Tenor of the times

Sax supremos John Coltrane & Eric Dolphy at their joint peak.

EVENINGS AT THE VILLAGE GATE, by John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy

Ominous clouds hung over New York City jazz for more than a decade from the mid50s. The great innovator Charlie Parker died in 1955 at 34 (the medical examiner thought he was in his 50s), Billie Holiday in 1959 at 44 (alcohol-related heart and liver disease) and the genius John Coltrane gone in 1967. He was 40.

The clean-living Eric Dolphy - who played with Coltrane in 1961 and was on Ornette Coleman's ground-breaking Free Jazz album - died in an untreated diabetic coma at a German hospital in 1964. He was 36.

Some survived the scourges of heroin, ill health and the jazz life - trumpeters Chet Baker and Miles Davis, saxophonist Art Pepper, pianist Bill Evans among them - but there was a terrible attrition.