Twenty-four-year-old engineer and Village scenester Rich Alderson wanted to test the club’s sound system and also an old RCA 77-A ribbon microphone he had modified.

The dog days of summer were in full swelter, and the venue had to lure listeners out of their homes and onto the sticky Village streets for dinner (bad service, but apparently tasty food! It’s Tyner’s arrangement, and the Coltrane/Dolphy mutual admiration society push each other to compelling effect. It was also in July ‘61 that the quintet Dolphy led with Booker Little played the legendary Five Spot gig. The recordings were made over two nights during a summer season in 1961 by the club’s sound engineer, Rich Alderson, with a single microphone suspended over the stage. Anomalous on the surface, such albums offered a blueprint for Coltrane’s future: screeching, unsettled melodies; bottom ends that churned and thrashed; a sprawling palette that mixed in music from India and Africa.Scores of Coltrane heads weaned themselves on the impressive fidelity of “Live” at the Village Vanguard and 1964’s Live at Birdland, both of which were captured with extreme stereo know-how by Rudy Van Gelder.

Ostensibly a timekeeper, Jones was the wildest member of Coltrane’s ’61 quartet, and perhaps as a result he was the last player of this era that Coltrane would replace. Given the rarity and extraordinary circumstances pertaining to the discovery of this music the sound is as good as could be expected, do not let it deter you. But listening to this recording, captured at Art D’Lugoff ’s cavernous basement venue in the heart of Greenwich Village by sound engineer Rich Alderson (see Back Story), is to hear an artist – Coltrane – trying to push through, playing tracks from old setlists but in a new way that rejects the old structures and, yes, that does invoke notions of anarchy. Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy was nominated for Best Album Notes at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards.

Part of that rare uncertain quality was down to the presence of Dolphy, who Coltrane had first befriended in New York in 1959. The degree to which this is a transitional recording is perhaps best exemplified by the early run through of Coltrane’s Impressions, first recorded in the studio in 1962 but best known from the version captured at New York’s Village Vanguard in November 1961. The multi-reedist orchestrated large sections of Africa/Brass in May and June, and his solos took over the bandstand while he gigged with the band that summer and fall.

He adapts it for another soloist, and rebuilds it into other tracks, one of which he dedicated to Africa.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. Beginning with a version of My Favorite Things, with Elvin Jones drumming clean, hard hypnotic patterns, Reggie Workman’s bass sure and steady, and McCoy Tyner’s piano intense and beaming, Coltrane repeatedly sounds like a man trying to find a way over, under, through or beyond his own sound, taking his squalling soprano sax out to heights too dizzying, before coming back to the grounded surface melody. Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy, a new archival release, captures the 34-year-old artist as he comes to grips with his music’s remarkable possibilities.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The quartet welcomed him in the spring of ’61 as a featured sideman, and he left fingerprints on much of what Coltrane accomplished for the rest of the year. In August 1961, John Coltrane and his legendary Quintet, joined by visionary multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, played the revered Village Gate in Greenwich Village, New York, not, at that time, as established as it would soon become.

There have been some fascinating, and absorbing, discoveries of previously unissued Coltrane material culled from a variety of sources, but this one takes the biscuit. John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy Evenings At The Village Gate Reviewed: Newly rediscovered sessions show a genius in transition". John Coltrane moved from Atlantic to Impulse this year, developing his signature Sheets of Sounds and exploring new heights. But the beauty of their interplay was tightly wound in the tension of two self-directed men with irrepressible appetites for innovation. This recording represents a very special moment in John Coltrane's journey—the summer of 1961—when his signature, ecstatic live sound, commonly associated his Classic Quartet of '62 to '65, was first maturing and when he was drawing inspiration from deep, African sources— and experimenting with the two-bass idea both in the studio (Olé) and on stage.