Rudy Van Gelder: A Painstaking Master Passes Away

Your correspondent is a fan of older jazz recordings. Yesterday Rudy Van Gelder died at the age of 91. If you run a search on “rudy van gelder” and click on images you’ll probably see several hundred album covers featuring a Hall of Fame line-up of the greatest musicians and recordings of the past century.

Readers of this blog, even if they are not fans of jazz, I think would appreciate his total dedication to and continual improvement of the art and science of recording music. He painstakingly assembled over the years a trove of microphones and recording equipment that he used in a home recording studio he had built from the ground up.

There are many great eulogies to RVG out there (here’s one in The New York Times) that do a great job of describing his career and approach. The purpose of this post was to bring to your attention the passing away of someone who I think embodied the spirit of seeking performance. To our benefit, his skills captured the brilliance of some amazing artists.