Live At The Village Vanguard Again!

Live at the Village Vanguard Again! remains one of the most fiercely debated records in John Coltrane's catalogue. Released less than a year before his death, it captures his new quintet in full flight: Alice Coltrane on piano, Pharoah Sanders on tenor saxophone, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Rashied Ali on drums, with additional percussion from Emanuel Rahim.

The three performances collected here are all that survive from a much longer tape, and they show a group pushing hard at form, feeling, and space.

Naima, Coltrane's signature ballad, opens the album and stretches past the 15-minute mark. One of the most iconic pieces in his repertoire, it gets a truly radical reading here.

My Favorite Things unfolds in two parts. Its opening six minutes are given over to a gorgeous, deeply imaginative solo from Garrison. Coltrane holds back the tune's familiar theme until after the mode is established, then gradually threads fragments of the melody into the performance until, however briefly, the full head appears. It vanishes almost as quickly, even as it continues to surface in passing throughout his solos.

On soprano, Coltrane is intense but still utterly beautiful, playing with pure passion and restless creative imagination, always alert to the shimmering block chords from Alice Coltrane. Ali skitters around them with insistent propulsion before breaking loose entirely when Sanders enters with a violent tenor wail that all but ignores the tune, aside from one quoted phrase near the end that brings Coltrane back in. Sanders screams through his horn across the solo, and when Coltrane rejoins him, it feels like an attempt to meet that energy and pull it back into shape. The result is a 25-minute performance that leaves the listener completely spent.