The Blue Van Album

• The Blue Van Cd
• The Blue Van Album Cover
• The Blue Van Album Cover
• The Blue Van Album Download

• Rudy van Gelder, as you may have guessed from the name of this edition, recorded the sessions and remastered the album. The result is stunning. Coltrane sticks to the Hard Bop style, but there are plenty of explorations to be discovered.
• Order our new vinyl box-set here: i-Tunes: i-Tunes: Dan.

Buy the music here: The single is taking from the Album 'Man Up' from 2008. The Blue Van is the Dan. Blue Note is an iconic jazz label, so we've put together a list of its greatest albums. Check out our picks from the label's catalogue here.

The myth of jazz recordings is that they’re pure documents of what occurred in the studio on a given day. That’s broadly true—jazz has always been a live, in-the-moment art form—but how the music is captured can be as important as how it’s played. Nobody knew that better than engineer Rudy Van Gelder, whose productions for Blue Note Records in the 1950s and 1960s permanently shaped the label’s image and reputation.

Born in Jersey City, NJ in 1924, Van Gelder began as an amateur, working as an optometrist by day and making records by night in his parents’ Hackensack home. The musicians would set up in the living room, with a control room adjacent. By 1959, though, he’d moved to a purpose-built studio in nearby Englewood Cliffs.

Van Gelder Studios soon became crucial to the development of mainstream jazz in the 1960s. Savoy, Riverside, and other labels all employed Van Gelder, but it was Blue Note that became most closely identified with his particular sound. And that particular sound was truly unique.

Engineers for Columbia and RCA, and even small labels like Contemporary, strove to preserve the music they recorded as precisely as possible, and they succeeded. An album like Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West, recorded by engineer Ray DuNann in Los Angeles, has an extremely crisp, clear, and balanced sound, totally free of distortion.

On the flip side, a Van Gelder recording has a rough-edged wildness that’s more comparable to a Sun or Motown release. It also has some instantly recognizable sonic fingerprints. The horns and the drums are big and brash, coming right at you. The piano, on the other hand, is frequently muffled and subdued—even rinkydink at times—and unless the bassist is soloing, he’s buried, too.

Legendary producer Don Was—who has worked with Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, The B-52s, and too many other artists to list here—has been the president of Blue Note Records since 2012. He can still recall the first time he heard a Rudy Van Gelder recording. It was 1966, he was 14 years old and sitting in his mother’s car listening to Joe Henderson’s Mode For Joe on Detroit radio station WCHB.

“I felt like I was having a conversation with Joe Henderson over the AM radio, you know?” Was says. “And I believe that’s a testimony to Rudy’s mic'ing technique. In fact, I [recently] had [Herbie Hancock’s] Maiden Voyage playing on my iPhone, which is essentially like listening to a transistor radio, and it sounded like Freddie Hubbard was standing by the sink playing. So there was something he was doing. I met him twice, and I knew better than to ask for mic'ing secrets, but I’ve read some accounts and… best I can visualize is that he maybe mic'd a little too close for the accepted techniques of the time, and in doing so he had a higher threshold of distortion, that I think translates to immediacy. Scientific workplace 6 keygen crack codes. I think distortion’s a good thing.”

Nick O’Toole, one of the co-owners of the independent jazz label Posi-Tone (which is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2020), produces all of their releases himself and acknowledges Van Gelder as a pioneer. “I think Rudy’s style stands the test of time,” he says.

“It may have been different back then, but you listen to it now and at least for me, the tones he gets on the horns are magical, you know? And he did what he could with the drums and the bass, because it was a different type of separation. Nowadays, everyone’s comfortable on headphones, and it’s a whole different way of recording now than back in the day, when you put everybody in the same room and maybe some stuff in between, some gobos. So I think he was limited in that way, but the fact that he was doing it every day in his own studio, the consistency of the sound… that’s the beauty of some of those '50s and '60s records. Maybe the horn’s screaming, but it’s beautiful.”

