From New Yorker's Richard Brodey on Coltrane's new release from the early 60's:
Rightly understood, the new release (available on CD, vinyl, and digital formats) is as valuable for tyros as for aficionados. I don’t believe in cultural starter sets; with great artists, there’s no point to beginning at a simpler, more conventional stage, or with a sampler. In my experience, what matters is to come in where the passion runs high, and in the Village Gate album, the entire band plays with an astonishing, even overwhelming intensity. The spectrum of achievements that the recording documents for Coltrane and Dolphy is narrow, but it reaches further into the musical future—the musicians’ and that of jazz at large—than any other recordings of theirs from the early sixties that I’ve heard. Here, Coltrane, in particular, offers audacious premonitions of a jazz avant-garde, running years ahead to prefigure the way he’d be playing from 1965 through the end of his life, in 1967.
Coltrane was a late bloomer. Born in 1926, he came to prominence as a sideman, playing tenor saxophone in Miles Davis’s groups, in 1955, and stayed with him, on and off, through 1960. Though Coltrane made many recordings under his own name throughout that time, only in 1960 did he form his own working band, the core of which, heard here, is the pianist McCoy Tyner and the drummer Elvin Jones. (On “Evenings at the Village Gate,” two bassists, Reggie Workman and Art Davis, perform together.) Dolphy, too, had a long musical gestation. Born in 1928 in Los Angeles, he came to New York in 1959, and began to record as a leader in 1960, but worked mainly as a sideman (notably, in Charles Mingus’s group). In the album’s liner notes, Ashley Kahn quotes an interview with Coltrane from soon after this gig: Coltrane said that he and Dolphy had been “talking music for quite a few years, since about 1954.” He added, “A few months ago Eric was in New York, where the group was working, and he felt like playing, wanted to come down and sit in. So I told him to come on down and play, and he did—and turned us all around.”
That turnaround was a revolution, one that’s all the more remarkable for being a revolution within a revolution, because Coltrane was at the center of mighty and epochal change. Coltrane was already at the forefront of jazz modernity. With his sophisticated ideas about harmony and its mighty complexities, he made recordings in the nineteen-fifties that were definitively characterized by the critic Ira Gitler as “sheets of sound,” colossal skeins of notes that ran at high speed, in long-breathing phrases, through ferociously intricate sets of chromatic variations.
Early in 1960, Coltrane was ready to start his own band, but Davis, who had booked a European concert tour, persuaded him to come along. During that tour, Coltrane’s impatience was evident, and he gave it furious musical expression, soloing—usually at much greater length than Davis—with a vehemence that ripped the sheets to shreds. (These concert recordings are among my favorites of Coltrane’s.) In the course of that tour, Davis bought Coltrane a present—a soprano saxophone—and, according to Davis’s drummer at the time, Jimmy Cobb, Coltrane spent most of his time on the tour bus “looking out the window and playing Oriental-sounding scales on soprano.” Later that year, back in New York, Coltrane formed his group. His recording of “My Favorite Things,” which he made on soprano sax, was released in March, 1961, and became, of all things, a jukebox hit. Coltrane built that long-limbed, loping studio performance on the expanded sense of musical space that he had developed with Davis. (That track runs nearly fourteen minutes.)
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