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."

Studio visit: Milford Graves on record

In a March post, I attempted to make the point that free jazz ought to be documented in the studio from time to time. The only problem was that the Peter Brötzmann albums I chose as examples were actually live recordings. I stand by my argument, however, and it's because of albums like Real Deal and Beyond Quantum, sessions from, respectively, 1991 and 2008 featuring the drummer Milford Graves.

I've been on a Milford Graves kick over the past few days, incited by an interview subject who named Graves's 1976 LP Babi as an all-time favorite. Checking out that record, it was easy to see the appeal: It is as unhinged and raw a free-jazz document as you will find. Like Graves's many ESP-Disk recordings (I happened to catch some great material from 1964's The Giuseppi Logan Quartet on WKCR the other day as part of a Don Pullen profile), it sounds DIY, punk. There's something romantic about that. The legend of free jazz hinges on ideas of subversion and underground-ness. We like to think of these sorts of recordings as having been made hastily and cheaply—or in the case of Babi, a live album, almost incidentally, i.e., the music would have raged on whether or not the tape recorder was rolling. Graves's ESP sessions were mostly (all?) recorded in the studio in NYC, but there's nothing meticulous about them. The resulting documents are more or less the polar opposite of the kinds of gorgeously warm and balanced albums being made for Blue Note nearby at Rudy Van Gelder's New Jersey studio.

Despite all the financial shadiness surrounding ESP, fans of this music—myself included—tend to be glad that those mid-’60s records exist. We should also be happy, though, that many of the artists in question, e.g., Mr. Graves, have survived/thrived long enough to take advantage of more sophisticated recording technology. Just like with old, scratchy blues recordings sourced from 78s, we fetishize the thin, sometimes borderline crappy sound on those old ESPs, hold it up as a badge of authenticity, forgetting that no free jazz actually sounded like that in the flesh. You want to hear a Milford Graves album? Get Real Deal, a duet recording with David Murray recorded in the decidedly non–historically sexy year of 1991, or Beyond Quantum, a 2008 trio album with Anthony Braxton and William Parker. (Both are available as Amazon downloads via the links above.)

I can't express to you the sheer beauty of these recordings—not just the performances, but the SOUND. On Real Deal, Milford Graves sounds like the wind and the rain. He sounds like he's worshiping the drum kit, its glorious range of timbres. I'm listening to the first track right now, and it sounds heartbreakingly alive. The recording is wonderfully three-dimensional: You have the ride cymbal over in the left channel, the toms and bass drum closer to the center along with Murray's tenor, the hi-hat slightly to the right of those. I don't think I've ever heard another drummer paint with his kit the way Graves does, coax as much nuance out, and a musician like that deserves to be heard in a warm and resonant document like this, without that obfuscating aspect of rawness—obfuscating not just in the sense that detail is lost, but in the sense that it invites you to impose upon it a kind of punk romanticism. The romanticism is all there in the drums, though—you don't need an invitation to heap on your own baggage.

In short, free jazz deserves the studio treatment just as much as any other music. Sure it's a style built on rawness and spontaneity, but with the truly great musicians like Graves, you're going to get that no matter what. Why not hear him in glorious hi-fi? Here is a sample of Beyond Quantum—skip to around 1:50 for a taste of what I'm talking about:



I love that the ESP records exist (The New York Art Quartet is a particular fave), that Babi survives. But in terms of what I would take to a desert island, it's the pro-shot stuff, so to speak, where the music brings the heat and the recording soaks up the whole range of frequencies. Interstellar Space, anyone? Recorded at the aforementioned Van Gelder facility, not at some no-name Times Square facility or at a gig with a room mic. These Graves records are part of that illustrious tradition. Like many of the recordings in, say, the Aum Fidelity catalog—I've been very impressed recently by the new Planetary Unknown, with David S. Ware, Cooper-Moore, the aforementioned William Parker and Muhammad Ali—they're about museum-quality preservation, not DIY mythmaking. Artists of this caliber deserve such treatment. It is, I would venture to say, the real deal.

P.S. ECM is another label that has long understood the value of superior sound quality and studio documentation. You won't hear the full range of a Paul Motian performance on any other label. (See I Have the Room Above Her.) Speaking of which, I wrote about a handsome new studio-recorded Craig Taborn solo disc on ECM in this week's Time Out New York.