Evenings At The Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy

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The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy is a live album recorded in 1961 featuring jazz musicians John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, released on Impulse! By 1970, Coltrane’s former boss Miles Davis was using two bassists on a game-changing release in a far different vein, Bitches Brew. He divided rhythm duties, writing static harmonies that pulsed through his piano lines, permitting more movement from drummers and bassists.

Against Jones’s driving polyrhythmic be-bop patterns Coltrane niggles away at a tiny harmonic idea reminiscent of Miles Davis’s So What, before turning the whole thing upside down and inside out, Dolphy cutting in on incendiary agitated alto sax, the duo reaching for something ancient and primal as Tyler seemingly scales the walls with his glittering keyboard runs. Coltrane’s road to the avant-garde was built from his ability to compose, arrange, and imagine new roles for diverse instruments on his bandstands.John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy Evenings At The Village Gate Reviewed: Newly rediscovered sessions show a genius in transition Rediscovered performances from 1961 document the saxophone colossus’s short-lived quintet including multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy. Just as Coltrane did for Miles Davis during their final shows together, Dolphy widened Coltrane’s canvas.

According to the review aggregator Metacritic, Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy received "universal acclaim" based on a weighted average score of 91 out of 100 from four critic scores. Coltrane even carried a photo of Dolphy with him after he died, at 36, in 1964, from a diabetic coma, hanging it on the walls of hotel rooms while he traveled. It was also in July ‘61 that the quintet Dolphy led with Booker Little played the legendary Five Spot gig. If you play in a place where they really like your group,” Coltrane told Downbeat magazine in 1962, “they can make you play like you’ve never felt like playing before. But the beauty of their interplay was tightly wound in the tension of two self-directed men with irrepressible appetites for innovation.This period of experimentation proved highly controversial and Coltrane and collaborator Eric Dolphy faced criticism that their music during this period was "anti-jazz". 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. 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. Patrick Hadfield lives in Edinburgh, occasionally takes photographs, and sometimes blogs at On the Beat.