Le PIANO et RUDY VAN GELDER: quel est le problème?

Je le dis, et je sais que je ne suis pas le seul: il n'y a pas beaucoup d'enregistrements musicaux qui me donnent autant de plaisirs que les enregistrements de jazz acoustique de la fin des années '50 et du début des années '60, enregistrés (mais non remasterés!) par Rudy van Gelder. On dirait que ces titres immortels sont le passage obligé de la musique pop et rock à un monde plus audiophile... Les titres sont dans presque toutes les collections de disques un peu sérieuses: la série des Workin', Steamin', Cookin' et Relaxin' du Miles Davis Quintet; les Blue Note de Sonny Rollins (Tenor Madness, Saxophone Colossus); Something Else de Cannonball Adderly; Horace Silver; Art Blakey; John Coltrane; Eric Dolphy. La liste est longue, le musicianship inégalable et le son, le son! On pourrait mordre dans le son des cuivres tellement il est vivant et dense.

Pourtant, à chaque fois que j'écoute un enregistrement de RVG, un instrument me fait grincer des dents. Le piano. Le piano, étrangement gringalet, famélique, dénué de densité, une sorte d'instrument fantôme dans des enregistrements pourtant tellement musclés.

Je viens de tomber sur un échange de posts entre Jamie Tate (un ingénieur de son) et Steve Hoffman (une légende du mastering qui vient de travailler sur des rééditions 45-tours des enregistrements RVG), où Hoffman explique pourquoi, entre autres et pour reprendre les termes de Jamie Tate, le piano de Bill Evans est

distorted and usually have a weird, midrange heavy sound to them.

sur l'excellent Everybody Digs Bill Evans.

Voici l'explication de SH:

The piano is always the hardest instrument to record. Back in the day, it always showed the flaws in any recording system. Usually you had a Neumann mic hooked into a mic pre console that wasn't compatible with it. You got overload (listen to BILL EVANS title mentioned above). When everything matched correctly there was no overload distortion but then engineers like Van Gelder wanted the piano to sound "better" or louder or more able to cut through. So they started EQ'ing the keyboards and running it through a separate compressor, putting the mic right inside the piano, etc., still with overload or the sound of cardboard. Never worked for these guys because they didn't understand that in order for a German mic to "do piano", ya needed SPACE between the mic and the instrument. These small studios didn't want leakage, etc. so they couldn't or wouldn't do it. Columbia or RCA in their big ol' rooms in the late 1950's didn't have this problem and they recorded the piano just like they did in the 1920's, from a short distance (sometimes taking the lid of the piano.)

Listen to a Duke Ellington VICTOR from 1932. Nice, natural piano sound, no distortion, no overload.

(....)

Van Gelder was always searching for a way to get the piano "out there". He tried almost everything and was never happy with any of them. Jack Higgins and the Reeves people seemed to just ignore the blatant distortion of the piano on many famous Riverside albums like Kelly Blue, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, etc. Like it didn't matter or didn't exist. Weird.

When Bill Evans recorded at Bell Sound or Nola Penthouse or whatever, the sound improved (piano overload-wise). Of course, this has nothing to do with performance or "feel" or anything of a musical nature, just sound reproduction. Bill hated the actual piano at Reeves and wouldn't record there after PORTRAIT..

Roy DuNann or Howard Holzer in Los Angeles never had a problem recording a good, distortion free piano sound at the Contemporary Records' mailroom studio. Listen to JAZZ IMPRESSIONS OF MY FAIR LADY from 1956 in stereo to hear what could be done by a small (tiny) studio setup..