A lot of it was happening at Slugs’
In his February 2025 cover story on jazz for The Nation magazine, musician and writer Ethan Iverson explores the thrilling albums of the 1960s and early 1970s as well as how important live jazz performances were to the era. He focuses specifically on gigs hosted by Slugs’, a dark and grimy former nightclub on East 3rd Street in Manhattan’s East Village.
From Iverson:
“John Coltrane’s death in July 1967 had seemed to mark the end of an era. Coltrane was the lodestar of a generation, a virtuosic saxophonist and visionary composer who channeled devout spirituality and fierce intellectual exploration in every note he played. Between the death of Coltrane and the death of (Lee) Morgan, there is a dearth of great material in the recorded canon. However, at least according to legend, the music was better than ever, and a lot of it was happening at Slugs’.”
Slugs’ wasn’t a jazz club like Birdland or the Village Vanguard—there weren’t marquee names drawing out-of-towners in from the cold. Opened in 1964 as a standard bar called Slugs’ Saloon before alto saxophonist Jackie McLean started booking acts (simply because he lived nearby), it eventually became known as Slugs’ in the Far East. The venue was in a seedy neighborhood shunned by taxi drivers, and it played host to progressive groups large and small that weren’t gigging elsewhere. The news peg for Iverson’s piece is that Blue Note issued an archival live recording called Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’ in late 2024 featuring tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, bassist Henry Grimes, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and pianist McCoy Tyner.
Chicago native DeJohnette moved to New York City to work with Charles Lloyd sometime in 1966, when this recording took place. A year later, Tyner booked sessions for The Real McCoy, the artist’s first LP for Blue Note after he parted ways with Impulse! and quit the John Coltrane Quartet in 1965. The groundbreaking, Philadelphia-born pianist had previously appeared on Henderson’s widely acclaimed Blue Note albums In ‘n Out and Inner Urge, and they reunited at Rudy Van Gelder’s New Jersey studio for The Real McCoy.
The Slugs’ gig’s sounds and The Real McCoy are exemplary of what Iverson calls “a new idiom,” which was “played by the sidemen of (Miles) Davis and Coltrane and their immediate disciples, using the materials discarded by free jazz and fusion,” and incorporated then-recent innovations in modal jazz as well as experiments with harmony and swing.
The original tape containing the Forces of Nature set languished in DeJohnette’s archives after the drummer secured a copy from engineer Orville O’Brien, who posted up at Slugs’ with his reel-to-reel that night. It’s seeing the light of day for the first time, and yes, there are many more tapes in DeJohnette’s collection. A 2024 New York Times piece on the drummer described a “vast sonic archive” that includes “decades’ worth of unreleased recordings.”
Iverson discusses this performance in detail but the bulk of the word count goes to clarifying this new idiom and unpacking the exploration that was regularly taking place onstage at Slugs’, “a venue heavily imbued with the patina of the deepest jazz history,” writes producer Zev Feldman, the so-called “Jazz Detective” and archival producer behind Forces of Nature, in the album’s liner notes.
Iverson includes quotes from clubgoers who witnessed performances at the venue during its prime, and his feature is illustrated with original Slugs’ handbills from the collection of musician Steve Lampert. A sidebar highlights key releases of “the Slugs’ years”—the club opened in 1964 and shuttered in 1972, not long after celebrated trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot and bled to death in the building (see I Called Him Morgan for more on that tragedy).
I was glad to see that The Nation deemed Iverson’s fascinating piece worthy of the cover, but I’m also wondering if there’s a book in here. There is likely more to say about the music and this stretch of “hallowed ground” in Alphabet City.
“Those who insist that jazz is ‘America’s classical music’ have a strong argument: The music of that continuum is just as serious as Bach or Beethoven,” writes Iverson. “But there’s also a counterargument, which is simply that the most serious jazz often happened in a small club smelling of bourbon, perhaps with sawdust on the floor, played on a piano overdue for a tuning, before a group of committed listeners mixing with the unpretentious flow of street life.”
Image © 2025 The Nation magazine.