The Blue Van Cd

On certain Blue Note recordings, the use of distortion can go so far beyond convention that it almost becomes noise. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ 1964 album Free For All is a prime example. Freddie Hubbard’s trumpet, Curtis Fuller’s trombone, and Wayne Shorter’s tenor saxophone all leap out of the speakers, with just a slight crackle. But Blakey’s drums are like a series of explosions, nearly blowing out the microphones and thoroughly drowning out Cedar Walton’s piano and Reggie Workman’s bass.

Blakey’s bands did this frequently; the 1961 album A Night in Tunisia, recorded by an earlier Jazz Messengers lineup, is almost as unhinged—the title track in particular. And yet, these albums are some of the most visceral and exciting jazz you’ll ever hear in your life.

“I’m an engineer, not a producer,” Van Gelder told a New York Times reporter in 2005. “I’m the person who makes the recording process work. I built the studio, I created the environment in which they play, I selected, installed and operated the equipment.” What exactly that equipment consisted of, and how it was operated, was information Van Gelder kept to himself.

We do know that a lot of his equipment was home-built, but some of it was new technology. He was one of the first US engineers, for example, to have and use Neumann microphones. But he would frequently take precision equipment and disguise it—placing Schoeps microphones in Shure housings, for example—to keep peers off his trail.

Blue Note co-founder Francis Wolff’s lush black-and-white photos, taken during the sessions and incorporated into graphic designer Reid Miles’ iconic album covers, were another crucial element to the label’s overall presentation. Van Gelder would often move microphones out of the way before Wolff shot, so that nobody would know what he was using or how it had been positioned.

Not everyone was a fan of Van Gelder’s approach, of course, then or now. In a 1959 Down Beat blindfold test, legendary bassist/composer Charles Mingus said, “He tries to change people’s tones. I’ve seen him do it… I’ve seen him take [trumpeter] Thad Jones and the way he sets him up at the mic, he can change the whole sound. That’s why I never go to him; he ruined my bass sound.'

Fans of ultra-pristine sound—the kind of guys who can spend an afternoon ranking matrix numbers on Steely Dan LPs—have been known to gripe about Van Gelder’s work. Mastering engineer Steve Hoffman infamously wrote on his own website, “Take three or four expensive German mics with a blistering top-end boost, put them real close to the instruments, add some extra distortion from a cheap overloading mic preamp through an Army Surplus radio console, put some crappy plate reverb on it, and record. Then, immediately (and for no good reason), redub the master onto a Magnatone tape deck at +6, compress the crap out of it while adding 5 dB at 5000 cycles to everything. That’s the Van Gelder sound to me.” Xforce 2019 autodesk.

To Don Was, Van Gelder’s relative isolation in Hackensack, New Jersey was what allowed him to experiment, and develop his trademark sound. Was says that he went through a similar process himself, in Detroit. “There was no one to teach me engineering, but there were studios that were willing to let me go in at midnight and experiment for a couple of years. And that was the only way I was able to do it, was through trial and error. And you come up with something that’s different than you would have come up with if you were a second engineer at Columbia Studios in New York or something like that, where they taught you the ‘proper’ way and put you in a lab coat and that kind of thing.”

He compares the classic Blue Note sound to that of Sun, Chess, Motown, or Stax recordings—all unique, all instantly recognizable, “so there’s a lot to be said for doing it on your own in a remote, provincial setting, in terms of coming up with personality. And I think Rudy did that—even though he was close to New York City, he might as well have been a thousand miles away, because he was a ham radio operator who built his own gear. That’s the other thing, too, the stuff that’s not necessarily willful, just the signal path he had. That’s as distinctive as a guitar. Every Fender Precision bass sounds different, and every signal chain sounds different, and is gonna have a character.”

The final component of Van Gelder’s sound was the mastering, which was red-hot in order to blare out of the primary music delivery systems of the time: mono jukebox speakers, transistor radios, and car radios.

