New Discovery of Coltrane and Dolphy

About a week and a half ago, Impulse! Records released a new album whose full title is Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. I have no idea how much of an impact either of those names has on the current community of jazz players and jazz listeners. However, the five tracks on the album were recorded in the summer of 1961. For those of us still around to remember the Sixties, that was as turbulent an era for jazz as it was for the pop scene. It was also a poignant period, since Dolphy would die on June 29, 1964 (which means, among other more selfish reasons, that I was never able to listen to him in performance). Coltrane would die on July 17, 1967, which would have been not too long after I heard him bring his quartet to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Both Coltrane and Dolphy were associated with the saxophone. Here is a photograph showing Coltrane on tenor saxophone and Dolphy on alto:

John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy (photograph by Herb Snitzer, courtesy of Crossover Media)

However, each of them ventured into other instruments. Coltrane was known for his solo command of the soprano saxophone, an instrument that tended to be obstreperous for mere mortals. Dolphy took off in the opposite direction, bringing the bass clarinet out of the symphony orchestra (where it has resided for at least a century) and subjecting it to over-the-top improvisations. He would also explore the higher register with his flute.

As the album title indicates, the five tracks of the new album were recorded at the Village Gate in New York in the summer of 1961. Coltrane played there for the better part of a month with Dolphy joining the Coltrane quartet, whose other members were pianist McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman on bass, and Elvin Jones on percussion. This was a time when we would talk about “straight-ahead” jazz. This quintet took the “straight-ahead” style and ran it at a breakneck pace.

The album consists of only five tracks:

1. My Favorite Things
2. When Lights Are Low
3. Impressions
4. Greensleeves
5. Africa

All five of them can be found on other Coltrane albums. However, the improvisations for each selection tend to run at a longer-than-usual pace. The shortest of the tracks was Coltrane’s own “Impressions,” whose underlying chord sequence is identical to Miles Davis’ “So What,” which he had played as a member of what is now known as the “first” Davis quintet. However, it was after Coltrane left that quintet that he began to work with his soprano instrument, which positively soars on this particular take, after which it could not be better complemented by anything other than Dolphy’s bass clarinet solo.

Where the rest of the quintet is concerned, Tyner tends to come up with the most engaging “responses” to the “calls” of both Coltrane and Dolphy. As Coltrane moved into more and more adventurous terrains, Tyner would often respond with full-handed chord progressions. However, back in 1961 he was still weaving rapid-fire accounts of a single melodic line, which would go on for some time before any of those progressions would emerge.

The longest of the tracks is Coltrane’s “Africa,” which runs just short of 23 minutes in duration. For this one track the bass is taken by Art Davis, rather than Workman. This performance is longer than either of the two studio recordings, made with a large wind/brass ensemble, in a single session that preceded by Village Gate residence by a month (if not less). It would not be difficult to label this new track as epic, taking “one step beyond” (for those that remember television from the Fifties and Sixties) the expansive rhetoric of the studio setting.

In other words, while, as observed, all five of the tracks had previous recordings, there is no shortage of fresh inventiveness anywhere on this new release.