I’m honored and thrilled to have played a small role in the rediscovery of one of the tapes featured in the latest John Coltrane/Eric Dolphy release, Evenings at the Village Gate (Impulse, 2023).

Back in early 2017, I was helping the recording engineer Richard Alderson try and track down a set of audio reels that he’d last seen in the late 1960s. Our aim was to recover his best source copies of the historic Bob Dylan recordings he made at the Gaslight Café in 1962.

Alderson had created part of the audio set-up for Richard Striker’s Carnegie Hall-based Institute of Sound in the 1960s, so when Alderson moved to Mexico in 1969, he left his personal tape collection at the Institute. Through the Association of Recorded Sound Collections listserv, we were able to connect with Jessica Wood at New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which houses the Richard C. Striker Memorial Collection. Wood confirmed the survival of Alderson’s tapes including the Dylan recordings, as well as the recently released Coltrane-Dolphy tape.

As if that was not enough, there were some other tantalizing Village Gate dates including Thelonious Monk in 1962 and, if I remember correctly, the Sonny Rollins Quartet (with Don Cherry, Bob Cranshaw, and Billy Higgins) just before the late July 1962 recording of Our Man in Jazz (RCA Victor) at the club. Given Alderson’s unique ability to capture a warm, clear club sound, one can only hope that these recordings will also see official release.

But for now and forever, an hour and twenty minutes of previously unheard John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, McCoy Tyner, Dr. Art Davis, Reggie Workman, and Elvin Jones in action is more than enough!

For more on how Evenings at the Village Vanguard came to be, read Jessica Wood’s wonderful blog post.