John Coltrane: Evenings At The Village Gate

It is important to emphasize, at the outset of this review, that Evenings At The Village Gate is a John Coltrane album of headline significance. Recorded during a four-week run at the New York City club in August and September 1961, the disc is a snapshot of Coltrane partway through the most momentous year of his development. He is in incandescent form from start to finish, leading an astounding sextet completed by multi-reedist Eric Dolphy, pianist McCoy Tyner, twin bassists Reggie Workman and Art Davis, and drummer Elvin Jones. None of the music has been available before, the tapes having for decades lain forgotten in a back room of New York Public Library.

The importance of the album needs emphasizing because the record business contains vagabonds and chancers who for a quick buck would release anything with Coltrane's name on it whatever the quality. Happily, Impulse!, Coltrane's label from 1961 until his passing, is not among them. In an interview with AAJ in autumn 2022, label president Jamie Krents observed that tapes featuring Coltrane, found under the proverbial grandmothers' beds, were periodically offered to Impulse!, and often declined. "There are things that we opt not to release or we will block other parties from releasing if we don't think they measure up to the artist's standards," said Krents.

[Among the considerable body of still unreleased Coltrane material out there is a massive cache of live recordings made by enthusiast Frank Tiberi between 1960 and 1964. When Verve, Impulse!'s parent company, made a digital transfer of the tapes in 2001, they filled 85 CDs. Verve and Tiberi agreed that the audio quality was not good enough to justify making them public at that time. One day in the not-too-distant future, however, sound-restoration technology may have advanced sufficiently to permit the release of at least some of the recordings.]

Evenings At The Village Gate, however, is among the most exalted of Impulse!'s new-millennial Coltrane releases, up there alongside even One Down, One Up: Live At The Half Note (2005). This is despite the fact that the sound quality is not as clean as that on the recordings the same band made at the Village Vanguard two months later with Rudy Van Gelder at the controls. In contrast to Van Gelder's relatively elaborate set-up, the Gate recordings were made with just one microphone suspended over the bandstand, as part of tests the in-house soundman, Rich Alderson, was making of the speaker system he had installed in the club. Despite his modest technical resources, Alderson successfully captured around 80 minutes of breakthrough performances. There are five tracks on the album. On the first four—"My Favorite Things," "When Lights Are Low," "Impressions" and "Greensleeves"—Coltrane plays soprano. He is heard on tenor only on the closer, "Africa" (the only non-studio recording of the tune known to exist). Dolphy plays flute on the opening "My Favorite Things," alto saxophone on "Africa," and bass clarinet elsewhere. "When Lights Are Low" is a showcase for Dolphy, who takes an extended solo, followed by a much shorter one from Coltrane.

It was during this engagement at the Gate, and later at the Vanguard, that Coltrane and Dolphy received the censure of the jazz establishment—they were actually called "anti-jazz" in Downbeat magazine. It is hard to reconcile the opprobrium with what one is hearing on either the Gate or Vanguard recordings, even allowing for the passage of time; one may reasonably construe that non-musical factors, primarily concerning race and politics, were in play among the naysayers.

To be fair, it is easy to imagine that someone who had last heard Coltrane play "When Lights Are Low" as a member of Miles Davis' quintet (as on Davis' 1956 Prestige album Cookin') might have needed smelling salts on hearing his performance with Dolphy at the Gate. It is worth remembering, too, that Coltrane's Africa/Brass (1961), which featured Dolphy, had yet to be released when the Gate recordings were made. This meant that "Greensleeves" and, more to the point, the turbulent "Africa," were likely to be new to many people in the audience, as would be Dolphy himself to some of them. And some audience members may well have been at the club on the strength of Coltrane's current radio hit "My Favorite Things." But the vibe in the room is palpably onside. If the gatekeepers did not get it, it sounds like the paying customers did.

Anyway, that is all history now. Evenings At The Village Gate should notch up five stars on most, perhaps all, Coltrane connoisseurs' scorecards in 2023..

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