John Coltrane’s Village Vanguard performances and soundtrack to a transitional time in America

Sixty years in the past at the moment, for 2 weeks with Mondays off, from Oct. 24 to Nov. 5, 1961, John Coltrane’s group — Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums — performed on the Village Vanguard, a jazz membership that also exists in the identical spot on Seventh Avenue South in Manhattan. (Coltrane’s son Ravi led a band there final week.) 4 nights in November had been recorded by Impulse!, Coltrane’s then-new document label. A culling from these nights was launched as a single LP in February 1962, with solely three tracks. They had been the intense and easeful “Religious,” which later helped outline a type of music recently referred to as “religious jazz”; his model of the usual “Softly, as in a Morning Dawn,” which (through this recording) helped outline the straight-ahead jazz mainstream; and, for all of aspect B, the unstable 12-bar blues in F referred to as “Chasin’ the Trane,” which begins abruptly, as if from a tape splice, and flies ahead in lunges, defining nothing and beholden to nothing. It ends when it ends and it may conceivably go on for much longer. It doesn’t know the which means of “enough.” Typically it will get unbearably thrilling. It might probably make the listener suppose: What precisely is happening right here?