The invisible man: Goodbye, Rudy Van Gelder

When I heard the news about Rudy Van Gelder, I thought about this track, with its almost surreally present-sounding Roy Haynes drum intro...




...and I started thinking about how when I hear Roy Haynes in my head, or Sam Rivers or Jackie McLean or Tony Williams or Andrew Hill or Richard Davis or Eric Dolphy or Bobby Hutcherson or Don Cherry or Ed Blackwell or John Coltrane or Elvin Jones or so many of my other jazz heroes, what I'm hearing is actually a collaboration between the artist in question and this greatest of jazz recording engineers.

JazzWax: What’s the biggest misconception people have about you?

Rudy Van Gelder: Some people think I'm a producer. I'm not. I'm a recording engineer. I don't hire the musicians nor do I come up with concepts for albums or how well musicians are playing. I'm there to capture the music at the time it's being created. This requires me to concentrate on the technical aspects of the recordings, which means the equipment and how the finished product is going to sound.

No dispute there, but didn't there also have to be some spiritual dimension to his art, some reason why so much magic happened there in that room in Englewood Cliffs? I think of those gorgeous Francis Wolff Blue Note photos, so many of them taken at Van Gelder's — the visual equivalent of the RVG sound: unadorned yet full. Clear, wholesome, true.

If you learn about the discographical history of jazz through RVG recordings, which, to me, seems like just about the best way to do it, you come to expect a certain integrity and rightness in your jazz records, a circumstance in which the temporal and spatial veil between you and the artist(s) is all but invisible. So many jazz records of the '70s and '80s sound so strange, so bad, so awkward, warped, hollow. So much so that for years, I dismissed those years aesthetically as well. Now, without really thinking about it, I tend to listen past a record's sonic quality whenever I feel like I have to. But you never have to do that with an RVG record. The word "timeless" is suspect, but I think it's basically an indisputable fact that the majority of the recordings Rudy Van Gelder made for, say, Blue Note and Impulse in the '60s — which only comprise a small sliver of his discography, in the end — sound pure and true and, somehow (spatially, spiritually) correct.

We all know that every recording is an act of interpretation. Cue Werner Herzog:

"...for me the boundary between fiction and 'documentary' simply does not exist, they are all just films. Both take 'facts,' characters, stories and play with them in the same kind of way."

I'm all for that idea. But I think there is a certain way of documenting sound which conveys, second-to-second, the engineer's deep drive to relay that sound's true voice, not simply "how it really sounded," but how it ideally would sound were your hearing perfectly acute, your engagement perfectly complete, your environment perfectly calibrated, your filter perfectly clean. This is an elusive and problematic idea, but it really boils down to the oft-repeated adage that "art is the concealment of art."

So Rudy Van Gelder is, in a sense, in between us and some great percentage of the jazz we hold in our heads and hearts. He's there, but he's invisible. Invisible, that is, until we hear recorded music that he did not take part in documenting (a fact that can often seem like an aesthetic tragedy). Then we know how much this invisible man really did for us, and for the artists, and for the art form. Without question, he lives on and on, further than any of us can see or know.

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*Peter Keepnews' NYT obituary.

*Ben Sidran's interview. This is just awesome.

RVG:

"I'm on the wrong side of this microphone. This is very strange for me. I just feel very uncomfortable. I'd rather be on the opposite side..."

Also love this:

"If you wanted to think of a way to inhibit creativity in jazz music in the studio, I would come up with a multi-track machine.... It's a machine of mass destruction."

Three clips

Much of my recreational listening lately has centered on Chick Corea's Now He Sings, Now He Sobs; Paul Motian in the ’70s, including his trio records with Charles Brackeen and his work with Keith Jarrett; and Dave Holland's ’80s quintet albums on ECM. Blessedly, all three of these strains of brilliance can be glimpsed on YouTube.

I'm transfixed by all these above clips, especially the Jarrett/Haden/Motian one—what in God's name is Paul Motian doing here? So gloriously eccentric and unhinged from the way anyone else has ever played drums. You don't think of the guy who swung with Bill Evans at the Vanguard; you think of the great outsider jazz-percussion geniuses, from Sunny Murray all the way up to Randy Peterson. Motian's playing here, and the sound of this Jarrett trio as a whole, reminds us that free jazz is about so much more than Free Jazz, i.e., the Coltrane-and-Ayler- or even Ornette-derived stuff. So many artists have played "free" in so many different ways. There's Fire Music on one hand and then there's this whole other strain that's about ecstatic joy and fun. Those emotions are really palpable in this clip.

And speaking of different spins on free jazz, how about Roy Haynes? At the beginning of the Corea clip above, what you hear is straight-up OUT, and moreover, Haynes sounds absolutely comfortable, not to mention fantastic, in this mode. It's basically exactly the type of thing Corea would play later on with Barry Altschul and the Circle cats. There's some more of this free vibe appended to the CD reissue of Now He Sings, esp. a track called "Fragments". A tantalizing performance, since I'm pretty sure Haynes never really did anything like this again. Of course, I could be mistaken, but in all the other instances I know of Haynes recording with avant-garde-leaning figures, e.g., Dolphy and Andrew Hill, the mode was pretty much straight postbop. Does anyone know if there are any other instances of Roy Haynes playing free jazz? If so, I absolutely NEED to hear them. He sounds incredible in this vein—if you heard just a few seconds, you might think you were listening to Andrew Cyrille or another avant-garde titan.