Was, who visited Van Gelder in his studio, says, “He explained [to me] that his lathe was such an important part of that sound—he had a Scully lathe, and he was buddies with Mr. Scully and they hot-rodded his lathe, basically. I don’t know how to separate that from the sound. I do know this, that if you put up the master tapes, they don’t sound like the records we know. You have to do something to them, you can’t just put them up.”

Like Was, O’Toole believes the mix of rawness and polish in Van Gelder’s classic sound draws the listener in. “You may not hear every bass note, you may lose the accents and the touch on the drums a little bit, but nowadays with the limiting and the compression, it’s too much to handle sometimes. Your brain just can’t process that much information. And not to get into vinyl versus CD, but that’s why some people like vinyl—there’s not as much information there, and it’s within the human hearing range, and that’s why people say it’s ‘warm.’ You probably don’t have 17KHz on a record, and you don’t have 50 Hz on a record either.”

It’s in that hazy zone between “warm” and “hot” that Rudy Van Gelder made his magic. And even if some of what he did was “wrong” from a technical standpoint, well, it made the recordings sound oh so right.

Los Angeles' Techno Empire actually has a cache of Van Gelder's later-year gear for sale on Reverb. Check out the Techno Empire Rudy Van Gelder Collection.

Weezer (often referred to as The Blue Album) is the debut studio album by Weezer. It was released on May 10, 1994 by Geffen Records. The album was produced by former Cars frontman Ric Ocasek and recorded in Electric Lady Studios in New York City. Weezer spawned the popular singles 'Undone - The Sweater Song' and 'Buddy Holly', both of which were responsible for launching Weezer into mainstream success with the aid of music videos directed by Spike Jonze.

• 4Reception
  • 4.1Critics

Pre-recording

After recording The Kitchen Tape in hopes of creating interest in L.A., Weezer eventually attracted attention from major-label A&R reps looking for alternative rock bands while performing on the same bill as the band that dog. They were then signed to DGC Records on June 26, 1993, by Todd Sullivan, an A&R rep from Geffen. While prepping for the forthcoming studio sessions, the band focused on their vocal interplay by practicing barbershop quartet-styled songs, which helped both lead singer Rivers Cuomo and bassist Matt Sharp achieve a newfound collaborative comfort during rehearsals. Sharp, who never sang before joining Weezer, gained his falsetto background vocal abilities. 'I had to sing an octave higher than Rivers. After a lot of practice, I started to get it down.'

Fifteen songs were rehearsed for the album during early practice sessions in New York in preparation for the Electric Lady Studios album recording. Ten of the songs appear on the album, but four of the songs were cut: 'Lullaby for Wayne', 'I Swear It's True', 'Getting Up and Leaving', and a reprise version of 'In The Garage.' The other song, 'Mykel and Carli', was attempted during the Electric Lady sessions, but was also abandoned. It would be recorded a year later and became a popular B-side, and eventually get a proper release on the 'Undone - The Sweater Song' single.

Recording process

The band briefly considered self-producing, but were pressured by Geffen to choose a producer. They ultimately decided on Ric Ocasek. Cuomo explained his choice: 'I'd always admired The Cars and Ric Ocasek's songwriting and production skills.' During production, Ocasek convinced the band to change their guitar pickup from the neck pick-up to the bridge pick-up, resulting in a brighter sound.

During these sessions, founding guitarist Jason Cropper left the band and was replaced by current guitarist Brian Bell, leading to some speculation about how much Bell contributes to the album. While Bell's vocals are clearly audible on some tracks, Cuomo re-recorded all of Cropper's guitar parts. According to Ocasek, all ten tracks were laid down by Cuomo in one day, each in one take. Cropper's writing credit on 'My Name Is Jonas' is earned by his coming up with the intro to the song. Most of the album was written by Rivers Cuomo. Exceptions are 'My Name Is Jonas', which was co-written with Jason Cropper and Patrick Wilson and 'The World Has Turned and Left Me Here' and 'Surf Wax America', which both were composed and written by Cuomo and Wilson. Weezer touches upon various life experiences of Cuomo, including subjects such as his brother's car accident, heartbreak, jealousy, alcohol and former girlfriends.

