Keeping the Flame at Van Gelder Studio

By Ted Panken I Sep. 3, 2025

Don and Maureen Sickler serve as the keepers of engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s flame at Van Gelder Studio, perhaps the most famous recording studio in jazz history.
(Photo: Richard Halterman)

On the last Sunday of 2024, in the control room of Van Gelder Studio, Don and Maureen Sickler, co-owners since Rudy Van Gelder willed it to Maureen in 2016, reminisced about day one of her 30-year tenure as his trusted assistant and eventual heir. Maureen, 78, sat on an ergonomic kneeling chair beside a stack of audio equipment on the left of Van Gelder’s custom Nieve console from 1972. Then, as now, that stack established the invisible line (a.k.a. the “bridge”) that only Van Gelder, famously secretive about his methods, was permitted to cross.

Don, a week shy of 81, stayed on the “civilian” side of the control room, his back to the glass wall that separates it from the main area, an acoustic marvel with a spire-like ceiling, made of Douglas fir ascending 39 feet at its apex, complemented by concrete floors. “I’ve played and produced records all over the world, and never found a studio whose acoustics match this,” he said. “There’s no echo, just the natural decay of the sound.”

They time-traveled to October 1986, when Van Gelder was considering whether to record Tommy Flanagan at the Village Vanguard for Uptown Records, a label for which Sickler had produced 14 albums at VGS since 1983. A pioneer in location recording whose resume included iconic Vanguard recordings by Sonny Rollins (1957) and John Coltrane (1961 and 1966), Van Gelder, then approaching 62, wanted an assistant.

“Rudy said, ‘How about Maureen?’” Don remembered. “She’d always joined me at the studio. On dates where I played trumpet, and couldn’t constantly listen to everything else, I trusted her ears to make sure everything was in tune or the bass player wasn’t going to the bridge in the wrong place. Rudy recognized how smart she is, how quickly she learns.” Once on location, Maureen ran the cassette machines and headphones, and carried cables from the truck into the club. “Nobody was allowed to touch anything at Van Gelder’s,” Don said. “That was big.”

By then, the Sicklers were running a bustling rehearsal studio and Don’s expanding publishing company, Second Floor Music, from their West 28th Street loft. They’d married and moved to New York in 1967, where Don enrolled at Manhattan School of Music after graduating from Gonzaga University. Maureen — a baritone hornist, trombonist, pianist and percussionist — had matriculated there on scholarship. For five years, she worked as a blackjack-carrying Federal Marshal, then earned an English degree. Meanwhile, Don established himself as a trumpeter on New York’s Broadway and session scenes, while also working as production manager and managing editor for Big Three Music, a subsidiary of United Artists that owned the Blue Note and Pacific Jazz catalogs as well as Duke Ellington’s music. Don created study scores of Ellington’s “Koko” and “Main Stem,” and then transcription books of Joe Henderson’s compositions and solos (vetted by Henderson) and John Coltrane’s pieces from Blue Trane and Whims Of Chambers for United Artists. Maureen helped oversee the process.

Don left United Artists to form Second Floor Music in 1979. In 1981, he began to alert jazz composers and their heirs about expiring copyrights, helping artists like Benny Golson and Gigi Gryce, and Clifford Brown’s widow, LaRue Brown, retain ownership of their intellectual property. “We’d search the copyright books for every year, page by page, at the 42nd Street library,” Maureen recalled. “Suddenly, we were bombarded by copyrights,” Don said. Maureen, who’d worked in a library as a teenager, created a meticulous filing system of song cards to manage the influx. By 2000, she was spearheading their internet arm, jazzleadsheets.com.

Maureen’s role at VGS expanded after the summer 1990 recording of Dizzy Gillespie’s Rhythmstick, when Van Gelder, a two-finger typist, struggled with synchronizing audio and video time codes. “Maureen suggested she do the typing, freeing Rudy to focus elsewhere,” Don said. “Rudy didn’t allow engineers in the studio, but Maureen wasn’t an engineer, plus she was non-aggressive, so she wasn’t a threat.”

