SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER/FALL, 2015
VOLUME ONE NUMBER FOUR
VOLUME ONE NUMBER FOUR
BILLIE HOLIDAY
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
ERIC DOLPHY
July 18-24
MARVIN GAYE
July 25-31
ABBEY LINCOLN
August 1-7
RAY CHARLES
August 8-14
SADE
August 15-21
BETTY CARTER
August 22-28
CHARLIE PARKER
August 29-September 4
MICHAEL JACKSON
September 5-11
CHAKA KHAN
September 12-18
JOHN COLTRANE
September 19-25
SARAH VAUGHAN
September 26-October 2
THELONIOUS MONK
October 3-9
July 18-24
MARVIN GAYE
July 25-31
ABBEY LINCOLN
August 1-7
RAY CHARLES
August 8-14
SADE
August 15-21
BETTY CARTER
August 22-28
CHARLIE PARKER
August 29-September 4
MICHAEL JACKSON
September 5-11
CHAKA KHAN
September 12-18
JOHN COLTRANE
September 19-25
SARAH VAUGHAN
September 26-October 2
THELONIOUS MONK
October 3-9
http://www.furious.com/perfect/ericdolphy.html
Photo courtesy of Concord Music Group
"Lloyd Reese was a master musician," Mingus said. "He knew jazz and all the fundamentals of music from the beginning. He used to be the first alto player in Les Height's band. And he could play anything."
Shy and introspective as a teenager, Eric spent nearly every waking hour cloistered away in his backyard studio, practicing and studying music. Dolphy fed his voracious musical appetite with everything from field recordings of pygmy yodeling to modern composers like Schoenberg.
Viewing a rare videotape of an interview with Eric Dolphy's parents conducted years ago by Alan Saul, a college student at the time, supplied enormous insight into the multi-instrumentalist's personality and supplied this article with many of the quotes from his folks. There were long awkward silent pauses as Alan, a self-conscious, well-intentioned young hippie, held a legal pad, as he nervously looked over a long list of questions while Dolphy's parents sat on the sofa graciously obliging. Eric Sr. was reserved and thoughtful. He let his wife and his polka dot shirt do most of the talking.
Dolphy's mother Sadie recalled how he got up each morning by five to practice until breakfast and then left for school. After classes, he'd hurry back home again to work on his tone.
"He'd blow one note all day long!" Sadie exclaimed.
"For weeks at a time!" Eric Sr. added. "Then he'd play it and put it on his tape recorder and listen to it. He'd say, "Dad it's got to be right."
I'd say, "It sounds right to me."
But Eric, perfectionist that he was, replied, "No. It's not right yet."
"Sometimes we'd be sleeping and hear him plunking on the piano," Eric Sr. continued. "And I'd say, ‘Hey, what ya doin'?' He'd say, ‘I just got an idea.' And he'd be writing y'know."
"He was gonna be a musician. He wasn't gonna do anything else!" Sadie said.
"He became discouraged when he couldn't get any work. But he kept on working at it because he figured some day, somehow he'd make it."
Like every saxophonist of his generation Eric was heavily inspired by Charlie Parker. Dolphy spent years mastering Bird's technique and concepts, employing them as the foundation for his own imaginative improvisations. Lillian Polen, a close friend of Eric's at this time recalled that Dolphy wholeheartedly "worshipped Bird." She recalled regularly "falling by the Oasis," a small club on Central Avenue in LA to check out Dolphy's band. At the time, Eric worried that people would write him as just another Charlie Parker imitator.
Years later, Eric explained his inspiration for his album title Far Cry: "The title's meaning is that it's a far cry from the impact Bird had when he was alive and his position now. I wrote this to show that I haven't forgotten him or what he's meant to me. But the song also says that as great as he was, he was a far cry from what he could have been. And, finally, it says that I'm a far cry from being able to say all I want in jazz."
Eric came to prominence during a transitional period in jazz. In the evolution of the alto saxophone, his horn bridged the gap between Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman and helped usher be bop into the uncharted realm of the avant-garde or the "New Thing." His unique sense of harmony and jagged melody lines had more in common with the fractured piano of Thelonious Monk than any horn player of his time. His lyrical leaps from one register to the next spanned a broad range of emotion and expression that few musicians then or now have been capable of. Dolphy's vocabulary ranged from a gentle whisper to a full-blown anxiety attack. Like Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Eric also battled the grim existential atmosphere of cold war era with an irrepressible howl.
"To me, jazz is like part of living, like walking down the street and reacting to what you see and hear. And whatever I react to, I can say immediately in my music," he once said.
"It was evident he had his Charlie Parker together, but little did I realize that he would become one of the groundbreakers of the new music of the Sixties," critic Ira Gitler exclaimed after witnessing Dolphy with Chico Hamilton's Quintet at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958.
At the time, Hamilton's group typified West Coast cool. Their soft tasteful chamber jazz, comprised of guitar, cello and woodwinds, was a forerunner to future New Age bands like the Paul Winter Consort and Oregon. In this setting, Dolphy's fiery approach to improvisation was rather risky. At any moment, Eric could suddenly bust Chico's groovy mood wide open with just a few slurs and squawks from his bass clarinet. Critics that just didn't get it heard Eric's joyous squeals as amateurish, shrill and offensive.
Earlier that year Buddy Collette left Chico Hamilton's Quintet, suggesting Eric Dolphy as his replacement. Eric played in the group a short time before re-locating to New York in the autumn of 1959 when he joined forces with his old friend from L.A., the volatile bassist Charles Mingus.
Back in California, Dolphy had been harshly criticized for playing out of tune.
"The public in general wasn't ready for Eric when he was in my band," Hamilton later admitted. Many complained, suggesting that Chico fire him and find someone more suitable to his smooth sound. "But Eric was such an original type player. He had a legitimate background in music to the extent of the classics and he studied with [William] Kincaid. He did everything correct. He was total music," Hamilton said in his former sideman's defense.
Chico believed it a coincidence that Dolphy became a jazz musician in the first place. He felt Eric's exceptional technique and diversity would have allowed him to pursue any style of music he desired, from classical to R&B.
Dolphy employed traditional song structures as his foundation for expression and exploration while Ornette's approach came straight out of Planet X. The kind of freedom practiced and encouraged by members of Coleman's quartet shook the very foundations of jazz at its core. Unless the listener was willing to approach the complexity of Ornette's music with an unbiased mind and open ears, allowing the sound to wash over them without analysis, they would never grasp its full impact.
