Below you will find a database with engineering credits and recording locations for the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings‘ Core Collection albums. The database only contains Core Collection albums in the ninth edition of the book for which it was possible to obtain engineering credits (125 out of 199 albums). For a complete list of Core Collection albums, visit TomHull.com.

SOURCES: Rudy Van Gelder’s album credits were sourced from album liner notes and various published discographies. Other engineer credits were mostly sourced from album liner notes via Discogs.com.

MISSING ALBUMS: For a number of reasons it was not possible to obtain engineering credits for the entire list. In particular, I was only able to find credits for 3 of the 37 albums containing material recorded prior to 1953. For the remaining 162 albums recorded entirely in 1953 or after, I managed to secure engineering credits for approximately 74% of those albums.*

ALBUMS VS. COMPILATIONS: The Penguin authors elected to focus on modern-day compact disc releases of all the recorded material in their guide. This means that the earliest recordings in the guide are not “albums proper” but compilations of numerous recordings that would have been originally released in pairs on 78 R.P.M. shellac disks. Even for recordings made at the very beginning of the “album era” (roughly 1953 on), the authors still usually give preference to compilations. What this means for this research project is “albums” are sometimes actually compilations with split engineering credits. Additionally, there are numerous “proper albums” in the list that have multiple engineering credits, and the database takes those into account as well.

RECORDING AND MIXING ENGINEERING: In the early days of recording, the act of “mixing” an album was done on-the-fly at the time of recording, usually by the recording engineer and the session producer. With the advent of multitrack recording in the late 1960s, there became a new division of labor in the recording industry, as the responsibility of mixing slowly moved from the recording engineer’s hands into those of a separate engineer specially designated as the “mixing engineer”. Since many of the earliest recording engineers were at least partly responsible for the mixing process, for later albums I have elected to give partial credit to both recording and mixing engineers when both credits are present for an album.

If you have any information regarding engineering credits and/or recording locations for other Core Collection albums, or if you know of any corrections that need to made to the current data, please let me know.

– Rich Capeless, April 12, 2020

* Rudy Van Gelder has claimed he was the first or one of the first engineers to be credited for a commercial release (Van Gelder’s earliest known credit is on the label of a 78 R.P.M. shellac disk issued in late 1951). This study provides evidence of that claim (Doug Hawkins and Harry Smith, the engineers for the earliest recordings in this database, were not credited on the original 78 R.P.M. releases).

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