Evenings At The Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy

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Alderson provides some details in an essay accompanying the CD: he hadn’t intended to record the music for posterity; rather, he wanted to know what the sound was like. The whole track possesses luxurious space, hypnotic mystery and tension that has the audience audibly gasping. There is no limit if I say greedy, but I wish that each instrument was captured a little more clearly. Of course Coltrane makes My Favourite Things something beautiful but what makes this recording so very special is Eric Dolphy.

Twenty-four-year-old engineer and Village scenester Rich Alderson wanted to test the club’s sound system and also an old RCA 77-A ribbon microphone he had modified. He flails against orthodoxy, rattles the bars of swing time and jeers at the expectations of consistency that percussionists have to shoulder. The sound from the stage is an elemental force blasting through the soporific climes, shaking the empty seats. Is it because the unique atmosphere created by that era has the power to draw me in without saying yes or no?Lo-fi, but to complain about that is like whinging that you need your glasses to read the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scores of Coltrane heads weaned themselves on the impressive fidelity of “Live” at the Village Vanguard and 1964’s Live at Birdland, both of which were captured with extreme stereo know-how by Rudy Van Gelder.

In short, the magnificent and the unknown, a point where both player and audience are simultaneously lost and awestruck. Just as Coltrane did for Miles Davis during their final shows together, Dolphy widened Coltrane’s canvas. Within a month of the Gate performances, Ornette Coleman released Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, which used two bassists. The dog days of summer were in full swelter, and the venue had to lure listeners out of their homes and onto the sticky Village streets for dinner (bad service, but apparently tasty food!This concert would be a prime candidate for The Beatles AI demixing / remixing technique to rebalance the instruments when it becomes commonly available but until then this superb release will do just fine.

The best track has to be the opener, My Favourite Things, with Dolphy on skittering flute and Coltrane's sound concentrated to its essential essence sounding both beautiful and ugly all at once (which so alarmed the critics of the time who were mystified by how anyone could do this). Patrick Hadfield lives in Edinburgh, occasionally takes photographs, and sometimes blogs at On the Beat. With Evenings At The Village Gate both adjectives are at play, but the LP is at its best when you don’t rightly know which one it is that you’re feeling, or, as Dolphy puts it in the same interview, “It swings so much I don’t know what to do… it moves me so much. In the edit page, go to the 'Metadata' tab and add your Juno artist, label or release page for listeners to purchase your release / releases. A sound technician installed his reel to reel tape deck and recorded the Coltrane Quintet with a single microphone hanging from the ceiling.His early-’60s classics Giant Steps and “Live” at the Village Vanguard planted seeds for free and spiritual jazz, which flowered into teeming subgenres. The rest of jazz soon followed suit: A decade later, musicians far and wide explored the spiritual caverns and world-spanning vistas that Coltrane uncovered at the dawn of the ’60s. He divided rhythm duties, writing static harmonies that pulsed through his piano lines, permitting more movement from drummers and bassists. He played “My Favorite Things'' during his last recorded concert, in 1967, at the Olatunji Center for African Culture in Harlem. His constant transformations illustrated a quintessential ’60s metaphor: Coltrane’s music rolled along too hard and fast to gather any moss.

However, as a general recording condition, the entire performance of the night can be understood well. Squabbles about sound quality, and comparisons between various iterations of his quartet, are never convincing: John Coltrane cared about change, not perfection.The album is culled from a couple of nights during an August and early September residency at the Village Gate, a since-shuttered Greenwich Village venue. He purportedly sat offstage during Dolphy’s solos at the Village Gate, magnanimously handing the reins to an artist who would express himself regardless. The version bears no similarity to the original except for a several-second phrase during a breathless solo. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Critics tout Coltrane’s soprano saxophone as the key that unlocked the door to spiritual jazz, yet Dolphy’s similarly unconventional instrumentation greased the hinges.