Coleman's image as the era's premiere iconoclast may have overshadowed many of his peers but Dolphy's role in the avant-garde was unquestionably integral to its development. One listen to his contribution to such milestone recordings as Coleman's Free Jazz and Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth and John Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard will immediately set the record straight.
For whatever reason, many of Eric's best solos were recorded as a sideman. Free from the pressures of leading his own band, Dolphy may have been able to express himself on a deeper level, embellishing his cohort's compositions with his lyrical and explosive reed work. Or perhaps it was the camaraderie that inspired to reach a little deeper. Yet Dolphy's music stands alone as an entirely valid expression unto itself, with or without his association to Mingus, Coltrane and Coleman.
"He had such a big sound, as big as Charlie Parker's," Mingus claimed. "Inside that sound was great capacity to talk in his music about the most basic feelings. He knew that level of language which very few musicians get down to."
"Near the end of ‘What Love' Mingus and Dolphy (on bass clarinet) have a long and different kind of conversation on their instruments, apparently about Dolphy's intention of quitting the band," Whitney Balliett revealed in Night Creatures. "Eric Dolphy and I were having a conversation about his leaving the band. Mainly it was curse words, except for Eric. Eric didn't curse until the very end of his solo," Mingus joked. "He was absolutely without a need to hurt," Charles explained. The duets at the Five Spot with Mingus playing bass and Dolphy on bass clarinet are among the greatest musical dialogues in the history of the music. "We used to talk to each other, and you could understand – and I mean understand in words – what he was saying to me," Mingus said.
Friction continued to develop between the two and by the end of the 1964 tour Dolphy had grown weary of Mingus' outrageous antics. True to form, Charles lived up to his myth as the mad, sexy genius he was, busting microphones, telephones and doors. He was also arrested for wielding a knife.
"Eric played with Mingus after I did," Composer/multi-instrumentalist David Amram told me in a recent interview. "I played French horn with Mingus in '55. Mingus loved Eric's bass clarinet. Both instruments were unusual in a jazz setting. Mingus could hear these instruments in a different way and adjust his music to what they could do. I was particularly interested in Eric's bass clarinet as I had a part for one in my opera, Twelfth Night. I told him, ‘Some of the registers you're playing on the bass clarinet, I wouldn't dare write because nobody could stay in tune or make it sound good, playing that high.' He said, ‘They should either check me out or practice,' David laughed. "He believed there were no limitations in music, that if you wanted to do it enough, you would find a way. He had a great sense of adventure and daring. He was a true improviser. Remember he had a real foundation in music. There are a lot of free jazz players these days that don't have that kind of background. He could play within the mainstream but he just followed how he felt."
Seldom does a musician's search for a new mode of expression culminate in a riotous response from their audience. The most notorious instance in the twentieth century was Igor Stravinsky's premiere of "Sacre du Printemps" in 1913. A little over fifty years later, Bob Dylan suddenly shed his Woody Guthrie/weary dust bowl bumpkin balladeer guise, put on his black leather jacket and plugged in his Stratocaster at the Newport Folk Festival. The crowd erupted in outrage and anger. In the heat of the moment, the banjo-strumming King of Sing-Along, Pete Seeger was said to have grabbed an ax with the intent of whittling the soundboard into kindling but was thankfully subdued. The folkies felt betrayed by their boy wonder. Before them stood Bob Dylan, like Judas in Beatle boots, defiantly flailing his Fender while crowing, "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm No More!" His message came across loud and clear. He had turned his back on "the cause." Dylan may have sold out to rock and roll as many claimed, but he also happened to be playing some of the best damn music of his career.
With the release of My Favorite Things in the spring of 1961, John Coltrane experienced a wave of popularity unlike anything he'd ever known. With his soaring soprano saxophone, Coltrane transformed Julie Andrews' little ditty from the popular Disney film The Sound of Music into a lilting waltz that was at once romantic, accessible and cool. In the process, Coltrane had unwittingly hipped an entire generation of tweed-clad, flat-topped college kids to jazz. Even girls liked it!
Suddenly reporters from Newsweek scurried down the narrow, red-carpeted stairs of the Village Vanguard to cover the story. But it wasn't long before Rogers and Hammerstein's lovely tune became a vehicle for some of Coltrane's most torrid improvisations.
In no time, the critics attacked Coltrane like a pack of rabid hounds, tearing him apart for blowing half hour solos over a repetitive two-chord vamp. Leonard Feather believed this latest development in John's music was "retrogressive in terms of development in jazz." Feather also complained that Coltrane's endless soloing was monotonous when compared to the lush harmonic complexity of an Ellington arrangement.
"You see, that is another complexity in itself, of playing on 1 or 2 changes." Dolphy countered. Eric actually found it more challenging for a creative musician to play over a sparse framework. The simple repetition laid bare the musician's technique and intent for all to hear. With no place to hide, their shortcomings were certain to become obvious after just a few choruses.
"This automatically gives him more time to think, and it gives him the chance to unfold a lot more. Like in Indian music they only have one [chord], in our Western music we can usually hear one minor chord, but they call it a raga or scale and they'll play for twenty minutes."
Eric understood the rigorous path of discipline and practice that Indian classical musicians must endure to perfect their technique and build a musical vocabulary diverse enough to successfully improvise over a single chord without becoming redundant.
"Music contains like, rhythm and pitch, time, space and all these elements go into improvisation," Dolphy once said. "You have to take that into consideration. It's not a question of running notes, running notes in random."
Eric was deeply inspired by the hypnotic beauty of Indian music, not as a superficial trend but as a form of discipline and expression similar to his own. Years before Beatle George Harrison and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones employed the sitar's exotic twang as a condiment to their catchy pop tunes, Coltrane and Dolphy could be heard improvising within the framework of these scales on John's haunting composition "India."
As fate would have it Eric met the spectacular sitarist Ravi Shankar on his first tour of the U.S. It was a great opportunity for the multi-instrumentalist to learn about ragas, talas and other intricacies of Indian music directly the master of the form.
As Dolphy later explained it: "Classical Indian music is the music of [Indian] people and jazz is the music of the American people, especially the American Negro. Quite naturally, there's something of a connection there, of people expressing themselves in the same way [ancient blues of variable hues]. To the listener that doesn't pay close attention to the notes, the sound will get monotonous. But to the person that listens to the actual notes and the creation that's going on and the building within the players and within themselves, they'll notice that something is actually happening."
