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

Since the end of the 1990s, with music lovers becoming more open minded like they were possibly in the 1960s and the following decade, Coltrane was again a pivotal figure for all the rock and alt rock aficionados who wanted to become aware of other styles of music, as jazz for example. That’s why there was a huge amount of new releases, mostly live albums.

Many of them were exceptional as far as material but poor in terms of recordings, like as an example the live at the Olatunji Center For African Culture (Impulse!, 2000) with Trane’s last quintet featuring Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane. But others were incredibly good: take for instance the double album Live at The Half Note (Impulse!, 2005), with recordings from a radio broadcast of Coltrane’s classic quartet, or again the recording of the entire A Love Supreme suite included in the deluxe edition of the album (Impulse!, 2002) from a Juan-Les-Pins festival, or the recordings with Thelonius Monk (Blue Note, 2005).

All of this material helped people to keep the flame of Coltrane’s music alive and well. In these last years new original material has seen the light of day. The two entire studio records, Both Directions at Once, issued in 2018 and featuring material recorded in 1963, the other studio album Blue World, issued in 2019 but recorded in 1964 and with material dedicated to a soundtrack for a movie titled Le Chat Dans Le Sac by Gilles Groulx, and finally another live version of A Love Supreme recorded at a Seattle’s jazz club in 1965 and issued in 2021.

Now’s the time for this Evening At The Village Gate, recorded live with a single microphone in 1961 just a few times after the recording of Olé Coltrane, featuring the same personnel: Coltrane aside, there are the unforgotten genius of Eric Dolphy, the rhythm section offered by Elvin Jones and Reggie Workman, and McCoy Tyner’s piano. The album, even if in mono, is extraordinary and exquisite as far as the music comprised herein, end it will be possibly one of the albums of the year 2023.

Recorded originally by Rich Alderson the afternoon of a lazy August day only in order to understand if the acoustic of the club was enough good for the night shows, the tapes were lost for many years and finally recovered for the New York Library for Performing Arts. Last July, they were released by Impulse! as a single CD or a double vynil, and are finally available for all of you passionate listeners.

The first track in an incomplete, but beautiful in its almost 16 minutes lenght, My Favorite Things, one of Coltrane most successful compositions reworked and reimagined over and over throughout his entire career where Dolphy and its flute dominate for the first 7 minutes, thanks to an angular and graspy voice exploring both the severe and sharp tones of the instrument, over the propelling circular drums by Elvin Jones, Reggie Workman’s walking bass and McCoy Tyner’s voicings.

When it’s time for Trane to take place, he exploits his typical churning tone at soprano saxophone, that set of techniques that will inspire people like Evan Parker in the following decades. Overacute tones, almost binaural sounds, hints to the melody of the song interspersed with raucous and furious yells, all the arsenal that made some critic write the word ‘anti-jazz’ – we’ll see. But Trane is more than that: from the minute 11 he is able to embellish the melody of the song in a logical and consequential way, again abrasive but far from being an anarchist’s shout.

When Lighs Are Low is another classic tune shaped originally by Benny Carter and Spencer Williams in 1936 and that was subsequently interpreted by the likes of Chet Baker and Miles Davis. This version, again, start with a beautiful, almost cubist solo by Dolphy at bass clarinet, an instrument played in his high register this way only by Dolphy itself and few others trying to imitate him.

Those of you who are familiar with Dolphy’s language through Mingus’ live records will be happy to hear such a soloing in this version of a song played by the Coltrane quartet, since many critics in the past, starting from the studio albums in which the two were collaborating, asserted that Trane and Dolphy collaboration was sometimes harsh and difficult for both, since the melodic and harmonic idea of music by Coltrane was not completely malleable for a musician with the harmonic conceptions of Dolphy.

In this piece, instead, we can hear Dolphy playing at ease and at will for more than seven minutes, before leaving space to his pal and his soprano until minute 10, where the soloing is left to a bluesy and dense McCoy Tyner until the end of the song before a brief assertion by Dolphy again. The following Impressions is almost classical in its proceeding and sees Dolphy as a perfect partner for Coltrane, whose solo is developing lavishly and more consistent, which is so difficult to obtain at the same time, than the studio version.

