Live! at the Village Vanguard

Background

In 1961, Coltrane created controversy with the hiring of Eric Dolphy and with the kind of music his band was playing. In reaction to the Quintet's residency at the Village Vanguard in New York City starting in late October 1961, DownBeat critic John Tynan described the group as "musical nonsense being peddled in the name of jazz" and "a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend." European critics and audiences also had difficulty with appearances earlier in the year, finding the group's music, especially that of Coltrane and Dolphy, puzzling and difficult to follow. DownBeat magazine editor Don DeMichael took the step of inviting the pair to defend themselves, a piece appearing in the April 12, 1962 issue entitled "John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy Answer the Critics".

It was the idea of new producer Bob Thiele to record Coltrane live over four nights in early November, Thiele meeting the saxophonist for the first time face-to-face at the club. This commenced a close working relationship between Thiele and Coltrane that would last for the rest of his time at Impulse!, Thiele producing virtually every subsequent album. Thiele secured Coltrane's trust right away by not insisting he record his most popular song, "My Favorite Things", during these shows. Recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder set up his equipment at a table by the stage, and for these concerts Coltrane often enhanced the Quintet by adding tampura, contrabassoon, oboe, or a second bass.

These were Reggie Workman's final recordings with the group, as by December 1961 Garrison was announced as his replacement, stabilizing a line-up that would remain constant for the next four years. (Garrison's performance on the album marked the first time he had played with the group.)

Two additional recordings taken from these shows appeared on the album Impressions, "Impressions" and "India". On September 23, 1997, Impulse! issued a box set The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings, with recordings from all four nights chronologically on four compact discs.

Music

Three performances (two original compositions and one jazz standard) were chosen for the album. "Spiritual", played by a quintet featuring Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophones (the album credits only list the soprano; however, Coltrane acknowledged playing both instruments on the piece in a 1966 interview) and Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, is possibly an adaptation of "Nobody Knows de Trouble I See" published in The Book of American Negro Spirituals by James Weldon Johnson. Coltrane stated: "It's a piece we'd been working with for some time because I wanted to make sure before we recorded it that we would be able to get the original emotional essence of the spiritual." "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise", a pop standard, is played by a quartet with Coltrane again on soprano sax. Coltrane stated that the piece "seems to me to round out the two originals, and I especially like the swinging by Jones..."

The third selection, the blues "Chasin' the Trane", is seen by Ashley Kahn in his book about the Impulse! label as "the birth cry of sixties avant-garde jazz: an outpouring of stylistic tongues and melodic ideas that linked the bebop dexterity and daring of the past with a free, stripped-bare, spiritually charged future," and was described by Coltrane biographer Ben Ratliff as "a great statement", his "landmark performance of the period", and "one of the most important recordings in jazz as it is currently practiced." One aspect of the track is the fact that it was recorded as a trio, without Tyner, freeing Coltrane, who plays tenor sax, from the harmonic underpinnings normally provided by the piano. Jimmy Garrison, the bassist on "Chasin' the Trane", had recently played with Ornette Coleman's piano-less quartet, and, in a 1961 interview prior to the recording, Coltrane expressed great admiration for Coleman and acknowledged his influence, stating that "there probably will be some songs in the future that we're going to play, just as Ornette does, with no accompaniment from the piano at all." Coltrane also recalled: "When I played with Monk... I played many times without a piano: Monk... after two pieces, would return to the dressing room or even stand looking out the window for two or three hours. So, we played without a piano."

