Ominous clouds hung over New York City jazz for more than a decade from the mid-50s. The great innovator Charlie Parker died in 1955 at 34 (the medical examiner thought he was in his 50s), Billie Holiday in 1959 at 44 (alcohol-related heart and liver disease) and the genius John Coltrane gone in 1967. He was 40.
The clean-living Eric Dolphy – who played with Coltrane in 1961 and was on Ornette Coleman’s ground-breaking Free Jazz album – died in an untreated diabetic coma at a German hospital in 1964. He was 36.
Some survived the scourges of heroin, ill health and the jazz life – trumpeters Chet Baker and Miles Davis, saxophonist Art Pepper, pianist Bill Evans among them – but there was a terrible attrition.
Which makes the music created in short lives seem all the more urgent as players constantly moved between club dates and recording studios. There was so much activity that previously unreleased and often unknown recordings still come to light: most recently two Coltrane sessions (Both Directions at Once recorded in March 1963 and the live A Love Supreme from October 1965) and, improbably, pianist Thelonious Monk’s group at a Californian high school in October 1968.
Now, another live recording, Evenings at the Village Gate, appears from the vaults of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: Dolphy and Coltrane in August 1961 with Coltrane’s legendary group of drummer Elvin Jones, pianist McCoy Tyner and bassist Reggie Workman.
The short-lived association with Dolphy produced important studio recordings and the controversial but ground-breaking Live at the Village Vanguard, recorded in November 1961.
Like Coltrane, the younger Dolphy was a kindred spirit on a journey to see how far they could take improvisation, but many critics didn’t go with them, the music pushing into baffling realms of impenetrable and furious creativity.
Dolphy, who played flute, saxophones and bass clarinet, had been in Chico Hamilton’s band (he appears in the classic documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day filmed at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958), then with the great Charles Mingus. But he was also an outsider: the word “out” appeared in three of his album titles, notably his outstanding Out to Lunch recorded just four months before his death.
On Evenings at the Village Gate, both the traditional Greensleeves and My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music – the latter a Coltrane favourite which Dolphy on flighty flute weaves around for almost seven minutes before Coltrane’s astringent saxophone enters – stretch to 16 minutes as they tease and tear apart the tunes and drummer Jones deconstructs the rhythms.
Coltrane’s monumental Africa with bassist Art Davis has sections of furious, Hendrix-like intensity alongside quieter passages by Tyner and Davis, a kaleidoscopic 22 minutes and the only known live recording of it.
This admittedly difficult and sometimes demanding music sounds vital, often desperate and full of pain and life.
Within six years, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy would be gone, jazz again robbed of an unknowable future.
Evenings at the Village Gate is now available digitally, on CD and vinyl.