The single 'Undone - The Sweater Song' was described by Cuomo as 'the feeling you get when the train stops and the little guy comes knockin' on your door. It was supposed to be a sad song, but everyone thinks it's hilarious.' The video marks one of the early directorial efforts of Spike Jonze, whose pitch was simply 'A blue stage, a steadicam, a pack of wild dogs.' The video became an instant hit on MTV.

Both 'No One Else' and 'The World Has Turned and Left Me Here' are lyrically connected, with Cuomo describing the narrator of 'No One Else' as 'the jealous-obsessive asshole in me freaking out on my girlfriend' and claiming that 'The World has Turned and Left Me Here' is the same asshole wondering why she's gone.'

The second single from the Blue Album was 'Buddy Holly', whose music video was also directed by Spike Jonze. It portrayed the band performing at the original Arnold's Drive-In diner from the popular '70s television show, Happy Days. The video combined contemporary footage of the band with clips from the show. Happy Days cast member Al Molinaro]] made a cameo appearance in the video. The video was met with great popularity and heavy rotation on MTV. The video scored four awards at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards, including prizes for Breakthrough Video and Best Alternative Video.

'My Name is Jonas', deals with Cuomo's brother Leaves who had been seriously injured in a car accident while a student at Oberlin College, and was having problem with his insurance. Jason Cropper earned co-writing credit for coming up with the intro to the song.

The final single, 'Say it Ain't So', was inspired by Cuomo (incorrectly but sincerely) believing (as a child) that his stepfather was becoming an alcoholic, which fed Rivers' fear about losing his stepfather the same way he lost contact with his dad. The music video, which was directed by Sophie Muller, was less successful than the previous two Spike Jonze-directed videos. It featured the band performing in the garage of their former house, and the bandmates playing hacky sack in the backyard.

Artwork

The Blue Van Album Cover

The album artwork, designed by Karl Koch based on Rivers' ideas and photographed by 60's glamour photographer Peter Gowland, features Patrick Wilson, Rivers Cuomo, Matt Sharp, and Brian Bell standing left to right in front of a plain, blue background.

During an interview for the iTunes Originals compilation Cuomo said, 'I remember having a very strong vision for the first album, The Blue Album, what that cover was gonna look like. I never anticipated people would call it The Blue Album, or even Weezer. I just thought of it as an untitled album. It was like the year later that we noticed that everyone was calling it The Blue Album.' In 2020, Cuomo gave some additional insight on the choice of blue: 'When I was 7, my family built a house. My parents said I could paint my room any color I wanted. I painted it my favorite color, a specific shade of blue. When I was thinking about a cover for the first Weezer album, I wanted it to be that same shade of blue. This mode of nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood was the same source of my 'look' in the Blue album era--the glasses frames, bowl cut, dickies, blue t-shirt, and windbreaker from my childhood photos.'

The simple image would be used prominently in the advertising of the album. The cover received many comparisons to the Feelies' album Crazy Rhythms. On some vinyl pressings of the album, the cover does not crop off their feet. On the Deluxe Edition case, the feet are presented on the back cover, and the band sold an official t-shirt with a shot of the band's feet after the deluxe edition release. Inside the album booklet, Rivers Cuomo pays tribute to his past metal influences with a photo taken in the group's garage on Amherst (this same garage would be featured in the 'Say It Ain't So' music video). A poster of Judas Priest's album British Steel is featured on the left side of the photo, while on the right a Quiet Riot concert poster is displayed. The Deluxe Edition features additional photographs of the band, and hand-written lyrics for each song.

