By the summer of 1961, the indomitable saxophonist John Coltrane had established his first quartet and opened new harmonic expanses for jazz through his sheets of sound. As a leader for Atlantic, the cascades of ‘Countdown’ and ‘Giant Steps’ with its loping bassline and spirited cycle of chromatic thirds helmed his first iconic album and introduced what would become known as the Coltrane changes, while turning to the soprano saxophone, he scored a surprise hit with his rendition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune ‘My Favorite Things’, which would remain one of his most cherished pieces of work. Now buttressing the playing of the drummer Elvin Jones, the pianist McCoy Tyner, and the bassist Reggie Workman with an extra bass in the form of Art Davis, Donald Garrett or Jimmy Garrison and the incendiary Eric Dolphy on second horn, the expanded ensemble were preparing for a four-night residency at the Village Vanguard, although it was not all plain sailing for Coltrane during this period, as his group would be described as ‘a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend’ by the Downbeat critic John Tynan, while his muscular solos had alienated the Parisian crowd on his final tour with Miles Davis the previous year.
Shedding new light on this seminal moment of artistic development, tapes recently discovered by a Bob Dylan archivist at the New York Public Library capture Coltrane and Dolphy just a couple of months before their famed Village Vanguard residency, on a special night at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village in August of 1961. With the original quartet of Jones, Tyner and Workman bolstered by Dolphy on bass clarinet and alto saxophone, Coltrane’s engagement at the Village Gate was part of a busy month of summer jazz for the burgeoning nightclub. He was billed alongside groups by the drummer Art Blakey and the pianists Ray Bryant and Horace Silver, plus a nineteen-year old singer by the name of Aretha Franklin, who was performing for the very first time in New York City, having released her debut solo album Aretha backed by the Ray Bryant Combo on Columbia Records at the start of the year.
The Village Gate had a state-of-the-art sound system which had been installed by an ambitious young engineer called Richard Alderson, who would later work extensively for ESP-Disk and record live albums for Bob Dylan, Harry Belafonte and Nina Simone. Seizing the moment that night in August, he recorded the Coltrane quartet as a way to test out his new system, using a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a single suspended RCA ribbon microphone. The results were shelved and found their way into a collection at the New York Public Library, with their discovery prompting eighty minutes of new material scheduled to be released in July as a double album on Impulse. Boasting a full title of John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy: Evenings at the Village Gate, the set includes a fresh take on ‘My Favorite Things’, a breathtaking feature for Dolphy on bass clarinet on the Benny Carter and Spencer Williams standard ‘When Lights Are Low’, and the only known non-studio recording of the Coltrane composition ‘Africa’, plus liner essays by Workman, Alderson, the Grammy-winning jazz historian Ashley Kahn, and the saxophonists Branford Marsalis and Lakecia Benjamin.
Taking loan of the Stradivarius Feuermann for a period of one year, the Franco-Belgian cellist Camille Thomas composed a journey in three chapters devoted to the life and works of the great Polish romantic virtuoso Frédéric Chopin. Alongside Julien Brocal on their arrangement of the Larghetto from the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, the cellist finds buoyancy in a piece which Chopin wrote to his friend Tytus Woyciechowski was ‘not intended to create a powerful effect’. Rather the larghetto was written as ‘a romance, calm and melancholy, giving the impression of someone gazing gently towards a place that reminds him of a thousand happy memories. It’s a sort of moonlit reverie on a beautiful spring evening’, facets which Thomas and Brocal render winningly within the sunlit daytime grounds of the Abbaye de Clairvaux.
What Antonio Stradivari was to the string instrument the Hemony brothers were to bellfounding in the Low Countries, as Pieter and François in collaboration with the blind musician Jacob van Eyck cast the first tuned carillon in 1644. Within and without St. Catherine’s Church in the Belgian municipality of Hoogstraten, music accompanied the unveiling of a woven tapestry by the multidisciplinary artist Joris Martens in the spring of 2021, with Mia Prce as Miaux playing her own compositions on the Pels organ, while the Edições CN founder Lieven Martens converted bird sounds into musical notation whose trifles were translated for the Hemony carillon by the town carillonneur and improviser Luc Dockx. In two parts the results blend the tradition of monophonic plainsong with multivalent cinematic evocations from the cyber noirscapes of Vangelis through the wistful waterfalls of Angelo Badalamenti to the kosmische wayfaring of Popol Vuh, and organic birdsong with screwed tidbits which serve as a sort of homage to the composer and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen, climaxing beatifically with a spirit of communal uplift.