In November 1961, Trane toured England bringing Eric Dolphy along to augment his classic quartet. Jazz writer/photographer Val Wilmer believed their performance had "an enormous impact, particularly on local musicians."
Regarding the classic quartet, pianist McCoy Tyner once remarked, "That group was like four pistons in an engine. We were all working together to make the car go." If that was indeed the case, many critics and fans alike looked at the addition of Eric Dolphy as an extraneous fifth wheel.
The reaction in the press to Dolphy joining the group was second only to the Spanish Inquisition. On November 23, Down Beat published a scathing review by John Tynan, who claimed that "melodically and harmonically" the group's collective improvisations sounded like "gobbledygook."
Suddenly John and Eric were perceived as a pair of charlatans, plotting "an anarchistic course," and playing a defiant brand of "anti-jazz" that didn't swing. Both Coltrane and Dolphy were stumped by Tynan's term. Eric found the accusation confusing and absurd. "In fact, it swings so much I don't know what to do – it moves me so much," he replied. "I'd like to know how they explain ‘anti-jazz'. Maybe they can tell us something."
"There are various types of swing," Coltrane theorized. "There's 4/4, with heavy bass drum accents. Then there's the kind of thing that goes on in Count Basie's band. In fact, every group of individuals assembled has a different feeling, a different swing. It's a different feeling than in any other band," John said, regarding his quintet. "It's hard to answer a man who says it doesn't swing."
"It's kind of alarming to the musician when someone has written something bad about what the musician plays but never asks the musician anything about it. At least the musician feels bad. But he doesn't feel so bad that he quits playing," Eric countered. "The critic influences a lot of people. If something new has happened, something nobody knows what the musician's doing, he should ask the musician about it. Because somebody may like it; they might want to know something about it. Sometimes it really hurts, because a musician not only loves his work but depends on it for his living. If somebody writes something bad about musicians, people stay away. Not because the guys don't sound good but because somebody said something that has influence over a lot of people."
Photo courtesy of All About Jazz
God Bless The Child, Part II
An advocate of free jazz, Dolphy was a champion of free speech as well. Ultimately Eric believed that Tynan was entitled to voice his opinion, but he questioned the motivation behind the critic's terse words. Gentle as he was, Eric would not stand by idly while somebody made ignorant comments that were damaging to both his and Coltrane's career.
"You use other notes in the chord to give you certain expressions to the song, otherwise you'd be playing what everybody else is playin'. The thing only happens at the moment when you do it, and quite naturally it might change," Eric said, hoping to shed some light on the elusive process of improvisation.
When Eric Dolphy moved to Manhattan in 1960, he first joined the Mingus Workshop, then later that same year he began playing with Ornette Coleman.
In retrospect, it's surprising that Coleman's music caused such a maelstrom. Many of his compositions have an almost child-like, singsong quality while others reveal a West-Indian calypso feel. His drummers, Eddie Blackwell and Billy Higgins always swung hard. In his unorthodox approach to group soloing, which had its roots in traditional New Orleans music, Ornette would forge a fresh, new, dimension of sound. No matter how radical his concept of Harmolodics, Coleman never completely abandoned changes that chords (if they had been employed) inferred.
"You CAN play every note you like," Dolphy told Leonard Feather, in a desperate attempt to convey the essence of the new music. "Of course, you can only play what you can hear, and quite naturally... more or less I guess what I hear is not your hearing."
In the spring of 1964, Dolphy left Mingus' band while on a tour of Europe and planned to live in Paris where quite a number of expatriate musicians found themselves welcome with open arms. But that June, Dolphy suddenly died due to complications from diabetes. Two months earlier Mingus had composed and recorded a blues entitled "So Long Eric" which he maintained was not a "eulogy" but a "complaint."
At the end of Alan Saul's video, he sits on Dolphy's sofa asking if they ever feel bitter about the way things all went down.
It will be difficult to avoid clichés here. In their defense, clichés originate from an authentic place; they are mostly an attempt, at least initially, to articulate something honest and immutable. And so: Eric Dolphy is among the foremost supernovas in all of jazz (Clifford Brown, Booker Little and Lee Morgan—all trumpeters incidentally—also come quickly to mind): he burned very brightly and very briefly, and then he was gone. Speaking of clichés, not a single one of the artists just mentioned—all of whom left us well before their fortieth birthdays—died from a drug overdose. Dolphy, the grand old man of the bunch, passed away at the age of 36, in Europe. How? After lapsing into a diabetic coma. Why? The doctors on duty presumed the black musician who had collapsed in the street was nodding off on a heroin buzz. To attempt to put the magnitude of this loss in perspective, consider that Charles Mingus, perhaps the most difficult and demanding band leader of them all, declared Dolphy a saint, and regarded his death as one of a handful of setbacks he could never completely get over. Dolphy holds the distinction of quite possibly being the one artist nobody has gone on record to say a single negative thing about. His body of work, the bulk of which was recorded during an almost miraculously productive five-year stretch, is deep, challenging, and utterly enjoyable. Outward Bound, then, holds a special place as his debut recording as a leader.
Music
Jazz Enigma of the ’60s Has an Encore
A New Focus on Eric Dolphy, in Washington and Montclair
MAY 27, 2014
New York Times
A Virtuoso Revisited
CreditFrancis Wolff/Mosaic Images, via CORBIS.
Jazz Festival to Honor Eric Dolphy
Question: What’s it all about?
Answer: I don’t know.
But I do know a few things.
I know some of the things that make me tick.
Even though I write (for fun, for real and forever), I would still say that music has always been the central element of my existence. Or the elemental center. Writing is a compulsion, a hobby, a skill, a craft, an obsession, a mystery and at times a burden. Music simply is. For just about anyone, all you need is an ear (or two); that is all that’s required for it to work its magic. But, as many people come to realize, if you approach it with your mind, and your heart and, eventually (inevitably) your soul, it is capable of making you aware of other worlds, it can help you achieve the satisfaction material possessions are intended to inspire, it will help you feel the feelings drugs are designed to approximate. Et cetera.
I know that jazz music has made my life approximately a million times more satisfying and enriching than it would have been had I never been fortunate enough to discover, study and savor it.
