Three significant elements made Blue Note releases stand out: the work of recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, the photographs of Francis Wolff and the cover designs principally by Reid Miles.
Suffering from heart problems for some years, Lion sold the Blue Note label and catalogue to Liberty Records and retired to Mexico in 1967. Towards the end of his life, the record producer respected by musicians for his straight dealing and for ‘hanging out’ in the jazz scene, gained the recognition he had often been denied. Alfred Lion passed away on February 2, 1987 in San Diego, California.
Dose A Day-Blues Away
More Posts: producer,record executive
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lester Koenig founded the jazz label, Contemporary Records, in Los Angeles in 1951. It was known for seminal recordings embodying the West Coast sound, but also released recordings by jazz artists known throughout the world. Under his leadership, Contemporary recorded such artists as Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Art Farmer, Benny Golson, the Curtis Counce Group featuring Harold Land, Jack Sheldon, Carl Perkins and Frank Butler; also Ben Webster, Miles Davis, Benny Carter, Chet Baker, Art Pepper, Phineas Newborn, Woody Shaw, Shelly Manne, Hampton Hawes, Barney Kessell and Leroy Vinnegar.
Les maintained extremely high audio standards. In 1956 he hired Roy DuNann from Capitol Records, who, out of the label’s shipping room turned studio, turned out some of the best sounding records of the 50s and 60s using German and Austrian condenser microphones that produced very high output of these microphones, especially close-in on jazz musicians’ dynamic playing. DuNann would achieve his signature sound for the label, a crisp, clear and balanced without distortion or unpleasant “peak presence” by keeping his microphone setups very simple, generally one per musician, and he avoided the use of pre-amplifiers.
In the mid 1960s the company fell into relative limbo, but limited new recordings were made in the late 1970s including a series of albums by Art Pepper recorded at the Village Vanguard in New York. After Koenig’s death in 1977, his son, John ran the label for seven years and continued the legacy producing albums by George Cables, Joe Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson and Chico Hamilton to name a few.
Fantasy Records purchased the Contemporary label and catalogue in 1984 but not before ushering in a number of major figures in the music business such as Nesuhi Ertegun, who went on to exec at Atlantic Records, and writers Nat Hentoff and Leonard Feather among others.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Nesuhi Ertegun was born November 26, 1917 in Istanbul, Turkey, moving to Washington, DC when his father was appointed Ambassador to the United States in 1935. From an early age, Nesuhi’s primary musical interest was jazz, having attended concerts in Europe. While at the Turkish Embassy he also promoted jazz concerts during 1941-44.
After his father’s death in 1944, Ertegun stayed in the U.S., moved to California, got married and established the Crescent record label. He purchased Jazz Man Records and issued traditional jazz recordings producing classic Kid Ory revival recordings plus sessions with Pete Daily and Turk Murphy. He went on to work with Contemporary Records and Imperial Records developing their jazz catalog for the later.
In 1955, he was preparing to work for Imperial Records to develop their jazz record line and develop a catalog of LPs. However, his younger brother Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler persuaded him to become a partner in Atlantic Records over the jazz and LP department.
As a producer he worked with John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Ray Charles, Chris Connor, the Drifters, Bobby Darin, Roberta Flack and numerous others while being first recruiting songwriters and producers Leiber and Stoller. He went on to establish WEA International venturing into Latin-American rockers and other world music groups and remained at the helm until his retirement in 1987.
Nesuhi Ertegun, writer, editor, producer, educator, art collector and soccer promoter died on July 15, 1989, at the age of 71, due to complications following cancer surgery. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, awarded the Grammy Trustees Award for lifetime achievement, the National Soccer Hall of Fame and had the Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame at Jazz at Lincoln Center dedicated to him.