Karl Koch recalled the album art's creation in a post from 2002:

The guys actually went out and found 4 matching striped button down shirts, and in fact in late 1993 played at least one show wearing them, much to the contempt of the LA scenesters of the era. Noted 60's fashion photographer Peter Gowland was contacted to do the shoot, as his mellow pastel colored shots of girls in bikinis and guys out golfing had the exact 'anti-90's' feeling we needed. To Peters sprawling Lloyd Wright-esqe 50's house we went, which was complete with a near-clone of 'Alice' from Brady Bunch manning the kitchen. The guys started the shoot in the striped shirts, but everyone later concluded that the photos looked better with everyone wearing regular clothes.

Reception

The album was well-received by critics on its release. Allmusic gave the album 5 stars explaining 'What makes the band so enjoyable is their charming geekiness; instead of singing about despair, they sing about love, which is kind of refreshing in the gloom-drenched world of '90s guitar-pop.' Rolling Stone praised the album saying 'Weezer's Rivers Cuomo is great at sketching vignettes (the Dungeons and Dragons games and Kiss posters that inspire the hapless daydreamer of 'In the Garage'), and with sweet inspiration like the waltz tempo of 'My Name Is Jonas' and the self-deprecating humor of lines like 'I look just like Buddy Holly/And you're Mary Tyler Moore', his songs easily ingratiate.'

In the years since its release, The Blue Album has risen in stature to become one of the most highly-regarded albums of the 1990s, appearing on many 'Best-of' lists. In 2003, Rolling Stone named the album number 297 in their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Blender named the Blue Album among the '500 CDs You Must Own', calling the album 'Absolute geek-rock, out and proud.' Non-U.S. publications have acclaimed the album as well: New Zealand's The Movement placed it at number 39 on a list of 'The 101 Best Albums of the 90s', and Visions of Germany ranked it number 32 on a list of 'The Most Important Albums of the 90s.' Reviews of the deluxe edition of the album have also been positive. In 2004, Popmatters gave the album a very positive review and saying 'I’d go so far to declare the 'Blue Album' one of the greatest records of the last 20 years.'

In naming Weezer one of the 50 best albums of the 1990s, Pitchfork Media summed up the album's critical recognition. Brent DiCrescenzo wrote: 'An album so substantial the band misguidedly attempted to tap into its resonance through cover graphics a mere two releases later. In 1994, 70s rock had come to mean either a bastardized version of Led Zeppelin or a bullshit reconstruction of punk rock. As guitar nerds, Weezer sought influence there but found true inspiration in forgotten bubblegum power-pop like Cheap Trick, The Raspberries, 20/20, and The Quick. Most impressively, Rivers Cuomo rescued the thrilling guitar solo from finger-tapping metal and disregarding grunge/punk. A decade later air-guitaring to the album feels far less embarrassing than singing along. With the help of Spike Jonze, Weezer kept joy alive in arena rock, making the critical repositioning of Weezer as some emo touchstone even more absentminded. They called themselves Weezer, knowingly, for chrissakes.'

Weezer was certified gold in just under seven months after its release on December 1, 1994. It was certified platinum on January 1, 1995; since then it has gone three times multi-platinum in the United States. As of December 2007, the album had sold 3,146,000 copies in the US (Weezer's best-selling album to date), peaking at #16 on the Billboard 200. In 2003, the album was ranked number 297 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. A 2-CD deluxe edition was released in 2004. Also in 2003, Pitchfork Media named The Blue Album the 26th best album of the 1990s.

Critics

The Blue Van Album Cover

Individual songs

Track listing

The Blue Van Album Download

Personnel

• Rivers Cuomo – guitars, lead vocals
• Patrick Wilson – drums (backing vocals - not credited)
• Brian Bell – backing vocals (credited with rhythm guitars although is said to have not played on the album)
• Matt Sharp – bass guitar, backing vocals
• Ric Ocasek – production
• Chris Shaw - engineering, mixing

See also