Marta Salogni, the producer with a penchant for tape decks who has mixed some of the best albums of the past year in the form of Time Skiffs by Animal Collective, ¡Ay! by Lucrecia Dalt and Aura by Hatis Noit, and Tom Relleen perhaps best known as one half of the experimental jazz and drone duo Tomaga alongside the percussionist Valentina Magaletti, began to record what would become Music For Open Spaces at Joshua Tree on the cusp of the desert, later continuing their mostly spontaneous improvisations on the Cornish coastline and at their London home. Permeated with the breadth and heft of these physical and emotional landscapes, Salogni left their original compositions unmixed and unaltered after Relleen passed away from stomach cancer in the summer of 2020 at the age of 42 years old, describing the open spaces of their ambient passages as ‘where Tom is now, unconstrained by form’.
Slipping in at the tail end of a golden age of Ethiopian music before the Derg regime began to crack down on all manner of artistic expression, the voices of Aselefech Ashine and Getenesh Kebret entwine in close harmony over the minor-key piano runs, interlocking percussion and rock-steady basslines of the Army Band while the sonorous flute of the arranger Teshome Sisay ties together ten rollicking and variegated Ethio-jazz compositions. Ashine and Kebret met at the legendary Hager Fikir Theatre in Addis Ababa and their duo album Beauties was a local hit upon its release in 1976, now remastered and reissued with translated lyrics and an interview with Ashine by Mississippi Records and Domino Sound who have a track record when it comes to filling in our collective blanks, reviving marginalised voices and long-forgotten scenes in close collaboration with their selected artists.
From the streets of Kathmandu in Nepal to the bustling heart of New York City, the ripping immigrindcore collective Chepang close the second side of their impending album Swatta with luminous melodies from Patrick Shiroshi on the saxophone and aerophone. The bassist Linda May Han Oh explores the chimera of time and the fragility of antiquity alongside a small ensemble which features Sara Serpa on vocals, Mark Turner on tenor saxophone, Fabian Almazan on piano and electronics and Obed Calvaire on drums. Accompanied by Doshambay Sabir on the damboora, Ustad Noor Bakhsh pulls together two fragments structured around a seven and eight-beat tala on his trusty electric benju, a type of zither fitted with a keyboard which was modified and naturalised by Baloch musicians during the course of the twentieth century.
By way of Vladimir Nabokov and his translocutionary prowess, the harpist Sarah Pagé draws inspiration from the poem ‘The Mermaid’ by Mikhail Lermontov for the nine flowing movements of Voda, a submersible which agglomerates bits of myth and instrumentation from the bass, cello, koto and violin to oak branches, water bowls, waterphone and mic’d up sheet metal as it plumbs the murky depths. Hinako Omori opens a new chapter with the cleaving compassion of ‘in full bloom’, embracing the principle of self-sufficiency as she tends to her inner allotment. Yussef Dayes locks in a groove alongside the chasmic basslines of his friend and collaborator Tom Misch, while Rey Sapienz rolls us back to his debut extended play, whose soukous mutations served as the founding document for the Nyege Nyege offshoot Hakuna Kulala.
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Marta Salogni & Tom Relleen – ‘Desert Glass’
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Linda May Han Oh – ‘Antiquity’
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Chepang – ‘Na’ (feat. Patrick Shiroishi)
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Camille Thomas & Julien Brocal – ‘II. Larghetto’ (from the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor)
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Yussef Dayes – ‘Rust’ (feat. Tom Misch)
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hinako omori – ‘in full bloom’
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John Coltrane – ‘Impressions’ (feat. Eric Dolphy)
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Aselefech Ashine & Getenesh Kebret – ‘Wegenne’
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Ustad Noor Bakhsh – ‘Tor Sor’