Dolphy, again at the bass clarinet, shows us that idea of angularity typical of his concept of harmonic leap, even larger than that of Charlie Parker, that made him become famous and peculiar as a musician. The more than 16 minutes for Greensleeves open a song that, far from the original timing on the Africa/Brass album with the Dolphy/Tyner orchestrations, shows us, here, all its potential. Melodic as many of Trane’s material of choice, it becomes a true tour de force for all the musicians involved.

Finally, the most intriguing live execution of the record: Africa, a piece recorded originally for the album Africa/Brass with orchestrations by Eric Dolphy following McCoy Tyner’s piano voicings, with the two horns proceeding at the same time is that manner that was defined ‘speaking in tongues’ by the fans and critics following Albert Ayler and his brother Don in the same years, that means that every horn is proceeding speaking his own thing before taking time for a solo.

The more than 20 minutes of the composition are possibly some of those Steve Reich was referring to during the years as an inspiration for his works as a minimalist, and so they are an important document for all the people who want to understand better the many links between different styles of music such as jazz and contemporary classical.

Far from being a mere exhibition for the two horns, Africa features a beautiful exchange between Reggie Workman and Art Davis on bass: the first exploring the rhythm, the other expressing a pedal that is reminiscent of ancient African music. Those were, in effect, the days when Coltrane was exploring the music of India and Africa from a composer’s point of view, establishing also a significant friendship with musicians such as Ravi Shankar – Ravi will also be the name of one of Coltrane’s sons.

Few months later, John Tynan in Downbeat will review Coltrane and Dolphy’s music coining the label of ‘anti-jazz’. Coltrane and Dolphy will stick up for their music from the columns of the magazine in an interesting article available online and titled John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy Answer to Jazz Critics. An advised reading for you all, since if now we can taken Trane and Dolphy music for art, the path to that consciousness was not linear and it deserves to be deepened in full. 

 

 

John Coltrane “A Love Supreme Live in Seattle” (Impulse!, 2021)

October 2, 1965, a Saturday night. The place is The Penthouse, a club held by Joe Brazil where people like Roland Kirk and Chick Corea played many times. Mr Brazil won’t be very happy of the performance of that night, but not because of the music: the deal is, ‘Trane lovers drink only one beer, then they listen to that demanding music with almost religious concentration. But they’re right. That night, John Coltrane enlarged his historical quartet in order to welcome a bunch of other musicians, so it was worh to listen to them carefully.

It wasn’t the first time for the multireedist, this kind of enlargement of his quartet. Few months before, during the sessions leading to the album The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, he hosted bassist Art Davis, along with Jimmy Garrison, for a mournful version of the classic song Nature Boy. Also, the same year, Coltrane recorded his pivotal album Ascension, released only the following year, where he led his classical quartet plus Art Davis again, trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson, altoists Marion Brown and John Tchicai, and tenorists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp.

This period, from 1965 until the end of ‘Trane life in 1967 for a liver cancer, is my favorite in the saxophonist career. Les schizophrenic than the previous years, where Impulse! managers were constantly asking him to produce a hit song like Atlantic’s My Favorite Things, forcing the musician to issue records like Ballads, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, while it was clear listening to his less commercial stuff like Africa/Brass, India and the live versions of My Favorite Things what Coltrane’s real direction was, the 1965/1967 period marks the end of the classic quartet and an attempt to follow more experimental paths. 

Unluckily the extraordinary machine of the classic quartet in the end disbanded. Pianist McCoy Tyner declared more than once how unable to listen to the music he was with the passing of time, due to the volume of the two tenors – Coltrane took Pharoah Sanders as a permanent member of his band, and for a short amount of time tried to set a couple of drummers, putting Rashied Ali and Elvin Jones side by side – the latter also said farewell not knowing exactly how to manage with the uncertainties of ‘Tranes experimentations.

But with Alice Liddle, further also Coltrane’s wife, on piano, and Jimmy Garrison as the only member of the previous group remained as pivotal contrabass, the music went on for that short amount of time leaving some masterpieces like Meditation, the above mentioned Ascension, Kulu Sé Mama and the drums/saxophone duets contained in the beautiful Interstellar Space. 

