John Coltrane

"Live" At The Village Vanguard documents John Coltrane during his residency at the New York club in November 1961 and was released by Impulse! in early 1962. It holds only three performances, but its second side, the sixteen-minute Chasin' The Trane, became one of the most argued-over recordings in jazz. Here Coltrane's long, searching solos reached a new intensity, and the record marks the point where his music began to split critics openly.

The tracks come from the nights of 2 and 3 November 1961, recorded on location by Rudy Van Gelder. On Spiritual Coltrane leads a quintet with Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, McCoy Tyner on piano, Reggie Workman on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. He is credited on soprano there, though he later said he also played tenor, and he stays on soprano for the quartet reading of Softly As In A Morning Sunrise.

Spiritual unfolds slowly over a modal base, its solemn theme darkened by Dolphy's bass clarinet. The Romberg and Hammerstein standard is lighter and shorter, the only piece on the album not written by Coltrane. Chasin' The Trane is a different animal: a blues played by a pianoless trio with Jimmy Garrison on bass and Jones on drums, where Coltrane on tenor works a few figures through chorus after chorus while the drums answer and push.

The residency had already drawn fire. In 1961 John Tynan wrote in DownBeat of "musical nonsense being peddled in the name of jazz". When the album came out, DownBeat ran two reviews side by side in April 1962, and Pete Welding heard Chasin' The Trane as "a torrential and anguished outpouring". Today the record sits among the essential Coltrane albums of the period.

This 2022 edition belongs to Verve's Acoustic Sounds Series, supervised by Chad Kassem. It was mastered by Ryan K. Smith at Sterling Sound from the original analogue tapes, pressed on 180g vinyl at Quality Record Pressings and housed in a gatefold tip-on jacket printed by Stoughton.