Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard and Crescent, from Impulse! and Acoustic Sounds
John Coltrane spent his final years with Impulse! Records, from 1961 until his death, in 1967, at the age of 40. Those years were his most adventurous, as he sorted through every sound he could create in his spiritual quest, as he put it, to “get the one essential.” His range of recordings in those years spanned from “Greensleeves” to A Love Supreme, from ballads with pop singer Johnny Hartman to multiphonic fireworks with alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy.
Two new Coltrane reissues on vinyl, from the partnership, recorded on November 2 and 3, 1961, was Coltrane’s first live album, catching a growing trend of laying down tracks before live audiences at the storied Greenwich Village jazz club. (Stan Getz’s quartet was the first, in 1957; the most famous, by the Bill Evans trio, took place five months before Coltrane’s.) The album was also, in its day, a shock. Coltrane’s rapid chord extensions had been described as “sheets of sound”; at the Vanguard, he stormed forth with of sound, eruptions of pure energy, especially in the 16-minute, spontaneous stream of consciousness “Chasin’ the Trane,” which takes up all of Side B. And on “Spiritual,” which covers most of Side A, he played alongside Dolphy, whose intervals on bass clarinet were even more unconventionally dissonant. Even so, the album understates the radicalism of the live sets. , a four-CD boxed set released 36 years later, contains 22 tracks, all but five featuring Dolphy. The original album (as well as the UM/AS reissue) contains the mildest of those five, “Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise,” which was also one of only two standards Trane played that week.