Anyway, that night, the second occasion we know in which Coltrane played the A Love Supreme suite in its entirety, was for sure a special night. Just to start, Carlos Ward on alto and Pharoah Sanders on tenor and percussions are present in this concert/record, as well as Donald Rafael Garret at a second bass. Ward has been mostly a sidemen for people like Coltrane, Karl Berger, Don Cherry, Abdullah Ibrahim and Cecil Taylor if we refer to jazz, but for the most part of his life the man played also funk.

Donald Rafael Garret has been one of those rare musicians whose career is difficult to put in a box and to label. A collaborator of Muhal Richard Abrahms and his Experimental Band, he played also with Sun Ra, Coltrane – he is present also on the double album Live In Seattle, on Om and on Kulu Sé Mama –  Johnny Griffin and Roland Kirk between the many others. 

This version of A Love Supreme is very far from the original, even if the themes of the four sections are all expressed in their entirety and clearly distinguishable. But the variety of musicians involved and the different intros before every part of the suite make this album one of those products of research you can also be disappointed with, if you’re not that much adventurous. Another characteristic of this record is that the use of small percussions by Sanders and the presence of Ward make this rendition of the suite more keen on the experiments of the AACM, building a bridge between the wave of NY free jazz and the Chicagoan avant garde movement.

Those who are familiar with the Juan-Les-Pins version of the suite – played on July 26, 1965 by his classic quartet – will be not particularly swept up by ‘Trane performances on this Seattle date, since he was careful in order to leave the correct amount of space to his many hosts. Ward solo on Pursuance is possibly the most interesting part of the record since it is completely unheard before and Ward himself is not an overrepresented musician – unluckily – but for sure he has something to say: his solo is flamboyantly obliquous but clear and meaningful in his statement. 

Pharoah Sanders solo on Pursuance is something every Coltrane fan wanted to hear in a clearer recorded environment since the release of the Olatunji Concert in 1999. There, the noise of the poor recording wasn’t helpful in making us concentrate on Sanders honks, squeals, parodistic marches, while here his solo, that for some parts is not that much different from that on My Favorite Things, is finally clearly audible.

And it is an important statement. Apparently, Pharoah is not matching with the rest of the band and seems not consequent to what John previously have played, but if you listen closely it makes completely sense. Hazardous as it is melodically, harmonically and chromatically, Sanders’ solo is one you don’t forget quickly and that in a way change emotionally at every listening, depending on the feeling it moves in you, that can be different every time. 

In his liner notes for the album, Ashley Kahn writes that maybe there can be other live versions of A Love Supreme to discover. We hope so, and we hope they will be different the one from the other, in order to touch with our ears how different even a perfect music can be while involving other human hearts or the same in different occasions. Quick note for the listener: this live version is recorded with the drums and the piano on the foreground and the saxophones and the bass on the background. Disappointing as this can be for some of you, some people say that listening to it in mono, if your stereo gives you this opportunity, is a good correction.  

 

 

John Coltrane "Both Directions at Once" (Impulse!, 2018)

March 6^th, 1963. Englewood Cliffs, Van Gelder Studios. Saxophonist John Coltrane joined his partners – bassist Jimmy Garrison, pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones – for a recording session. The result will be: four short versions of Impressions (one pianoless), two untitled originals with Trane on soprano (the most interesting pieces), a version of Nature Boy which is a short game based on the theme of the song, two versions of Vilia, one Slow Blues and two versions of the piece One Up, One Down.

Part of the material, recorded the day before the session with singer Johnny Hartman, is pianoless. That means that possibly Trane had Sonny Rollins, his eternal rival, in mind. Hearing for the first time this material, Rollins said “This is like finding a new room in the great pyramid”. But we're so far here from a “new Coltrane album”, from a “lost album”.

The recordings, held by Naima Grubbs, Trane's first wife, and discovered only recently, are in fact only a session of music, recorded only with the purpose of leaving Coltrane free to listen to them. An album is usually something more complex, with material coming from different sessions. So, while listening to this record anyone can feel like a peeping tom, which is quite good since you're listening to unreleased material by John Coltrane.

Ok, so what about the music? The two untitled originals go near the land of free jazz, while the remaining pieces are pure post-bop. Trane himself described his style and articulation to Wayne Shorter as “starting a sentence in the middle and then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time”.

And obviously you can hear that in this session. The music in this album is important since you can hear Coltrane on solid rock starting with his future sonic experimentations, in a period, our present tense, of reflux, with so many musicians standing on solid ground. A call to do something else, something new.