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Still, the rudimentary production will frustrate fans who seek sonic perfection from mid-century pioneers. This period of experimentation proved highly controversial and Coltrane and collaborator Eric Dolphy faced criticism that their music during this period was "anti-jazz". 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.
Ninety minutes of never-before-heard music from this group were recently discovered at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, offering a glimpse into a powerful musical partnership that ended much too soon. At the end of the year, Workman left— his father was sick and Coltrane had a new trajectory in mind. The booklet is beautiful, with my only caveat being that it’s a bit difficult to work out who wrote what. The quartet welcomed him in the spring of ’61 as a featured sideman, and he left fingerprints on much of what Coltrane accomplished for the rest of the year.The set ends with a 22-minute version of Africa, the Tynerarranged big band number from Africa/Brass stripped back to quartet, but with the addition of second bassist, Art Davis. This concert would be a prime candidate for The Beatles AI demixing / remixing technique to rebalance the instruments when it becomes commonly available but until then this superb release will do just fine.
Before he lost his fight with liver cancer at age 40, Coltrane released definitive albums in both modes, but they were hardly end points for an artist who often seemed to embody flux itself. In August of 1961, the John Coltrane Quintet played an engagement at the legendary Village Gate in Greenwich Village, New York.It’s Tyner’s arrangement, and the Coltrane/Dolphy mutual admiration society push each other to compelling effect. By the end of the year came another three Coltrane LPs, all of them capturing the sound of an artist in a constant state of flux and evolution. With Evenings At The Village Gate both adjectives are at play, but the LP is at its best when you don’t rightly know which one it is that you’re feeling, or, as Dolphy puts it in the same interview, “It swings so much I don’t know what to do… it moves me so much. He adapts it for another soloist, and rebuilds it into other tracks, one of which he dedicated to Africa.
The song begins with applause, as the band teases a fleeting figure from a George Gershwin tune that Coltrane reinvented, “Summertime.Dolphy consistently pushes boundaries – indeed, he sounds more adventurous than Coltrane much of the time – although on the particularly fast “Impressions” , Coltrane’s soprano reaches new highs, its repetitiveness being almost hypnotic.