During the last 4-5 years, I’ve had (or taken) the opportunity to write in some detail about Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Freddie Hubbard, Ornette Coleman, John Zorn, and Herbie Hancock. This has been important to me, because I feel that in some small way, if I can help other people better appreciate, or discover any (or all) of these artists, I will be sharing something bigger and better than anything I alone am capable of creating.
Before this blog (and PopMatters, where virtually all of my music writing appears), and during the decade or so that stretched from my mid-’20s to mid-’30s, I used to have more of an evangelical vibe. It’s not necessarily that I’m less invested, now, then I was then; quite the contrary. But, if I wasn’t particuarly interested in converting people then (I wasn’t), I’m even less so today. When it comes to art in general and music in particular, entirely too many people are very American in their tastes: they know what they like and they like what they know. And there’s nothing wrong with that, since what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Also, let’s face it, the only thing possibly more annoying than some yahoo proselytizing their religion on your doorstep is some jackass getting in your grill about how evolved or enviable his or her musical tastes happen to be. Life is way too short, for all involved.
On the other hand, back in the day I was obliged to talk about music using only words. Now there is YouTube. You can’t believe everything you read, but you can always have faith in what you hear; the ears never lie. Not when it comes to music. Not when it comes to jazz music.
How to talk about jazz music? Well, perhaps it’s better to determine how not to talk about jazz music. Hearing is believing. That’s it. And if you hear something that speaks to you, keep listening. Whatever effort you put in will be immeasurably rewarded. Trust me. But first, eradicate cliché. Possibly the most despicable myth (that, fortunately doesn’t seem as widespread, perhaps –sigh– because less people talk or care about jazz music in 2010) is one I found myself ceaselessly rebutting back in the bad old days. You know which one: that lazy, anecdotally innacurate and often racist assumption that all jazz artists are (or at least were) heroin addicts. That’s like saying all pro athletes are steroid abusers. Oh wait…
There are several dozen top-tier jazz musicians whose artistic (and personal) lives could be held up as examples any sane person should want to emulate. And while geniuses like Wayne Shorter, Jackie McLean, McCoy Tyner, Max Roach, Henry Threadgill and Sonny Rollins all spring immediately to mind, the one I believe serves as the ultimate example of everything sublime about jazz music is Eric Dolphy. I’ve discussed –and celebrated– the man at length here, as well as here, here and here.
This is an excerpt from my review of Dolphy’s Outward Bound:
It will be difficult to avoid clichés here. In their defense, clichés originate from an authentic place; they are mostly an attempt, at least initially, to articulate something honest and immutable. And so: Eric Dolphy is among the foremost supernovas in all of jazz (Clifford Brown, Booker Little and Lee Morgan—all trumpeters incidentally—also come quickly to mind): he burned very brightly and very briefly, and then he was gone. Speaking of clichés, not a single one of the artists just mentioned—all of whom left us well before their fortieth birthdays—died from a drug overdose. Dolphy, the grand old man of the bunch, passed away at the age of 36, in Europe. How? After lapsing into a diabetic coma. Why? The doctors on duty presumed the black musician who had collapsed in the street was nodding off on a heroin buzz. To attempt to put the magnitude of this loss in perspective, consider that Charles Mingus, perhaps the most difficult and demanding band leader of them all, declared Dolphy a saint, and regarded his death as one of a handful of setbacks he could never completely get over. Dolphy holds the distinction of quite possibly being the one artist nobody has gone on record to say a single negative thing about. His body of work, the bulk of which was recorded during an almost miraculously productive five-year stretch, is deep, challenging, and utterly enjoyable.
One of the paradoxical reasons Dolphy tends to get overlooked, even slighted, is not because of any lack of proficiency, but rather an abundance of it. It does not quite seem possible—particularly for lazier critics and ringleaders amongst the jazz intelligentsia—that such a relatively young musician could master three instruments. In actuality, Dolphy was an exceedingly accomplished alto sax player, drawing freely (pun intended) from Bird while pointing the way toward Braxton. Perhaps most egregiously disregarded is his flute playing, which not only achieves a consistent and uncommon beauty, but more than holds its own against fellow multi-reedists Yusef Lateef and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Nevertheless, it is the signature, unmistakable sounds he makes with the bass clarinet that ensure his place in the pantheon: no one of note, excepting Harry Carney, employed this instrument on the front line before Dolphy and, arguably, no one has used it as effectively and indelibly since…Let there be no doubt that Eric Dolphy warrants mention amongst jazz music’s all-time immortals.
So: a sample of some of Dolphy’s finer moments
1. “Hat And Beard” from Out To Lunch.
This song, the first track from his last proper album, can serve as well as virtually any other composition I can think of to best illustrate what jazz is; what it is capable of conveying. In this song, the primary feeling is ecstasy. The ecstasy of discovery; the ecstasy of shared purpose amongst the musicians (and this is an unbelievable group of masters, including Freddie Hubbard, Tony Williams and Bobby Hutcherson) and the ecstasy of expression. This song’s title is a tribute to Thelonious Monk, but the notes are all Dolphy. Here is his slightly surreal, intentionally off-kilter, totally focused and deeply, darkly beautiful vision fully developed and delivered. This is not the easiest music to absorb, at least initially, but once you “get it”, you stay got.
2. “Come Sunday” from Iron Man.
That Dolphy is able to cover the immortal Duke Ellington so convincingly is remarkable; that he is able to do it so indelibly with only one other musician (Richard Davis) is more than a little miraculous. The sheer volume of feeling in this performance is mind boggling, and life changing. Dolphy’s bass clarinet sings, cries and cajoles. It whispers and it pleads, and then it sighs. By the end, it has exhausted itself; it has said everything there is to say.
3. “Eclipse” from Out There.
Another tribute to another great composer: his friend, mentor and bandmate Charles Mingus. Writing recently about Jimi Hendrix, I observed that “The Wind Cries Mary” captures the feeling of melancholy as well as any song ever has. And it does. But to do similar work without words, as Dolphy does here, is a truly staggering achievement. The mournful cadence of Dolphy’s clarinet here gets right inside you, and the feeling expressed is magnified by Ron Carter’s bowed cello, which weaves in and around, at once among the corners and right within the heart of the song. The sounds these two men achieve are so unusual, so unsettling and (the word has to be used again) so surreal, it almost defies explanation. This is music best categorized as other and the album title, Out There, is more than a little appropriate. Dolphy was indeed “out there” in the sense that most of us are blissful or oblivious inside our little boxes, incapable of hearing, much less expressing, the joyful noises that reside in those most inaccessible spaces: within each of us.
