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Re: severe on the van gelding sound

Posted by suretyguy (A) on November 13, 2002 at 08:20:22

In Reply to: severe on the van gelding sound posted by hifitommy on November 12, 2002 at 23:21:19:

The problem with Van Gelder, I think, is that he enjoys a reputation that is often not supported by the results and I tend to agree with Severius for the most part. In particular Van Gelder almost never captures the full range of the piano, producing instead a compressed, at times almost pinched sound, even taking into consideration the fact that most of the players he recorded tended to be in the minimal left hand Bud Powell influenced vein. I agree less with his assessment of the reproduction of the string bass, although that seems to vary from date to date; some of the Paul Chambers releases, e.g., "Bass On Top", are very good, but then the bassist was after all the leader. Van Gelder also tended to overemphasize and highlight the horns, sometimes to the point of stridency. As to the hard right-left problem, he was hardly the only guilty party in the early days of stereo recording (The Contemporary label, most of whose recordings sound far superior to me, was similar in this respect.), but he may have hung on to this ping-pong effect longer than others. Reproduction of drums is another weakness, especially the lower end of the frequency spectrum, however, I suppose we should remember that bop percussionists generally made minimal use of the bass drum. For the most part I think Jim Anderson, the engineer who currently does a lot of Blue Note sessions, is, and in fact has been for years, far better in all respects.

One curious thing about Van Gelder's work: For most of the same period that he was the "house" engineer for Blue Note, he served in a similar capacity for the Prestige label and I've always thought that his work for the latter was on the whole not as good as that for Blue Note. Some of the difference may simply have been that the producers for the two labels had different ideas. And then there is his work for Impulse, which I think in large part better than either of the other two; again this could be the involvement of different producers.

By the way your comment about Van Gelder's "foresight" is probably misplaced. As the recording engineer he would not have been the individual who arranged the dates; this would have been the decision of the producers/owners of the labels. On the other hand he apparently provided a venue conducive to enducing good work from musicians, whose respect he generally had in spite of a somewhat testy personality.

One last thought: We should bear in mind that not every session recorded by Blue Note is important or worthy, either in recording or performance quality, and there is probably a reason why the results of some dates have sat unreleased for lengthy periods. (See, for example, my earlier post "Redd Alert!!!".)

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