276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Evenings At The Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy

£7.285£14.57Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

The recordings came into the possession of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where it was lost. Though the tapes were briefly rediscovered, they disappeared again in the Library’s archives for several more decades.

Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy was commercially successful, debuting at No.8 on Top Album Sales, No.1 on Jazz Albums, No.1 on Traditional Jazz Albums, No.4 on Tastemaker Albums, No.7 on Top Current Album Sales, No.10 on Vinyl Albums, and No.156 on Billboard200 charts. [16] Chart performance for Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy Chart Falsenthal, Daniel (August 1, 2023). "John Coltrane: Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy". Albums. Pitchfork Media . Retrieved August 2, 2023.

My Favourite Things’ starts with Dolphy on flute. Dolphy loved dissonance and unpredictability. During his short life he was just as individual as Ornette or Coltrane. Sometimes he is wilder than either. It is the sound that is unique: easily recognisable, especially when he uses the bass clarinet, as he does frequently in this session. The whoops and hollers that he uses on ‘Africa’ are a successful attempt to reproduce the character of the studio recording. The Village Gate was a large basement room with a growing reputation in 1961, home to folksingers and comedy acts as well as artists like Nina Simone. Coltrane worked there in August as part of a triple bill, alongside groups led by drummer Art Blakey and pianist Horace Silver. (A photograph of the club marquee by Herb Snitzer shows Coltrane billed with a quartet, underscoring how recently Dolphy had joined the fray.) Those Village Vanguard tapes, which later yielded a monumental four-disc set, amount to one of the most mysterious and thrilling documents in jazz history. A couple of years ago, Ben Ratliff, author of Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, placed this music within a cultural context of "ambivalent possibility," in a vivid essay for the Washington Post titled " John Coltrane and the Essence of 1961." He observes: "The music sounds post-heroic and pre-cynical; interestingly free from grandiosity; full of room for the listener to find a place within it and make up their own mind." The performance took place just three years before Dolphy died aged 36, meaning the archive material is a special insight into his and Coltrane’s brief musical partnership, which encompassed the albums Olé Coltrane, Africa/Brass, Live! at the Village Vanguard and Impressions, released between 1961 and 1963. It is the only live recording of the group’s legendary Village Gate performances and it features the only known non-studio recording of Africa – extended to nearly 23 minutes.

We should be grateful for what we have got, however, for the tape reels concerned disappeared from view around 1968 and were only rediscovered, by chance, in 2019 (the first four tunes) and 2021 ("Africa"). The recordings, uncovered at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, were made by engineer Rich Alderson as part of a test of the Village Gate’s then-new sound system. The tapes seemed to have been lost, were found, but then disappeared again into Library’s vast sound archives. In 2023, we know there are many unreleased Coltrane recordings out there. There are, for instance, around 84 CDs-worth of material in the collection of live tapes the saxophonist and Coltrane aficionado Frank Tiberi made between 1960 and 1964. The recordings, however, are not as felicitous as those heard on Evenings At The Village Gate, and Impulse! and Tiberi do not feel they are candidates for release right now. But sound-restoration technology is improving all the time, and fast, and it is possible that in the not too distant future some at least of the tapes will be of a high enough audio standard to permit release. McCoy Tyner was always the calm between the storms, His vamp on ‘My Favourite Things’ moves slowly away from the waltz rhythm. He is not well served by the recording but we can hear, even at this early stage, the contribution of Tyner to the quartet and quintet would not be spectacular but essential. ‘Impression’ soars ahead and once the theme is finished Coltrane goes into repeated figures reaching for transcendence. Dolphy is tentative at first before giving way to a Tyner solo that is fluent and expressive. The take on ‘Greensleeves’ is made memorable in the way that Coltrane made ‘My Favourite Things’ stand out. The ancient tune is recomposed on the fly. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?The new release features essays from two participants from those evenings, Workman and Alderson, and insightful pieces by historian Ashley Kahn and jazz luminaries Branford Marsalis and Lakecia Benjamin.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment