[If you haven't heard anything from Coltrane prior to this you can still enjoy it but I'd recommend starting with his more (or most?) famous works. In short, check out these albums in order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.]
Arguably all jazz albums are "live" albums but studios still are a bit different from a proper live setting. The Village Vanguard tapes/recordings have a long and detailed background behind them and for a good reason too. I'm not going to elaborate all the minute details because you can find it all in the booklet provided with the songs so if you're interested just read it from there.
Personally I think Coltrane and his group were at their absolute prime here (1961) and whenever I want to hear some live Coltrane concerts I usually drift back to these recordings. This was a period for Coltrane where he was done with conventional jazz for the most part and was starting to shape into his more infamous free jazz form. So I'd say this was the time where you get still great conventional jazz but in a much more relaxed (rules-wise) and creative form. Probably the best thing with these recordings is that the tracks themselves are long as fuck. Considering how Coltrane always had millions of ideas at the same time this live setting gives him breathing room to play them all out compared to a studio album which would certainly limit this kind of creativity. A lot of the songs were augmented with additional players of which Eric Dolphy is the most known these days. This engagement, from what I've read, sparked a lot of hate that came from jazz classicists (purists or whatever) calling this anti-jazz but as time went on they were rightfully proven wrong. Coltrane and a lot of the free jazz crew got a lot of flak like that simply because they had different ideas of what jazz is and could be. Nowadays calling Coltrane an anti-jazz musician is absurd but people then were less receptive to more dissonant music I assume because a lot of them lived or were born during the heyday of swing and Dixie jazz.
While I enjoy all the tracks that are on these recordings I still have some issues with it. My main problem is that sometimes the recordings get unbalanced so you have parts that are dominant on the left or right speaker while the other side is either really low or silent. This can potentially ruin the experience but luckily it does not happen often and it doesn't last that long (still it made me snap out of the music when it did happen).
My other issue might come off a little controversial or pretentious but hear me out (or just skip to the links). I'm a fan of Dolphy and I enjoy his works (Out To Lunch and Out There being my favorites) but unfortunately on these recordings I didn't particularly like his solos or him being added at all. This is just a personal preference because he plays his parts with exceptional technicality but whenever he jumps into a solo it feels so tacked on and unnecessary for me. Coltrane plays his solo parts for a very long time and Dolphy, usually coming in after Coltrane, sounds comparatively weaker and out of place for me. It might be because he's using the bass clarinet for the most part and its sound I do not find fitting in the classic Coltrane quartet.
In summary this is a great live setting and a great live recording that bore us a lot of excellent material. I have two "versions" of this but not the complete version which is this one.
What I do have are the master takes which you can get here.
And I also have something called "The Other Village Vanguard Tapes" that were originally released in 1976. It's a two CD set that features different versions of the tracks from the master takes in a even more longer fashion and also some extra tracks that weren't featured (one being a traditional song called Greensleeves).
Here's the CD1 and CD2
I recommend getting both!
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