Rudolph Van Gelder (November 2, 1924 – August 25, 2016) was an American recording engineer who specialized in jazz. Over more than half a century, he recorded several thousand sessions, with musicians including John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock and Grant Green. He worked with many different record companies, and recorded almost every session on Blue Note Records from 1953 to 1967. He worked on albums including John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Miles Davis's Walkin', Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus, and Horace Silver's Song for My Father. He is regarded as one of the most influential engineers in jazz. Early life Van Gelder was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. His parents, Louis Van Gelder and the former Sarah Cohen, ran a women's clothing store in Passaic. His interest in microphones and electronics can be traced to a youthful enthusiasm for amateur radio. He was also a longtime jazz fan. His uncle, for whom Rudy was named, had been the drummer for Ted Lewis's band in the mid-1930s. Van Gelder took lessons on the trumpet. Van Gelder trained as an optometrist at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania College of Optometry because he did not think he could earn a living as a recording engineer. He received an O.D. degree from the institution in 1946. Thereafter, Van Gelder maintained an optometry practice in Teaneck, New Jersey until 1959. Career In the evenings after work, Van Gelder recorded local musicians who wanted 78-rpm recordings of their work. From 1946, Van Gelder recorded in his parents' house in Hackensack, New Jersey, in which a control room was built adjacent to the living room, which served as the musicians' performing area. The dry acoustics of this working space were partly responsible for Van Gelder's inimitable recording aesthetic. "When I first started, I was interested in improving the quality of the playback equipment I had," Van Gelder commented in 2005; "I never was really happy with what I heard. I always assumed the records made by the big companies sounded better than what I could reproduce. So that's how I got interested in the process. I acquired everything I could to play back audio: speakers, turntables, amplifiers". One of Van Gelder's friends, the baritone saxophonist Gil Mellé, introduced him to Alfred Lion, a producer for Blue Note Records, in