NYMag: Village Vanguard Tales

My annotated slide-show, "A Brief and Colorful History of the Village Vanguard", is now up on nymag.com. It chronicles 13 events from the club's 75 years, from its beginnings as a hangout for lefty booze-hound poets to its present as jazz's most prestigious venue (with some Charles Mingus history/folklore and an account of Bill Evans's famous Sunday thrown in for good measure).

Comments

[Paul]

I am very glad for these photographs and stories, but I am confused and partly hurt by the lack of any reference to John Coltrane. Any particular reason?

[Eric Benson]

Thanks for your comment. I admire and respect no jazz artist more than John Coltrane: my favorite album of all-time pretty much oscillates between A Love Supreme, Coltrane's Sound, and Crescent. So I definitely didn't mean to diss 'Trane--the omission was the result of writing for a general magazine readership and not wanting to be repetitive. I thought Sonny Rollins' A Night at the Village Vanguard was crucial to include, since it allowed me to discuss the club's role as a recording venue, and Evans is more closely associated with the club than any other musician. The Coltrane entry would have come right after Evans and Rollins and I thought readers needed to read something other than "this guy played a great, legendary, transcendent set." In a more complete history I would certainly have discussed Coltrane, but, to be fair, Coltrane isn't discussed at length in Max Gordon's book and, while he cut a great album at the Vanguard, didn't have as close a link to the club as many other musicians of that time. (A reader could be equally miffed by my omission of Monk or Rahsaan Roland Kirk or, gulp, Wynton Marsalis.)