10 Influential Albums #4: Live at the Village Vanguard Again by John Coltrane

One of the most extraordinary recordings I know. Beautiful, heartbreakingly beautiful, virtuosic beyond what most of us might think these instruments are incapable of. And then that masterpiece of deconstruction, My Favorite Things, with so many of the intervals changed but the tune still fully recognizable, a flight into a musical world of limitless possibility.

And there they were, in the Vanguard, playing this incredible music and, as you can hear at the end of My Favorites Things, very, very few people were lucky enough to hear it live. I’ve always thought that that was a sad commentary on Trane’s audience, that they couldn/wouldn’t follow him.

It is hard to believe that a year later, Coltrane would be dead. Even harder to believe that he was only 40 years old. He apparently was not a natural musical genius; he had to work at it, constantly practicing and studying, but a genius he certainly was, long before this performance, long before even Miles’s Kind of Blue. But Trane was clearly always a profoundly spiritual man; clear even in his earliest recordings.

Sadly, I never saw Coltrane live, but I did see Alice Coltrane, Rashied Ali, and Pharaoh Sanders, at the infamous Slug’s and elsewhere.. I also saw other Trane veterans — Elvin Bishop many times, and McCoy Tyner at least once. They were all amazing musicians.