4. “Left Alone” from Far Cry.
So, you might ask, are you really telling me I should want to listen to music that is capable of making me cry?
Yes, I would reply.
And, you might add, why would I want to do such a thing?
It’s simple, I’d say. So that you know you are alive.
5. “Miss Ann” from Last Date.
Eric Dolphy, dead at 36. There is nothing anyone can say that could possibly begin to explain or rationalize that travesty of justice; that affront to life. It is the intolerable enigmas like these that make certain people hope against hope that there is a bigger purpose and plan, a way to measure or quantify this madness. But in the final, human analysis, whatever we lost can never overwhelm all that we received. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It helps that we will always have the gifts the artist left behind. It’s never enough; it’s more than enough.
After the final cut of his final recording, Dolphy offers the following observation: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air…you can never capture it again.”
What he said.
ERIC DOLPHY, 1928-1964
"Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician." – John Coltrane on Eric Dolphy
“When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.” – Eric Dolphy
"I'm leaving to live in Europe. Why? Because if you try to do something new and different in this country (the U.S.) people put you down for it."
THE MUSIC OF ERIC DOLPHY: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. DOLPHY:
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/eric-dolphy-the-complete-prestige-recordings-by-mike-neely.php
Eric Dolphy Turns Eighty
Photo courtesy of Concord Music Group
God Bless The Child
By John Kruth
(August 2008)
Eric Allan Dolphy was born eighty years ago on June 20th 1928. An
only child, of parents of West-Indian heritage, Eric grew up in L.A.. He
loved sports, swimming and tennis in particular. Eric also adored
classical music, the French impressionists, Ravel and Debussy and later
on, Webern, as his tastes expanded. By age seven, Eric began playing the
clarinet, then took up saxophone by the time he turned sixteen. Dolphy
also loved the oboe and his folks, Eric Sr. and Sadie, hoped their son
might one day fill a chair in the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. But
his music teacher, Lloyd Reese led the impressionable teenager down the
primrose path to a life in jazz, crushing Eric's parent's plans of a
more respectable and secure lifestyle for their son.
"Lloyd Reese taught Eric Dolphy; Harry Carney also studied with him
and so did Ben Webster and Buddy Collette, to name a few," Charles
Mingus wrote in the liner notes to his album Let My Children Hear Music.
"Lloyd Reese was a master musician," Mingus said. "He knew jazz and all the fundamentals of music from the beginning. He used to be the first alto player in Les Height's band. And he could play anything."
Shy and introspective as a teenager, Eric spent nearly every waking hour cloistered away in his backyard studio, practicing and studying music. Dolphy fed his voracious musical appetite with everything from field recordings of pygmy yodeling to modern composers like Schoenberg.
Viewing a rare videotape of an interview with Eric Dolphy's parents conducted years ago by Alan Saul, a college student at the time, supplied enormous insight into the multi-instrumentalist's personality and supplied this article with many of the quotes from his folks. There were long awkward silent pauses as Alan, a self-conscious, well-intentioned young hippie, held a legal pad, as he nervously looked over a long list of questions while Dolphy's parents sat on the sofa graciously obliging. Eric Sr. was reserved and thoughtful. He let his wife and his polka dot shirt do most of the talking.
Dolphy's mother Sadie recalled how he got up each morning by five to practice until breakfast and then left for school. After classes, he'd hurry back home again to work on his tone.
"He'd blow one note all day long!" Sadie exclaimed.
"For weeks at a time!" Eric Sr. added. "Then he'd play it and put it on his tape recorder and listen to it. He'd say, "Dad it's got to be right."
I'd say, "It sounds right to me."
But Eric, perfectionist that he was, replied, "No. It's not right yet."
"Sometimes we'd be sleeping and hear him plunking on the piano," Eric Sr. continued. "And I'd say, ‘Hey, what ya doin'?' He'd say, ‘I just got an idea.' And he'd be writing y'know."
"He was gonna be a musician. He wasn't gonna do anything else!" Sadie said.
"He became discouraged when he couldn't get any work. But he kept on working at it because he figured some day, somehow he'd make it."
Like every saxophonist of his generation Eric was heavily inspired by Charlie Parker. Dolphy spent years mastering Bird's technique and concepts, employing them as the foundation for his own imaginative improvisations. Lillian Polen, a close friend of Eric's at this time recalled that Dolphy wholeheartedly "worshipped Bird." She recalled regularly "falling by the Oasis," a small club on Central Avenue in LA to check out Dolphy's band. At the time, Eric worried that people would write him as just another Charlie Parker imitator.
Years later, Eric explained his inspiration for his album title Far Cry: "The title's meaning is that it's a far cry from the impact Bird had when he was alive and his position now. I wrote this to show that I haven't forgotten him or what he's meant to me. But the song also says that as great as he was, he was a far cry from what he could have been. And, finally, it says that I'm a far cry from being able to say all I want in jazz."
Eric came to prominence during a transitional period in jazz. In the evolution of the alto saxophone, his horn bridged the gap between Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman and helped usher be bop into the uncharted realm of the avant-garde or the "New Thing." His unique sense of harmony and jagged melody lines had more in common with the fractured piano of Thelonious Monk than any horn player of his time. His lyrical leaps from one register to the next spanned a broad range of emotion and expression that few musicians then or now have been capable of. Dolphy's vocabulary ranged from a gentle whisper to a full-blown anxiety attack. Like Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Eric also battled the grim existential atmosphere of cold war era with an irrepressible howl.
"To me, jazz is like part of living, like walking down the street and reacting to what you see and hear. And whatever I react to, I can say immediately in my music," he once said.
"It was evident he had his Charlie Parker together, but little did I realize that he would become one of the groundbreakers of the new music of the Sixties," critic Ira Gitler exclaimed after witnessing Dolphy with Chico Hamilton's Quintet at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958.
At the time, Hamilton's group typified West Coast cool. Their soft tasteful chamber jazz, comprised of guitar, cello and woodwinds, was a forerunner to future New Age bands like the Paul Winter Consort and Oregon. In this setting, Dolphy's fiery approach to improvisation was rather risky. At any moment, Eric could suddenly bust Chico's groovy mood wide open with just a few slurs and squawks from his bass clarinet. Critics that just didn't get it heard Eric's joyous squeals as amateurish, shrill and offensive.
Earlier that year Buddy Collette left Chico Hamilton's Quintet, suggesting Eric Dolphy as his replacement. Eric played in the group a short time before re-locating to New York in the autumn of 1959 when he joined forces with his old friend from L.A., the volatile bassist Charles Mingus.
Back in California, Dolphy had been harshly criticized for playing out of tune.
"The public in general wasn't ready for Eric when he was in my band," Hamilton later admitted. Many complained, suggesting that Chico fire him and find someone more suitable to his smooth sound. "But Eric was such an original type player. He had a legitimate background in music to the extent of the classics and he studied with [William] Kincaid. He did everything correct. He was total music," Hamilton said in his former sideman's defense.
Chico believed it a coincidence that Dolphy became a jazz musician in the first place. He felt Eric's exceptional technique and diversity would have allowed him to pursue any style of music he desired, from classical to R&B.
Eric Dolphy arrived in Manhattan at a time when the revolutionary
concepts of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor had turned jazz on its ear.
The term avant-garde no longer belonged exclusively just to painters,
sculptors and experimental musicians with classical backgrounds (read
white Europeans, like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen).
Ornette, in his highly personalized mission to redefine beauty, had
unleashed a strange new theory of music on the world he dubbed
"Harmolodics" (one part harmony/one part motion/one part melody)
although his bleating tone on a white plastic alto sax was considered
anything but beautiful by many. Meanwhile Cecil's scrambled madcap piano
extrapolations were demolishing traditional song structures with a
tremendous force known only to a Stravinsky symphony or an atomic blast.
On April Fools Day, 1960 Eric recorded his first album under his own name in for the New Jazz label. The cover painting for Outward Bound by an artist simply known as "The Prophet" presented a desolate green twilight zone where space and the future met. Dolphy's eyes are shut in deep concentration. Planets glow above his head. The album's title immediately identified him with the likes of Sun Ra, Coleman and Taylor. Now in hindsight, it's clear that Dolphy's musical concepts were far more conventional. His cohort and roommate at the time, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard was certainly no match for the likes of Don Cherry when it came to bending the perimeters of jazz. Once Eric played a solo and stepped back from the microphone, his band sounds ten years behind him. Although the rhythm section provided superb support and propelled the music onward and outward, there's little trace of invention or innovation in their playing.
On April Fools Day, 1960 Eric recorded his first album under his own name in for the New Jazz label. The cover painting for Outward Bound by an artist simply known as "The Prophet" presented a desolate green twilight zone where space and the future met. Dolphy's eyes are shut in deep concentration. Planets glow above his head. The album's title immediately identified him with the likes of Sun Ra, Coleman and Taylor. Now in hindsight, it's clear that Dolphy's musical concepts were far more conventional. His cohort and roommate at the time, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard was certainly no match for the likes of Don Cherry when it came to bending the perimeters of jazz. Once Eric played a solo and stepped back from the microphone, his band sounds ten years behind him. Although the rhythm section provided superb support and propelled the music onward and outward, there's little trace of invention or innovation in their playing.
Dolphy employed traditional song structures as his foundation for expression and exploration while Ornette's approach came straight out of Planet X. The kind of freedom practiced and encouraged by members of Coleman's quartet shook the very foundations of jazz at its core. Unless the listener was willing to approach the complexity of Ornette's music with an unbiased mind and open ears, allowing the sound to wash over them without analysis, they would never grasp its full impact.
Coleman's image as the era's premiere iconoclast may have overshadowed many of his peers but Dolphy's role in the avant-garde was unquestionably integral to its development. One listen to his contribution to such milestone recordings as Coleman's Free Jazz and Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth and John Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard will immediately set the record straight.
For whatever reason, many of Eric's best solos were recorded as a sideman. Free from the pressures of leading his own band, Dolphy may have been able to express himself on a deeper level, embellishing his cohort's compositions with his lyrical and explosive reed work. Or perhaps it was the camaraderie that inspired to reach a little deeper. Yet Dolphy's music stands alone as an entirely valid expression unto itself, with or without his association to Mingus, Coltrane and Coleman.
In 1960, pianist Sy Johnson played a two-week stint with Mingus at
the Showplace in Greenwich Village. According to author Janet Coleman,
Johnson recalled that once a night Mingus would inevitably chase
trumpeter Ted Curson down Fourth Street in a rage. The explosive bassist
also frequently scolded Dolphy to "play with taste."
Eric soon found a fitting, yet temporary position in the Mingus Jazz
Workshop, in a piano-less quartet that Charles led with Ted Curson and
long-time drummer Dannie Richmond. Their rendition of "Stormy Weather"
on The Candid Recordings recorded in the fall of 1960 is a prime example of the group's dynamics, telepathy and imagination.
"He had such a big sound, as big as Charlie Parker's," Mingus claimed. "Inside that sound was great capacity to talk in his music about the most basic feelings. He knew that level of language which very few musicians get down to."
"Near the end of ‘What Love' Mingus and Dolphy (on bass clarinet) have a long and different kind of conversation on their instruments, apparently about Dolphy's intention of quitting the band," Whitney Balliett revealed in Night Creatures. "Eric Dolphy and I were having a conversation about his leaving the band. Mainly it was curse words, except for Eric. Eric didn't curse until the very end of his solo," Mingus joked. "He was absolutely without a need to hurt," Charles explained. The duets at the Five Spot with Mingus playing bass and Dolphy on bass clarinet are among the greatest musical dialogues in the history of the music. "We used to talk to each other, and you could understand – and I mean understand in words – what he was saying to me," Mingus said.
Friction continued to develop between the two and by the end of the 1964 tour Dolphy had grown weary of Mingus' outrageous antics. True to form, Charles lived up to his myth as the mad, sexy genius he was, busting microphones, telephones and doors. He was also arrested for wielding a knife.
"Eric played with Mingus after I did," Composer/multi-instrumentalist David Amram told me in a recent interview. "I played French horn with Mingus in '55. Mingus loved Eric's bass clarinet. Both instruments were unusual in a jazz setting. Mingus could hear these instruments in a different way and adjust his music to what they could do. I was particularly interested in Eric's bass clarinet as I had a part for one in my opera, Twelfth Night. I told him, ‘Some of the registers you're playing on the bass clarinet, I wouldn't dare write because nobody could stay in tune or make it sound good, playing that high.' He said, ‘They should either check me out or practice,' David laughed. "He believed there were no limitations in music, that if you wanted to do it enough, you would find a way. He had a great sense of adventure and daring. He was a true improviser. Remember he had a real foundation in music. There are a lot of free jazz players these days that don't have that kind of background. He could play within the mainstream but he just followed how he felt."
