Live at the Village Vanguard - John Coltrane

John Coltrane
Live at the Village Vanguard

There isn't much to dislike about this one. Coltrane on tenor and soprano, Dolphy on bass clarinet, Tyner on piano, Workman on bass, and Jones on drums, playing what was, in 1961, some pretty crazy stuff. I don't know that I will develop this idea at all, but, this is a good example of why fame is important in music, it lets you be extremely progressive - imagine an unknown artist recording this album. No record company is going to touch it, who wants to buy 37+ minutes of shrieking and howling from an unknown? Who will buy it if you Coltrane's name on it? Lots more, some of us in triplicate. Having an established name gives you license to be weird. All of those artists that are "being true to themselves" and whatnot - that is why you are poor, you need to establish some trust and rapport with your audience so that when you want to take them someplace that might be uncomfortably experimental, they will go along.

This is the album that introduced me to the saxophone, Coltrane, and jazz. My Dad had* this on vinyl, original pressing, in stereo. I had inherited my parent's first turntable when in the early 80s, they made the wise choice to switch to a system with an 8-track. (My first album purchase was the score to Star Trek: Wrath of Khan.) Live at the Village Vanguard was there in the hi-fi cabinet stacked uncomfortably between Ray Allen and Johnny Horton. The Streak made me laugh, so did The Battle of New Orleans (love the part about powdering the alligator's ass), but Vanguard fascinated me.

I was young, and everything about this album screamed that it was different and must be dealt with in ways that would expand my musical literacy. It would not let me ignore it. The gatefold cover that was printed on stock that was at least twice as heavy as the other album covers. The track list that only had three tunes, all of other records had at least 7 or 8. The record itself, not a lightweight affair, but impressively substantial, thick, hefty, that black expanse of uninterrupted grooves not anything like others that had many more of the blank grooves between tracks. The thing even smelled different, like the way an old library smelled different from mass market paperbacks at the airport newstand. The record was importantly sophisticated.

Listening to it was just as different. This wasn't a smooth, overproduced recording. The music was raw, with an edge like a rusty, serrated steak knife. This music drew me in, the same way punk and metal would in a very short handful of years, and for the same reasons. The music was rough and loud. It sought to agitate and anger. It wasn't pretty or mellow. This was not the music of Herb Alpert, which was written with the unstated intent that the tinkling of ice in myriad double old fashioneds would serve as an additional percussion track.

You listened to this music. You listened seriously and with conviction. To not listen with conviction gave the music the power to destroy you, to obliterate your musical sanity with ruthlessness that would make Pol Pot seem cuddly and warm. If listening to this album was to kill time, you better just go ahead an listen to the Iglesias or the Alpert, much safer. Dolphy and Coltrane played those instruments exactly the same way that brought one of my parents to my bedroom door, admonishing me to "practice right"; they honked and squealed, they played stuff that I instinctively knew would never show up in my "Level One Alto Saxophone Student: A Method for Individual Instruction".** I wanted the lesson book they learned that stuff from.

Unfortunately, I never found it. That is why today, I am a history teacher. But I did finally realize that you don't learn that kind of playing. In fact, somewhat hypocritically, I would suggest that playing like that is only possible when you have learned so much, and practiced for so many hours, that playing becomes meditation, and gives you the freedom to liberate yourself from the confines of the instrument and the tune and musical theory. You simply play. And what you play is music that grabbed a little kid's ears, confusing the living daylights out of him. That little kid is still confused, but in the most pleasant sort of way.
 

*I say had, because the past tense is correct. I have it now. Hanging on the wall in an LP frame. I don't have a turntable. Neither does he. I stole it from his record collection and it welcomed me as a liberator, happy to be freed from its perverted sandwiching between a Julio Iglesias greatest hits album and The Streak by Ray Stevens. I like to imagine that my father bought this when he was a graduate student in Chicago in the early 1970s. I want to believe that. But submitted as evidence that he might have been given this as a gift are the rest of the records in his collection. Thankfully his tastes have improved. But his Iglesias collection is something he will have to answer for to St. Peter.

**If you are interested in reading something a real writer wrote about this type of music, try "John Coltrane Lives" by Lester Bangs which can be found in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, pages 103-111. I can't find it online, at least not with a cursory search, but it is probably out there somewhere.