Don elaborated: “Rudy had no children. Maureen was like the daughter he never had. She has the same sensibility — likes gadgets, can fix anything. Rudy would call for her opinion about new equipment. He’d built his stuff from the ground up, so he could figure everything out. Maureen read all the manuals.” Gradually, Maureen gained a comprehensive knowledge of audio engineering through the prism of Van Gelder’s process. “Rudy had to learn everything himself,” she said. “It was hard-won information, and he didn’t want to give it up.” During his final years, she finally assisted with the console, noting every knob’s position for recalibration if needed.

Van Gelder contributed his understanding and superior equipment to several thousand albums for Blue Note, Prestige, Impulse! and CTI from the 1950s through the 1970s that, drummer Kenny Washington said, “set the standard for what the rhythm section — all the instruments — should sound like.” Washington, who played on 59 post-1980 Van Gelder sessions, added, “Rudy instilled in Maureen how he wanted the instruments to sound. She’s carrying that on.”

After 2016, the transition wasn’t instant. A pep talk from Ron Carter, who first recorded at VGS sessions in 1960 and had recently recorded his fourth duo album with Houston Person (Chemistry on HighNote), galvanized Maureen into action. “Ron said, ‘We’ve got to do another duo record in that studio, with that incredible sound,’” Don recalled. “‘I know you can do it.’”

“No one but Maureen monitored pianos, knew the microphones, moved the microphones, made the purchases, knew what was coming in, knew how to replace certain things,” said Carter, who once spent several months of Saturdays brainstorming with Van Gelder about optimal microphone location for various bass pickups. “When Rudy decided she was the person who could best carry on in his position, I wholeheartedly accepted that.”

Don recalled: “After that conversation, Maureen said, ‘Get your trumpet and flugelhorn and all your mutes, so I can check all these microphones.’ She wanted to hear the qualities and workings of each one.”

In 2018, Carter and Person recorded Remember Love (HighNote). “The result was similarly satisfactory,” Carter said. “Maureen’s product of Rudy’s studio is going to have her fingerprints on it. It’s so close to Rudy — I’m OK with that.”

“Rudy told me he took the music the musicians made to please themselves and made it listenable,” Maureen said. Don added: “He gave back what he heard you sound like, not what he thought a trumpet player should sound like. ... Maureen is the same.”

The studio’s pristine sound, tradition and Maureen’s fidelity to Van Gelder’s ethos continue to attract musicians like Jonathan Batiste, esperanza spalding and David Murray as well as newcomers like Isaiah Collier. “It’s put together to enable you to make great music,” said trumpeter Brian Lynch, who produced Samara Joy’s new album, Portrait (Verve), at VGS last summer. “It’s like a church. Church is when it makes you look up, and that space makes you want to play up to it.”

Lynch recorded his debut album, Peer Pressure (Criss Cross), at VGS two months after Maureen’s maiden voyage with Tommy Flanagan’s Nights At The Vanguard. Some 38 years later, the two-time Grammy winner booked time to record a self-produced quintet project with Charles McPherson for which Joy wrote — and sang — lyrics for one song each by the two protagonists.

“At first, I wondered whether Maureen could manage sessions,” Don said. “She doesn’t talk much. But on the mic, she’s totally in control. She sets up camera shoots, handles film editing and designs graphics. She’s the brain. ”

“It’s her house,” Lynch said. “She’s the institutional memory of that space.”

As both the Sicklers and their admirers are acutely aware, preserving that institutional memory poses challenges. While VGS became a National Landmark in 2022 and secured a New Jersey easement ensuring its physical survival, maintaining the 65-year-old studio and its hefty property taxes requires constant activity. “Social Security helps, and I get a small union pension,” Don said. “But we can’t afford to hire anyone to work with us, and although we can stay in the apartment upstairs, it’s time-consuming. People want to intern, but Maureen has no time to teach them anything.” Maureen added: “We’re too old for vacations. We just want to get things done.”

The Sicklers hope to establish a nonprofit to inherit the studio one day. Would naming a successor involve briefing them on Van Gelder’s secret sauce? “If I can do it, it can’t be that tough,” Maureen demurred. “I don’t think it’s necessary.”

Perhaps. But Kenny Washington’s remark reflects the consensus wish of the hardcore jazz community: “I hope they find someone they can trust to keep it going and start training them now. They’ve got to pass it on.” DB