Seldom does a musician's search for a new mode of expression culminate in a riotous response from their audience. The most notorious instance in the twentieth century was Igor Stravinsky's premiere of "Sacre du Printemps" in 1913. A little over fifty years later, Bob Dylan suddenly shed his Woody Guthrie/weary dust bowl bumpkin balladeer guise, put on his black leather jacket and plugged in his Stratocaster at the Newport Folk Festival. The crowd erupted in outrage and anger. In the heat of the moment, the banjo-strumming King of Sing-Along, Pete Seeger was said to have grabbed an ax with the intent of whittling the soundboard into kindling but was thankfully subdued. The folkies felt betrayed by their boy wonder. Before them stood Bob Dylan, like Judas in Beatle boots, defiantly flailing his Fender while crowing, "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm No More!" His message came across loud and clear. He had turned his back on "the cause." Dylan may have sold out to rock and roll as many claimed, but he also happened to be playing some of the best damn music of his career.
With the release of My Favorite Things in the spring of 1961, John Coltrane experienced a wave of popularity unlike anything he'd ever known. With his soaring soprano saxophone, Coltrane transformed Julie Andrews' little ditty from the popular Disney film The Sound of Music into a lilting waltz that was at once romantic, accessible and cool. In the process, Coltrane had unwittingly hipped an entire generation of tweed-clad, flat-topped college kids to jazz. Even girls liked it!
Suddenly reporters from Newsweek scurried down the narrow, red-carpeted stairs of the Village Vanguard to cover the story. But it wasn't long before Rogers and Hammerstein's lovely tune became a vehicle for some of Coltrane's most torrid improvisations.
In no time, the critics attacked Coltrane like a pack of rabid hounds, tearing him apart for blowing half hour solos over a repetitive two-chord vamp. Leonard Feather believed this latest development in John's music was "retrogressive in terms of development in jazz." Feather also complained that Coltrane's endless soloing was monotonous when compared to the lush harmonic complexity of an Ellington arrangement.
"You see, that is another complexity in itself, of playing on 1 or 2 changes." Dolphy countered. Eric actually found it more challenging for a creative musician to play over a sparse framework. The simple repetition laid bare the musician's technique and intent for all to hear. With no place to hide, their shortcomings were certain to become obvious after just a few choruses.
"This automatically gives him more time to think, and it gives him the chance to unfold a lot more. Like in Indian music they only have one [chord], in our Western music we can usually hear one minor chord, but they call it a raga or scale and they'll play for twenty minutes."
Eric understood the rigorous path of discipline and practice that Indian classical musicians must endure to perfect their technique and build a musical vocabulary diverse enough to successfully improvise over a single chord without becoming redundant.
"Music contains like, rhythm and pitch, time, space and all these elements go into improvisation," Dolphy once said. "You have to take that into consideration. It's not a question of running notes, running notes in random."
Eric was deeply inspired by the hypnotic beauty of Indian music, not as a superficial trend but as a form of discipline and expression similar to his own. Years before Beatle George Harrison and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones employed the sitar's exotic twang as a condiment to their catchy pop tunes, Coltrane and Dolphy could be heard improvising within the framework of these scales on John's haunting composition "India."
As fate would have it Eric met the spectacular sitarist Ravi Shankar on his first tour of the U.S. It was a great opportunity for the multi-instrumentalist to learn about ragas, talas and other intricacies of Indian music directly the master of the form.
As Dolphy later explained it: "Classical Indian music is the music of [Indian] people and jazz is the music of the American people, especially the American Negro. Quite naturally, there's something of a connection there, of people expressing themselves in the same way [ancient blues of variable hues]. To the listener that doesn't pay close attention to the notes, the sound will get monotonous. But to the person that listens to the actual notes and the creation that's going on and the building within the players and within themselves, they'll notice that something is actually happening."
In November 1961, Trane toured England bringing Eric Dolphy along to augment his classic quartet. Jazz writer/photographer Val Wilmer believed their performance had "an enormous impact, particularly on local musicians."
Regarding the classic quartet, pianist McCoy Tyner once remarked, "That group was like four pistons in an engine. We were all working together to make the car go." If that was indeed the case, many critics and fans alike looked at the addition of Eric Dolphy as an extraneous fifth wheel.
The reaction in the press to Dolphy joining the group was second only to the Spanish Inquisition. On November 23, Down Beat published a scathing review by John Tynan, who claimed that "melodically and harmonically" the group's collective improvisations sounded like "gobbledygook."
Suddenly John and Eric were perceived as a pair of charlatans, plotting "an anarchistic course," and playing a defiant brand of "anti-jazz" that didn't swing. Both Coltrane and Dolphy were stumped by Tynan's term. Eric found the accusation confusing and absurd. "In fact, it swings so much I don't know what to do – it moves me so much," he replied. "I'd like to know how they explain ‘anti-jazz'. Maybe they can tell us something."
"There are various types of swing," Coltrane theorized. "There's 4/4, with heavy bass drum accents. Then there's the kind of thing that goes on in Count Basie's band. In fact, every group of individuals assembled has a different feeling, a different swing. It's a different feeling than in any other band," John said, regarding his quintet. "It's hard to answer a man who says it doesn't swing."
"It's kind of alarming to the musician when someone has written something bad about what the musician plays but never asks the musician anything about it. At least the musician feels bad. But he doesn't feel so bad that he quits playing," Eric countered. "The critic influences a lot of people. If something new has happened, something nobody knows what the musician's doing, he should ask the musician about it. Because somebody may like it; they might want to know something about it. Sometimes it really hurts, because a musician not only loves his work but depends on it for his living. If somebody writes something bad about musicians, people stay away. Not because the guys don't sound good but because somebody said something that has influence over a lot of people."
See Part II of the Eric Dolphy article
Eric Dolphy Turns Eighty
Photo courtesy of All About Jazz
God Bless The Child, Part II
By John Kruth
An advocate of free jazz, Dolphy was a champion of free speech as well. Ultimately Eric believed that Tynan was entitled to voice his opinion, but he questioned the motivation behind the critic's terse words. Gentle as he was, Eric would not stand by idly while somebody made ignorant comments that were damaging to both his and Coltrane's career.
