Ten iconic Blue Note records

Nearly every record on this list carries the same name in the engineering credits, and that name is Rudy Van Gelder. They don’t all come out of the same room, though, and the discography makes the split easy to see once you stop sorting by year and start sorting by street.

For years Van Gelder recorded in his parents’ living room in Hackensack, New Jersey. Then he had a studio built for the purpose at Englewood Cliffs, a few miles away.

Ten records, in order of address.

Hackensack, the living room

Johnny Griffin, A Blowing Session. Cut on 6 April 1957. Three tenor saxophones are in the room at once, which tells you how small the operation was and how big it wanted to sound.

Paul Chambers, Bass on Top. From 14 July 1957. The double bass sits at the front rather than the back, and getting it there in 1957 meant knowing exactly where to put a microphone.

Sonny Clark, Cool Struttin’. Cut on 5 January 1958 and issued as BLP 1588.

Listen while you read

Hank Mobley and Lee Morgan, Peckin’ Time. From 9 February 1958, one month and four days after the Clark session. Same room. Same microphone.

Lou Donaldson, Blues Walk. Cut on 28 July 1958, and it’s the last one here made in the living room.

Nineteen days

On 1 July 1959 Van Gelder recorded a session at Hackensack with the tenor player Ike Quebec, and on the twentieth of that same month he recorded Quebec again, this time in the new room at Englewood Cliffs.

Nineteen days sit between those two dates. After 1 July the Blue Note discography lists no further session at Hackensack, and before the twentieth it lists none at Englewood Cliffs.

The two sessions were later gathered onto a record called, with no fuss about it, From Hackensack To Englewood.

Englewood Cliffs, the room built for it

Tina Brooks, True Blue. Cut on 25 June 1960, and it carries more weight than the session date suggests, because Brooks recorded very little under his own name and this is the one record of his that anybody going looking will actually turn up.

Grant Green, Idle Moments. Two sessions, on 4 and 15 November 1963, and the record didn’t reach the shops until 1965, which is two years of a finished tape sitting in a vault while somebody decided what to do with it.

Andrew Hill, Point of Departure. Cut on 21 March 1964. This one also waited until 1965.

Sam Rivers, Fuchsia Swing Song. From 11 December 1964, out the following year.

Bobby Hutcherson, Components. Cut on 10 June 1965 and issued the following year, with Hutcherson on vibraphone, which is the hardest instrument to capture in this entire story because every note turns up with a long metal ring already attached to it. Nothing else on this list decays that slowly.

The catalogue lists records that never came out

You’d assume the new studio slowed everything down. It didn’t, and the dates settle it in a column.

Peckin’ Time was cut in February 1958 at Hackensack and appeared in 1959. True Blue was cut in June 1960 at Englewood Cliffs and appeared the same year. The wait had nothing to do with the address.

Something stranger shows up instead when you read the discography line by line. Catalogue numbers sit there beside the released titles, assigned to records that never reached a shop at all.

On the same day that produced Cool Struttin’, Blue Note set aside a second record, gave it the number BLP 1592 and called it Sonny Clark Quintet. It never came out.

Tina Brooks got the same treatment. A single with True Blue on one side and Theme For Doris on the other, numbered 45-1783, never pressed.

A catalogue number isn’t proof that a record exists.

Why the address matters

Van Gelder has described how Hackensack worked. His parents built a house for themselves, and he put a little control room next to the living room.

They also had an extra entry door cut into the building so they could get into their own quarters while he was recording.

He was blunt about what the place was. He said it wasn’t really a studio in the sense that studios were then, and that he thinks you can hear it.

There’s evidence you look at rather than listen to. The lamps and draperies of that living room show up on plenty of Blue Note sleeves from those years, and one cover has his dog on it, a dog called Rex.