Evenings At The Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy

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Himes, Geoffrey (November 7, 2023). "Give the Jazz Drummers Their Due". Music > Features > Jazz. Paste. ISSN 1540-3106 . Retrieved November 7, 2023.

This music is right at the beginning of a major change for Coltrane,” saxophonist Branford Marsalis writes in another essay. “He was starting to stretch in a new direction. In terms of the intensity that’s traditionally associated with the classic Coltrane quartet, this is the precursor.” And sometimes the music is downright holy. Welcome to the church known as the Village Gate. Welcome to Evenings At The Village Gate: John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy. Rightly understood, the new release (available on CD, vinyl, and digital formats) is as valuable for tyros as for aficionados. I don’t believe in cultural starter sets; with great artists, there’s no point to beginning at a simpler, more conventional stage, or with a sampler. In my experience, what matters is to come in where the passion runs high, and in the Village Gate album, the entire band plays with an astonishing, even overwhelming intensity. The spectrum of achievements that the recording documents for Coltrane and Dolphy is narrow, but it reaches further into the musical future—the musicians’ and that of jazz at large—than any other recordings of theirs from the early sixties that I’ve heard. Here, Coltrane, in particular, offers audacious premonitions of a jazz avant-garde, running years ahead to prefigure the way he’d be playing from 1965 through the end of his life, in 1967. Berlyant, Matthew (October 12, 2023). "John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy: Evenings at the Village Gate (Impulse!)". Music. Under the Radar. ISSN 1553-2305 . Retrieved October 12, 2023.Hobart, Mike (July 7, 2023). "John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy thrill in Evenings at the Village Gate— album review". Financial Times. ISSN 0307-1766 . Retrieved July 7, 2023.

That classic quartet comprised Coltrane, Tyner, Jones and bassist Jimmy Garrison, releasing classics including A Love Supreme. Coltrane would go on to explore even freer expression on albums such as Ascension. He died in 1967 aged 40, having led at least 50 recording sessions and collaborated with others including Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. His legacy continues; he has received a collection of posthumous awards, including a special Pulitzer prize in 2007. The recordings came into the possession of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where it was lost. Though the tapes were briefly rediscovered, they disappeared again in the Library’s archives for several more decades. During 1961, John was following a different concept as far as his harmonic approach,” Workman writes in an essay accompanying the new release. “He was giving more room for the solos and coming from a different place in the way he was constructing his tunes … It was an exploratory time for John. He was always reaching for new sounds and Eric being in the group was part of that. John really respected Eric a lot. They were very close in concept. Listening to the recording from the Gate, you can hear how Eric would take long solos and John would come after him and take a much shorter solo than he would normally take and let Eric’s voice be prominent.”

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For Coltrane admirers, jazz historians and anyone intrigued by the experimental end of improvisational music, Evenings at the Village Gate will represent not only a welcome new find but also a link in a chain. The Coltrane-and-Dolphy frontline was short-lived, in part because it faced such strong headwinds from the jazz establishment, but it did leave behind a major testament: Coltrane "Live" at the Village Vanguard, recorded at a different Greenwich Village club in November 1961, the same month that their unruly output jarred loose the indelible phrase "anti-jazz." The recordings, uncovered at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, were made by engineer Rich Alderson as part of a test of the Village Gate’s then-new sound system. The tapes seemed to have been lost, were found, but then disappeared again into Library’s vast sound archives.

A photograph of Eric Dolphy (left) and John Coltrane taken by Herb Snitzer during a performance at the Village Gate in New York in 1961. In an essay in the album booklet, Alderson tells the story. Here is an extract: "In 1965 and '66, I was hired to build Bob Dylan's stage sound system and went on the road with him. Around that time, I also got involved with the Institute of Sound at Carnegie Hall, a small non-profit run by a former child actor named Richard Stryker, which was dedicated to preserving historic recordings, primarily opera. Male, Andrew (July 27, 2023). "John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy Evenings At The Village Gate Reviewed: Newly rediscovered sessions show a genius in transition". Mojo. ISSN 1351-0193 . Retrieved July 27, 2023.

