Six days after the Transition session, Coltrane was back at Van Gelder’s, but this time only one other person showed up: Elvin Jones. No Tyner, no Garrison, just a saxophone and a drum kit facing each other in the room. The Vigil session is the shortest date on this whole calendar, one piece, two players, and it may be the most quietly significant thing they cut all year.
Coltrane in Context
Nothing dramatic shifted in Coltrane’s life in the six days between Transition and Vigil, Alice’s pregnancy continued its course toward an August due date, and the band’s brush with Roy Haynes the month before was already receding into the rearview. What changed instead was the room itself: for one session, Coltrane stripped his working unit down to its barest possible form, just horn and drums, no harmonic instrument, no bass. It’s a small, easy-to-miss experiment sitting in the middle of an otherwise busy month, and it wouldn’t fully pay off until a very different context, nearly two years later.
This post is part of The Ascension Years, a session-by-session listening journey through John Coltrane’s final years. Start from the introduction to follow the whole series in order.
Vigil
A duet between Coltrane and Jones, quite possibly the first of Coltrane’s drums-and-sax duets, a precursor to Interstellar Space. At first blush, one hears the absence of Garrison and Tyner through their presence within Jones’s playing, it’s easy to imagine Tyner’s comping, chord planing, and fingerful flights in support of Trane’s explorations. One has to wonder if the duo also played with these ghosts in mind.
There’s an Indian music quality to this too, a monophonic soloist with percussion accompaniment, the tamboura drone implied even without an actual tamboura in the room. Eventually the ghosts begin to dissipate and these two monsters engage in a heavyweight bout, not of competing violence but brutal choreography. Coltrane does some amazing countermelody work here, jumping between registers to create polyphonic textures that tussle before melding into a flurry of repetitive arpeggios.
“Repetition ensures closure”, my old composition teacher Mel Powell used to say, and here we have it: three repeated licks call this jam to a close.
The Records
Everything referenced from this Vigil session:
- John Coltrane — Kulu Sé Mama (1967, Impulse! A-9106, original stereo LP)
The System
All listening sessions on a Fisher 400 stereo receiver (1963) into Klipsch Heresy IV speakers via a Rega Planar 6 turntable fitted with a Rega Nd5 MM cartridge. Records cleaned in a Humminguru ultrasonic record cleaner before critical listening sessions.
About Spacefuzz
Spacefuzz is the recording project of Charles Morogiello, a composer, artist and guitarist based in Phoenix, AZ. He has studied, performed or recorded with Mel Powell, Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley, Wadada Leo Smith, Lou Harrison, Don Preston (The Mothers of Invention/Frank Zappa), Billy Martin (Medeski Martin & Wood), Mark Karan (The Dead, The Other Ones) and many more. His latest album, Crush Depth: A Dub-Sonic Submarine Symphony in Four Sides, is out now on vinyl and digital via Bandcamp. Explore the Spacefuzz discography or read more about the project. Stream on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, and Qobuz.