The Village Vanguard Fall Schedule:
Fred Hersch This Week, Aaron Parks Next, and a November Packed with Legends
Plus: Immanuel Wilkins completes his three-volume live Blue Note trilogy. And tonight on The Improv Café, Live at the Village Vanguard is on the air.
The Village Vanguard at 178 Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village has been the site of more landmark jazz recordings than any other venue on earth. It opened in 1935, and by the 1950s it had become the room where the music’s greatest practitioners came to play when they wanted the conditions to be right: the low ceiling that creates its legendary acoustic intimacy, the triangular basement shape that puts the audience in direct relationship with the stage on three sides, the size that makes two hundred people feel like they are in the same living room as the musicians. Bill Evans recorded his most celebrated albums there. John Coltrane recorded “Live at the Village Vanguard” in 1961, capturing some of the most important music of the 20th century in that specific room on those specific nights. Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Wynton Marsalis, Chris Potter — the names that have defined jazz across eight decades have all defined themselves, at least in part, at the Village Vanguard. The room runs two sets nightly at 8:00 PM and 10:00 PM, every week of the year, with no exceptions for holidays or slow seasons. The Vanguard does not close for business because the Vanguard is the business.
The low ceiling. The triangular shape. The two hundred seats. The same room where Coltrane and Evans and Miles Davis made their most celebrated live recordings — still running two sets a night, every night.
Fred Hersch Trio + 2
Vanguard Jazz Orchestra
Aaron Parks Trio
The Vanguard’s late autumn calendar is fully locked and it runs from challenging to historic to essential across four consecutive weeks:
- November 3–8: Ethan Iverson Sextet — The former Bad Plus pianist leading his own larger ensemble in a program that will draw on his deep engagement with jazz tradition and his compositional restlessness.
- November 10–15: Tyshawn Sorey — Multi-instrumentalist and composer Tyshawn Sorey, MacArthur Fellow and one of the most significant creative voices in contemporary improvised music, returns to the Vanguard stage.
- November 17–22: John Zorn’s New Masada Quartet — The legendary downtown New York composer and saxophonist brings his New Masada Quartet to the room, presenting the Masada songbook in its most intimate configuration.
- November 24–29: Jason Moran and The Bandwagon — Pianist and Kennedy Center Artistic Director Jason Moran, with his long-standing Bandwagon trio, closes November with the kind of deeply musical and theatrically sophisticated jazz performance that has made him one of the most respected and most original artists working in the tradition.
Immanuel Wilkins Quartet — Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol. 1, 2 & 3 (Blue Note Records)
Earlier this year, Grammy-nominated alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins completed one of the most significant live jazz album projects in recent memory: a three-volume documentation of his quartet at the Village Vanguard, released through Blue Note Records. Volumes 1, 2, and 3 together capture Wilkins alongside pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Ryoma Takenaga, and drummer Kweku Sumbry in performances at the Vanguard that critics placed in direct lineage with the great live Vanguard recordings of the past. NPR described the music as “heavy and thought-provoking,” noting that in Wilkins’s harmonic tension you hear both ancient struggle and forward-facing hope. The three-volume project is now complete and available on Blue Note Records. For listeners of The Improv Café, these are exactly the kinds of live recordings this station was built to broadcast: a young saxophonist of extraordinary depth, in the most important jazz room in the world, captured exactly as it happened.
Live at the Village Vanguard — Five Continuous Hours
Tonight on The Improv Café, the Live at the Village Vanguard radio show broadcasts five continuous hours of classic live jazz recorded at 178 Seventh Avenue South. Every track came from that room. John Coltrane’s legendary 1961 sessions. Bill Evans’s meditative trio performances. The Miles Davis recordings. The Wynton Marsalis residencies. The Chris Potter nights. The Immanuel Wilkins trilogy. All of them made in the same low-ceilinged triangular basement room, in front of the same two hundred seats, under the same conditions that have been producing the finest live jazz documentation in the world since the 1950s.
The Village Vanguard does not change because it does not need to. Two sets nightly, every night, 178 Seventh Avenue South. Tonight on The Improv Café, five hours of everything that room has produced. Tune in every Tuesday. The show is on now.