Over more than half a century, he recorded several thousand sessions, with musicians including Booker Ervin, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Grant Green and George Benson.

[1] 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.

His parents, Louis Van Gelder and the former Sarah Cohen ran a women's clothing store in Passaic.

[4] 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.

Thereafter, Van Gelder maintained an optometry practice in Teaneck, New Jersey until 1959 when he made the transition to full-time recording engineer.

[9] "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.

[10] One of Van Gelder's friends, the baritone saxophonist Gil Mellé, introduced him to Alfred Lion, a producer for Blue Note Records, in 1953.

In 1959, he moved the Van Gelder Studio to a larger purpose-built facility in Englewood Cliffs, a few miles southeast of the original location.

[12] An obituarist in the London Daily Telegraph wrote of "Van Gelder's extreme fastidiousness" as an engineer, and his insistence on "no food or drink in the studio, and on no account was anyone to touch a microphone.

In the late 1990s, he worked as a recording engineer for some of the songs featured in the soundtracks for the Japanese anime series Cowboy Bebop.

[20] Van Gelder pioneered use of close miking techniques, peak limiting, and tape saturation to imbue the music with an added sense of immediacy.

[21] He also demonstrated a commitment to superior signal-to-noise ratio while recording and mastering, allowing Van Gelder to achieve greater volume on his LPs and minimize tape hiss and vinyl surface noise.

[20] Though instrumental in developing the so-called 'Blue Note sound', Van Gelder's approach was often dictated by the production personnel with whom he worked.

[26] Richard Cook called Van Gelder's characteristic method of recording and mixing the piano "as distinctive as the pianists' playing" itself.

Some engineers suspect this was due to reflections over the piano, brought on by the shape and size of his parents' living room and, later, his studio.

But for me, the so-called "Blue Note sound" has always been a musical, rather than audio, innovation, and Van Gelder less a peerless technician than a sonic visionary.

"[30] Within a few years of opening his studio, Van Gelder was in demand by many other independent labels based around New York City, such as Prestige Records.

[31] According to a JazzTimes article in August 2016, "jazz lore has formed the brands into a yin and yang of sorts: The Blue Note albums involved more original music, with rehearsal and the stringent, consistent oversight of Lion; Weinstock was more nonchalant, organizing what were essentially blowing sessions for some of the best musicians in jazz history".