As for the Holland, I wrote in a comment here about how this band with Steve Coleman and Kenny Wheeler represents a jazz ideal for me. This is what I said there with regard to Holland albums such as The Razor's Edge and Seeds of Time, and I stand by it: "It's not free jazz; it's not straight-ahead jazz; it's just good jazz. It swings when it needs to, grooves when it needs to, comes off the rails when it needs to. It takes neither a reverent nor a defiant attitude toward the history of the music."

Anyway, long live YouTube and its jazz-historical treasures.

Weekend in review / Recent listening / Get well, Alvin Fielder

A busy and enjoyable weekend for the ears, I tell you.

*I got to hear the new Sunn O))) record on Friday.

*Laal, Tony and I checked out Attila Csihar and Bohren & Der Club of Gore at (Le) Poisson Rouge that night.

*And then Laal, Joe and I took in Roy Haynes at the Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival on Saturday, preceded by a gorging session at the impressive Smoke Joint. Sadly we missed the opening set by Amiri Baraka, but luckily the esteemed poet came back out at the end to drop some impish witticisms. He and Haynes were together onstage long enough for me to snap the blurry but (at least IMHO) evocative pic above.

Note: Yes, more and more posts on DFSBP are now linking to The Volume. Am doing my best to keep both beachballs in the air, but it's tough; sometimes there's just going to be overlap, which I'm cool with and hope you are too. Thanks for bearing with me in this transitional time.

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Recent listening:

I've never really offered straightforward playlists on here before, but why not start? I've been doing some spring cleaning both at home and at work and have unearthed a fair amount of jazz and experimental music discs from recent years that I've been really digging. Since most of them are old now they conform to the DFSBP corporate motto: "Apropos of Nothing!"

Vinny Golia Quartet Sfumato (Clean Feed, 2005)

Dennis González's Spirit Meridian Idle Wild (Clean Feed, 2005)

Does the Portugese avant-jazz label Clean Feed release too much music? Of course, there's no such thing as too much, but in one crucial sense, I'd have to answer yes. As you can tell by the vintages above, I'm nowhere near caught up on all this label's boatload of records from the past few years. I'm sure there's a ton more awesome ones that have fallen through the cracks. Both Sfumato and Idle Wild feature unbelievable supporting casts, and interestingly both records include the awesome Ken Filiano on bass. Oliver Lake steals the show on the González--the latter *always* recruits the sickest sideman; just check some of his Silkheart discs from the '80s--and on the Golia, I'm blown away by the leader's frenetic multireed facility. I really don't know Golia's other work at all. These are both out-jazz sessions with a just-right balance of structural integrity and free blowing.

Matthew Welch Ceol Nua (Leo, 2002)

Ambitious and beguiling, as with pretty much all of Welch's work that I've heard. Love the solo bagpipes piece, "Traversing Mad-Hatten," and the large-ensemble stuff ain't too shabby either. Cool that the last track features future stars such as Charlie Looker (Extra Life) and Tyondai Braxton (Battles, etc.).

Greg Kelley I Don't Want to Live Forever (Little Enjoyer/Gameboy, 2005)

What a strange, strange musician Kelley is. This is an enigmatic set, a sort of tape-collage thingie constructed out of live recordings. Don't know that I prefer this to, say, Nmperign, but at its best, it features the same obsessively textural quality that makes that duo so awesome.

William Parker & the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra Raincoat in the River (Eremite, 2002)

Exuberant and well-constructed; loose yet efficient. Have never truly loved a Little Huey record, but this one comes closest to what I'd like to hear from the band.

Håkon Kornstad and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Elise (Compunctio, 2008)

A dazzlingly romantic and gritty release. Are Scandinavians making the best jazz in the world right now? Could be. You can hear the whole record here.

and finally:

Miles Davis The Complete Birth of the Cool (Capitol/Blue Note, 1950/1998)

There are not too many jazz records as flawlessly exquisite as the original Birth of the Cool. Fleet and breezy yet insanely ornate; lovely, catchy, PERFECT (especially the to-die-for "Moon Dreams," a woozy ballad that becomes a modernist fever dream). It's a kaleidoscope of beautiful writing and as for the soloists, Lee Konitz, in particular, sounds utterly like mercury here. Really wish I'd caught him at the Vanguard this past week.

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Lastly, trolling about the Clean Feed site, I just discovered the unfortunate news that drummer Alvin Fielder is very ill. All well-wishes to this excellent and underrated musician, who played on Roscoe Mitchell's 1966 landmark Sound as well as a ton of great sessions in more recent years with "Kidd" Jordan et al.