More Important Than Politics

Rudy Van Gelder’s work was an important service to a community of people who have been marginalized historically. By the time he started recording professionally in the 1950s, jazz musicians had been negatively stereotyped in the mainstream American consciousness for decades. They had been unfairly discriminated against as rebellious, sex-crazed drug addicts threatening to erode the moral fabric of American culture. But Rudy knew these men and women personally, and he knew that the jazz community shared the same values as the rest of America. This is why Rudy felt that the work he did recording jazz musicians was, in his own words, “more important than politics” (Sickler et al., 2011). This was especially true in the 1950s and 1960s when these stereotypes threatened to do the most damage.

In the following video clip from 1994, Van Gelder is asked by interviewer Bert Caldwell if there was a common attitude amongst the musicians he recorded:

Van Gelder expressed additional concerns that jazz musicians had not always been treated with the dignity and respect they deserved when recording for bigger labels at more robust studios. During an interview with Mix magazine in 1993, Van Gelder explained that he saw his service as an important alternative:

I sort of had a rapport with the musicians, and I tried to understand what they were trying to do. I always felt that jazz musicians should be treated in a way that was a little more as if it were a major effort than the way they had been treated in other places. But that was a strong feeling on my part—that I could allow certain types of clients who came to me and had faith in me—to allow them to compete on a quality level with the biggest companies. And particularly with jazz. (Forlenza, p. 58)

Regardless of the extent to which Van Gelder thought about it or was motivated by sociocultural factors, there is no question that he is responsible for the dissemination of recorded jazz on a level far beyond that of any other engineer in the music’s history.

Main photo: (Left to right) Alfred Lion, Art Taylor, Paul Chambers, Ray Bryant, Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller, Cliff Jordan, and John Jenkins (kneeling) on the back patio of the Van Gelder Hackensack home, June 2, 1957 (Photo credit: Francis Wolff © Mosaic Images LLC)