The absence of a piano, along with a rhythm section playing with what Gary Giddins called "formidable concentration", allowed Coltrane to "stretch out" on "Chasin' the Trane". Coltrane stated that "the melody not only wasn't written but it wasn't even conceived before we played it. We set the tempo, and in we went." (Ratliff wrote that the piece "just vaults into being," and is "remarkable for the way it starts at absolute full intensity and retains that level without peaking or deflating.") According to Ratliff, in his solo, Coltrane "trips up the internal 12-bar logic. He causes patterns to change every bar, or stretches a single pattern across the 2nd and 3rd bar, or the 4th and 5th, or three in a row. In under a minute, Garrison, walking in hiccupped phrasing... loosens himself from the 12-bar structure; Coltrane (and Jones) still demarcate the end of the 12 bars by the beginning of a new melodic idea and an emphatic cymbal crash... at two and a half minutes in, Coltrane starts to disregard the 12-bar markers, and he's off, at large, exploring texture, fooling with short, sweet melodies." Aspects of the solo reflect the influence of tenor sax player John Gilmore, best known for his playing with Sun Ra: "run-on language of short motivic cells". Coltrane confirmed the Gilmore connection, stating: "I'd listened to John Gilmore kinda closely before I made 'Chasin' the Trane'... So some of those things on there are really direct influences of listening to this cat."

Reception

Pursuant to the article by Coltrane and Dolphy, for the following April 26 issue DownBeat presented two reviews of Live! at the Village Vanguard, both focusing on "Chasin' the Trane". Pete Welding described it as "a torrential and anguished outpouring, delivered with unmistakable power, conviction, and near-demonic ferocity." On the other hand, Ira Gitler, who had coined the phrase "sheets of sound", stated that "Coltrane may be searching for new avenues of expression, but if it is going to take this form of yawps, squawks, and countless repetitive runs, then it should be confined to the woodshed."

Writing in 2020 in his "Consumer Guide" column, Robert Christgau found the "relaxed "quietude of side one" to be "lovely enough" but went on to say, "this endlessly rereleased album is sacred for one reason: a second side consisting entirely of the 16-minute 'Chasin' the Trane,'" which he regarded as equal in importance to Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" (1928) and the Beatles' "She Loves You" (1963). He said the album track "both evoked and rendered unto history a theretofore unknown species of chaotic command", with "Trane wailing and whaling on tenor as Jones furiously drives and depth-bombs and bassist Jimmy Garrison tirelessly anchors and intensifies (and Dolphy is said to interpose brief alto commentary, though I’ve given up on figuring out where)".

Writers have acknowledged the sheer emotional impact of "Chasin' the Trane". In his liner notes, Nat Hentoff wrote: "Listening to Coltrane in this unyielding performance is so absorbing because it allows the outsider to be present at an uncompromising act of spontaneous creation. Usually, even in jazz, some polishing has been done beforehand to avoid at least some of the dangers of unbridled improvisation; but here the whole piece comes newly and unpredictably alive before us. It is possible, therefore, to experience vicariously that rare contemporary phenomenon - a man going for broke. And in public no less. If you can open yourself emotionally to so relentless a self-exploration, you can gain considerable insight into the marrow of the jazz experience and into Coltrane's own indomitably resourceful musicianship through this whirlpool of blues."

Eric Nisenson wrote that on "Chasin' the Trane", "Coltrane's playing is the most intensely emotional of his career... Analyzing the tune technically is beside the point - it is an experience, a catharsis shared by Coltrane and his audience, and it is unlike anything that preceded it... 'Chasin' the Trane' is especially hair-raising because it is clear that Coltrane has dug deeply into his psyche to create this music - 'cleaning the mirror,' as he would put it a few years later. The music sounds as if it is a portrait of the raw stuff of his inner being, music so frankly confessional we feel slightly embarrassed listening to it. It is, in its subjectivity, in the tradition of the most innovative twentieth-century art and literature. This type of inner-driven improvising was key to Coltrane's quest. By looking within, he was trying to find a center of both that musical 'essence' and the mind of God. From here on, most of his music would similarly be a result of his 'cleaning the mirror.'"

Track listing

All tracks written by John Coltrane, except where noted.

Side one

"Spiritual" – 13:47

"Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise" (Sigmund Romberg, Oscar Hammerstein II) – 6:36

Side two

"Chasin' the Trane" – 16:08

Personnel

John Coltrane — soprano and tenor saxophone

Eric Dolphy — bass clarinet on "Spiritual"

McCoy Tyner — piano on side one

Reggie Workman — bass on side one

Jimmy Garrison — bass on side two

Elvin Jones — drums

Technical

Pete Turner — photography