John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy - Evenings at the Village Gate (Impulse!, 2023)

By Martin Schray

The history of popular music and jazz is full of so-called lost albums: recording projects that never saw the light of day (or possibly only as bootlegs), discontinued either by the artist or the record company, or languishing in the archives. Examples of this may be the tapes that are supposedly still preserved by FMP founder Jost Gebers, who recorded almost all live performances of the Total Music Meetings he organized from 1968 to 1999 and of which only parts have been released, or Prince’s legendary vault. On the other hand, in many cases it quickly becomes clear why some recordings have just not been released. Whether almost everything that was recorded by Jimi Hendrix should have been released on vinyl or CD posthumously can be doubted. With John Coltrane, however, the situation is more complicated. In addition to less relevant albums, real masterpieces appeared after he had died, e.g. Cosmic Music (1968, with Pharoah Sanders), Interstellar Space (1974, his duo with Rashied Ali) or Stellar Regions (1994, with his last quartet). There have also been qualitatively different reissues in recent years, such as Offering - Live at Temple University (Impulse!, 2014), Both Directions At Once - The Lost Album (Impulse!, 2018), Blue World (Impulse!, 2019) and A Love Supreme - Live in Seattle (Impulse!, 2021). And now, there’s Evenings at the Village Gate, a live recording from 1961.

In said year, Coltrane set out to assemble a new band which could realize his musical ideas. According to Coltrane biographer Ashley Khan’s liner notes, he had tried out a number of sidemen and band ideas in the second half of 1960 and finally settled on a lineup that included McCoy Tyner on piano, Reggie Workman on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. Eric Dolphy, who could play flute, alto saxophone and bass clarinet, also joined the band. He had often rehearsed with Coltrane, the two shared similar musical ideas. “He had a broadening effect on us. We're playing things that are freer than before“, Coltrane said about him. The quintet then performed several nights at New York’s Village Gate, an up-and-coming club in the East Village. To test the club’s new sound system, a recording was made that was long thought lost and only recently discovered in the vast sound archives of the New York Public Library. For the present album, these recordings have been sonically reprocessed.

At the turn of the decade, after Coltrane had left Miles Davis’s band, he did quite well musically and commercially, especially with his My Favorite Things album. The title track in particular, a popular melody from a musical, was extraordinarily successful in its radio version. It was also Coltrane’s first published recording with the soprano saxophone. The saxophonist’s arrangement for the longer version has often been considered a radical subversion of a popular song of the Great American Songbook, because his playing is based on scales as an integration of Eastern idioms; it points in the direction of modality, whereby Coltrane was to shape the jazz of the future. However, not everybody liked that. A whole wave of reviews, especially in Downbeat magazine and other publications, harshly attacked him, even calling his sound “anti-jazz“, “nihilistic“, or simply “nonsense“, as the liner notes point out. In doing so, they failed to recognize how far ahead of its time Coltrane’s new sound was. And exactly the development of this sound can be traced on Evenings at the Village Gate, therein lies the quality of the recordings.

The album itself includes five tracks and, above all, it becomes clear what pioneers for the new jazz (and therefore also, by extension, free jazz) Coltrane and Dolphy were. The two set off to unbelievable flights of fancy, the band shimmies along the harmonic and melodic structures of these jazz classics, but breaks and expands them constantly, just to find back to the main motif.

The best examples of this are “My Favorite Things“ and “Greensleeves“. In the former, Dolphy begins with a long flute solo. The piece is initially recognizable only by its basic harmonic structure, it takes Dolphy more than two minutes to pick up the head. Then he stretches it out by using every trick in the book, sprawling out in evey direction. He overblows notes, swallows them or smears them. Coltrane gives him more than six minutes before he intervenes, continuing to spin Dolphy’s trills on the saxophone before picking up the melody of the track. The solo he develops from this, however, is sheer madness. In true roller coaster rides he chases the registers up and down, gets lost in trills, picks up the melody again and again briefly, only to rise again into undreamed-of spheres. It’s a mixture of angelic chant and hell ride. The band proceeds similarly in “Greensleeves“, which is also based on an easily accessible folk melody. However, the structure and timbre are somewhat different, as Dolby plays bass clarinet here. Initially, McCoy Tyner’s piano part takes center stage, with the horns keeping a distinguished low profile. The pianist also uses the theme only as a starting point to improvise over it mainly with powerful chord progressions. How Dolphy then gives the actually cheerful folk piece a somber atmosphere with his entry is another surprise. Again, Coltrane takes over the closing part and, as in “My Favorite Things“, he creeps in on Dolphy’s solo elegantly, ignoring the melody at first. What is more, he pushes the limits of his instrument, almost blowing it up.

Between these two pieces there is “When Lights Are Low“, a composition by Benny Carter, which was previously only heard by Coltrane in a recording by the Miles Davis Quintet (Cookin' With The Miles Davis Quintet, Prestige, 1957), on which Dolphy shines with a bass clarinet solo, and “Impressions“, which Coltrane was to release only two years later on the album of the same name. But the highlight of the album is undoubtedly “Africa“, to this day the only live recording of the piece that Coltrane had recorded in the studio shortly before and that was to appear a little later on Africa/Brass, his debut for Impulse!. The live version here, however, is longer and wilder, while at the same time more spartan in its instrumentation than the large-scale orchestrated studio version. Additionally, Coltrane experiments with two basses here, Art Davis takes over this part. It’s also the only piece on the album where Coltrane plays tenor saxophone. In addition to the large scales on “My Favorite Things“, for example, he also plays long melodic lines and punctuations in the low register here. Workman and Davis take turns playing arco and pizzicato, and Elvin Jones almost drops out to give the two the opportunity for an extended duet, then himself spreading out huge syncopated rhythms in a solo of his own a bit later. Finally, the theme of the piece is taken up and Coltrane and Dolphy engage in a duel as the climax to close the piece, once again exemplifying how both push each other in their improvisations.

Evenings At The Village Gate is undoubtedly musically terrific, but there is also a shortcoming in that the recording cannot match studio recordings or even later live recordings such as Live at the Village Vanguard or Live at Birdland in terms of sound. The sound engineer, 24-year-old Rich Alderson, placed his recording equipment next to the drums, which is why Workman’s bass is sometimes really drowned out (with the exception of the solo in “Africa“). Unfortunately, one can often only guess how decisively he drives the two horns together with Jones and Tyler. The same is unfortunately true for McCoy Tyner’s piano, it’s often far in the background as on “My Favorite Things“, for example, although not as much as the bass.

All in all, Evenings At The Village Gate gives an insight into the moving, but unfortunately short, musical relationship between John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. Their collaboration was documented on Afrika/Brass, Olé Coltrane and Live At The Village Vanguard. All three albums were made between May and December 1961. Now, with Evenings At The Village Gate, a new exciting chapter is added to this short but formative history of modern jazz.

Evenings At The Village Gate is available on double vinyl (in different versions), as a double CD and as a download on the usual streaming platforms.