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Album closer “Africa” emerged from one of those nights. It’s the only live rendition of the Africa/Brass centerpiece known to exist on tape. The song begins with applause, as the band teases a fleeting figure from a George Gershwin tune that Coltrane reinvented, “Summertime.” Davis plunks away regularly, enabling Tyner to sprint up and down the keys and Workman to navigate a searching bass solo. Africa/Brass was Coltrane’s most unusual album in the busy year of 1961, and it landed on shelves near the end of his run at the downtown venue. The inclusion from his latest, weirdest disc coaxes the audience to polite applause and probably some puzzlement, too. McCoy Tyner was always the calm between the storms, His vamp on ‘My Favourite Things’ moves slowly away from the waltz rhythm. He is not well served by the recording but we can hear, even at this early stage, the contribution of Tyner to the quartet and quintet would not be spectacular but essential. ‘Impression’ soars ahead and once the theme is finished Coltrane goes into repeated figures reaching for transcendence. Dolphy is tentative at first before giving way to a Tyner solo that is fluent and expressive. The take on ‘Greensleeves’ is made memorable in the way that Coltrane made ‘My Favourite Things’ stand out. The ancient tune is recomposed on the fly. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Those Village Vanguard tapes, which later yielded a monumental four-disc set, amount to one of the most mysterious and thrilling documents in jazz history. A couple of years ago, Ben Ratliff, author of Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, placed this music within a cultural context of "ambivalent possibility," in a vivid essay for the Washington Post titled " John Coltrane and the Essence of 1961." He observes: "The music sounds post-heroic and pre-cynical; interestingly free from grandiosity; full of room for the listener to find a place within it and make up their own mind."

Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy was commercially successful, debuting at No.8 on Top Album Sales, No.1 on Jazz Albums, No.1 on Traditional Jazz Albums, No.4 on Tastemaker Albums, No.7 on Top Current Album Sales, No.10 on Vinyl Albums, and No.156 on Billboard200 charts. [16] Chart performance for Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy Chart The Impulse! label has released several outstanding John Coltrane live albums since 2000. With the exception of the latest, the sensational John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy: Evenings At The Village Gate (2023), each was recorded in 1965, the year when Coltrane's classic quartet with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones, was at its zenith. The 2-CD A Love Supreme: Deluxe Edition (2002), which included a recording, previously available with poor audio only, of Coltrane's signature suite at the Antibes Jazz Festival in July, was followed by another 2-CD, One Down, One Up (2005), recorded at New York's Half Note in March and May. More recently there was A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle (2021), which featured an augmented lineup at the city's Penthouse in October. Some rediscovered archival recordings by great musicians are more noteworthy for their news value than for their artistic significance. Others are treasures that extend a view of the artists’ achievements without transforming it; these are more meaningful for connoisseurs than for general listeners. But a newly recovered recording that was released last week, “Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy,” featuring performances taped at a leading New York jazz club in August, 1961, has a singular place in the canons of both headliners. It reveals an entirely new realm of accomplishment for Coltrane and Dolphy, and helps to redefine the very importance of hitherto unreleased recordings. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? By 1961, Coltrane had begun experimenting with modes and genre, moving towards the avant-garde sound that would be featured on records like Africa/Brass. [2] This period of experimentation proved highly controversial and Coltrane and collaborator Eric Dolphy faced criticism that their music during this period was "anti-jazz". [4] The recordings on this album are from a brief residency in mid-1961 that the duo had at the Village Gate and were recorded for posterity's sake by engineer Richard Alderson. They were rediscovered decades later in a New York Public Library collection. [2] Critical reception [ edit ]The degree to which this is a transitional recording is perhaps best exemplified by the early run through of Coltrane’s Impressions, first recorded in the studio in 1962 but best known from the version captured at New York’s Village Vanguard in November 1961. That version might be the finest documented example of the Coltrane/Dolphy quintet. Recorded with the same line-up as this album, it’s a euphoric, exploratory masterclass in what Coltrane was capable of in 1961. Against Jones’s driving polyrhythmic be-bop patterns Coltrane niggles away at a tiny harmonic idea reminiscent of Miles Davis’s So What, before turning the whole thing upside down and inside out, Dolphy cutting in on incendiary agitated alto sax, the duo reaching for something ancient and primal as Tyler seemingly scales the walls with his glittering keyboard runs. And so we have "My Favorite Things," (which due to mainstream radio play was Coltrane's best-known release to that point) seemingly stirring into consciousness from the basement vapors of the Gate. Dolphy's bright, balletic flute spinning its way through the rhythmic propulsion, gearing up for the acrobatics to follow as Coltrane's melodically biting soprano comes screaming in full force. Jones, as ever, never lets up, giving the frontline ample tectonics to pursue what some small-mindedly labeled anti-jazz at the time. a b c Chinen, Nate (May 31, 2023). "John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy's fearless experiment sets a new album ablaze". Music News. Consider This. NPR . Retrieved June 2, 2023. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.