Evenings At The Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy

Product Information

The performance itself is in perfect harmony with the other four songs and does not make you feel any discomfort. Editors at Pitchfork chose this as one of the Best New Reissues and critic Daniel Felsenthal scored it a 9.

Part of that rare uncertain quality was down to the presence of Dolphy, who Coltrane had first befriended in New York in 1959. In August of 1961, the John Coltrane Quintet played an engagement at the legendary Village Gate in Greenwich Village, New York. During various appearances at the Gate, Coltrane faced skeptical audiences who had come to see folk singer Odetta, blues legend Lightnin’ Hopkins, and 19-year-old Aretha Franklin. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Coltrane’s road to the avant-garde was built from his ability to compose, arrange, and imagine new roles for diverse instruments on his bandstands. 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. Squabbles about sound quality, and comparisons between various iterations of his quartet, are never convincing: John Coltrane cared about change, not perfection.

Coltrane even carried a photo of Dolphy with him after he died, at 36, in 1964, from a diabetic coma, hanging it on the walls of hotel rooms while he traveled. 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. All image and audio content is used by permission of the copyright holders or their agents, and/or according to fair dealing as per the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. There were precedents for composers using two bassists, but arguably no one before Coltrane had saddled one bassist with roving lead parts and another with a stationary, raga-inflected drone. Coltrane’s Classic Quartet was not as fully established as it would soon become and there was a meteoric fifth member of Coltrane’s group those nights - visionary multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy.That track is immediately followed by When Lights are Low, here Eric is on his bass clarinet which he plays magnificently.