Tenor of the times
New Zealand Listener|August 5-11 2023
Sax supremos John Coltrane & Eric Dolphy at their joint peak.
Tenor of the times

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.

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