Live At The Village Vanguard Again!

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Live At The Village Vanguard Again! is a live jazz album by saxophonist John Coltrane. Recorded in May 1966 during a live performance at the Village Vanguard jazz club in New York City, the album features Coltrane playing in the free jazz style that characterized his final year. The lineup features Coltrane's quintet, with Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute, Pharoah Sanders on tenor saxophone and flute, Alice Coltrane on piano, Jimmy Garrison on ba, and Rashied Ali on drum, supplemented by Emanuel Rahim on percussion. Coltrane's group played at the Village Vanguard on two consecutive weekends (May 20–22 and 27-29, 1966), sharing the bill with Clark Terry on the first weekend, and Coleman Hawkins on the second. The album, which was recorded on Saturday, May 28, features two extended piece, "Naima" and "My Favorite Things", culled from a much longer tape. On both the LP and CD release, the pieces were issued with the bass solo played by Garrison as an introduction to "My Favorite Things" split out as a separate track titled "Introduction to My Favorite Things". In his liner note, Nat Hentoff noted: "Both songs have long been part of the Coltrane repertory, but again Coltrane has found in them the base for new dimensions of expressivene." Coltrane biographer Eric Nisenson stated that "Coltrane was obviously making a statement about how far he had come since both his first Vanguard album and his first recording of these two piece. By recording such familiar tune, he hoped perhaps to give those having difficulty with his new music some sort of familiar territory from which he could jump off to new, unexplored terrain." Ekkehard Jost wrote that "a comparison of the different versions of these two titles is all one need, to realize the influence of the six years in between on Coltrane's musical development," and stated that, on this album, "Naima" "becomes a launching pad for tension-charged improvisation. Points of contact between them and the original material are established in sporadic fragments of the theme, and hardly at all by harmonic references to the chord progression. This is a kind of melodic-motivic improvisation that does not take place within the time-boundaries of the theme; those boundaries are stretched or shrunk as prompted by the flow of musical idea." Personnel: John Coltrane – soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, flute Pharoah Sanders – tenor saxophone, flute Alice Coltrane – piano Jimmy Garrison – bass Rashied Ali – drums .

via Last.fm

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