John Coltrane moved from Atlantic to Impulse this year, developing his signature Sheets of Sounds and exploring new heights.

Coltrane and club owner Art D’Lugoff never meant to cut a record, but Alderson captured a couple of evenings and then forgot about them. By contrast, the version here, as much to do with the drum-forward recording as anything, feels somehow more sluggish, Coltrane’s and Dolphy’s motivic Eastern patterns sounding disquieted and imprisoned, like two giant glittering insects trapped in a conservatory and only the duet between Jones and Tyler allowing any sense of escape. In addition to some well-known Coltrane material (“My Favorite Things”, “Impressions”, “Greensleeves”), there is a breathtaking feature for Dolphy’s bass clarinet on “When Lights Are Low” and the only known non-studio recording of Coltrane’s composition “Africa”, from the Africa/Brass album. 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.Is it because the unique atmosphere created by that era has the power to draw me in without saying yes or no? The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy Evenings At The Village Gate Reviewed: Newly rediscovered sessions show a genius in transition". Editors at Pitchfork chose this as one of the Best New Reissues and critic Daniel Felsenthal scored it a 9.

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It’s unarguably the LP’s highlight with Workman providing a steady droning undertow and Davis dancing and weaving around the horns in the manner of some Yoruba trickster. Coltrane’s Classic Quartet was not as fully established as it would soon become and there was a meteoric fifth member of Coltrane’s group those nights - visionary multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy.

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. He adapts it for another soloist, and rebuilds it into other tracks, one of which he dedicated to Africa. Squabbles about sound quality, and comparisons between various iterations of his quartet, are never convincing: John Coltrane cared about change, not perfection.With Evenings At The Village Gate both adjectives are at play, but the LP is at its best when you don’t rightly know which one it is that you’re feeling, or, as Dolphy puts it in the same interview, “It swings so much I don’t know what to do… it moves me so much. 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. By 1961, Coltrane had begun experimenting with modes and genre, moving towards the avant-garde sound that would be featured on records like Africa/Brass.