Meanwhile, Dolphy lived in a lower Manhattan loft with no heat while
the winter snow blew through cracks in the bricks of his humble abode.
The criticism of Coltrane's Quintet continued in Down Beat
with a holy war fervor. Eric Dolphy, Coltrane's controversial cohort,
was blamed of inciting John to abandon his modal melodies and explore
the outer reaches of the avant garde.
John immediately rose to his partner's defense, claiming Eric was a
long time friend and a student of jazz with whom he freely exchanged
ideas. Coltrane recalled the first time that Dolphy sat in with his
group - "Everyone enjoyed it because his presence added some fire to the
band," he said.
According to biographer Bill Cole, Dolphy had an enormous influence
on Coltrane's music. "Trane made very few big musical decisions without
first consulting with him," Cole claimed. "I was always calling him on
the phone and he was calling me and we'd discuss things musically, so we
might as well be together. Maybe we can help each other some. I know he
helps me a lot," Coltrane told Benoit Querson.
"Eric is really gifted and I feel he's going to produce something
inspired," Coltrane predicted in 1961. "We've been talking about music
for years but I don't know where he's going and I don't know where I'm
going. He's interested in progress, however, and so am I, so we have
quite a bit in common."
"Eric was a very, very gifted musician and a very nice guy on top of
it," McCoy Tyner told me in a recent interview. "He had a very personal
approach to playing and enjoyed expanding the limits of imagination.
Eric played so many instruments, his pockets were bulging with all these
mouthpieces," McCoy said chuckling at the memory. "He was the first guy
to come on as a guest with the band. At the time he came along he was
doing his own thing and made a tremendous impression. We felt that the
quartet was self-contained. Jimmy, Elvin and I felt that we had built
something and were still on that journey. We didn't exactly understand
where John was going in terms of adding Eric. We were like little kids
in a sense like this is our band and we want to keep it that way. But
then again it wasn't like we didn't want to share our experience. John
was the leader and he was the one that made the final decisions. He
decided that maybe if I do this, this will cause something else to
happen. And it did! They played so differently. Eric added another
dimension to the sound. John never rested on his laurels. He was like a
scientist in the laboratory always searching for something new or
different. By adding Eric he was expanding the music. John and Eric had a
very different type of life experience. Eric had a very academic
approach. He studied a lot. John coming from the South had that real
gutsy approach. His father was a minister and his grandfather was a
minister. He spent a lot of time in church and you could hear that in
the music. At the same time there were points where the two met and
could make something very interesting happen."
"Eric added a very interesting component to the music," McCoy
continued. "John believed in what Eric was doing. He wanted to help him.
At the same time he wanted to open the music up. It was a very good
experience for Eric as well, being surrounded by the quartet. Ole
was one of the highlights of Eric's presence. He had his own approach
to the bass clarinet. He had personal things he would do on the
instrument and got sounds out of it that you normally didn't hear on a
bass clarinet. He was very animated and very enthusiastic."
Augmenting the Coltrane Quartet at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1961
was Eric Dolphy and guitar great Wes Montgomery for an hour long set
which consisted of just three tunes, "My Favorite Things," Coltrane's
transcendent ballad "Naima" and Miles Davis's "So What." The subsequent
review in Down Beat offered praise to Montgomery's "rhythmic flair"
while knocking John for making "animal sounds."
Once again it was open season on Eric Dolphy. "While his flute work
was generally good, part of his solo sounded as if he were trying to
imitate birds. His use of quartertone on ‘Things' led nowhere. And this
seemed his greatest hang-up; none of his solos had a clear direction."
The idea of Dolphy enhancing "My Favorite Things" with bird songs on
his flute, or in Coltrane's case, creating "animal sounds" on his
soprano saxophone seems more playful than something to get bent out of
shape about, after all the song's lyric mentions bees, kittens and dogs!
"Eric told me that one morning that when he got up, the birds were
singing outside his window and he said, ‘Oh!' and that became part of
his music," journalist Nat Hentoff said in a recent phone interview.
"This musician embodied what I call the life-force of jazz. You could
feel the intensity of his need to express himself in everything he did.
But it was always himself. He was one of the true originals in the
field."
The basis for Dolphy's approach to improvisation rarely relied on
the song's chord progression alone. "They're based on freedom of sound.
You start with one line and you keep inventing as you go along. And you
keep creating until you state a phrase," he explained to Leonard
Feather.
"You use other notes in the chord to give you certain expressions to the song, otherwise you'd be playing what everybody else is playin'. The thing only happens at the moment when you do it, and quite naturally it might change," Eric said, hoping to shed some light on the elusive process of improvisation.
When Eric Dolphy moved to Manhattan in 1960, he first joined the Mingus Workshop, then later that same year he began playing with Ornette Coleman.
"I heard about him and when I heard him play, he asked me if I liked
his pieces and I said I thought they sounded good," Eric told Martin
Williams. "When he said that if someone played a chord, [he said] he
heard another chord on that one. I knew what he was talking about,
because I had been thinking the same things."
Dolphy soon signed on as a member of Coleman's double quartet, which
featured two drummers, two bassists, two trumpets and Dolphy and Ornette
on reeds and yielded the watermark recording Free Jazz.
"I had known Eric back in the fifties when I shared some music that I
had been working on with him," Ornette Coleman told me recently. "He
was very open to the things that I was doing. I think that he thought I
was not in his class of perfection because I had just come to California
from the South. But it didn't bother me. There was an appreciation from
one musician to another. I invited him to play on my Free Jazz
record and he asked me, ‘Which instrument would you like for me to
play?' I said, ‘It doesn't matter. I wasn't concerned about him being
the worst or best or whatever. I was concerned about him expressing the
things he wanted to."
In retrospect, it's surprising that Coleman's music caused such a maelstrom. Many of his compositions have an almost child-like, singsong quality while others reveal a West-Indian calypso feel. His drummers, Eddie Blackwell and Billy Higgins always swung hard. In his unorthodox approach to group soloing, which had its roots in traditional New Orleans music, Ornette would forge a fresh, new, dimension of sound. No matter how radical his concept of Harmolodics, Coleman never completely abandoned changes that chords (if they had been employed) inferred.
"You CAN play every note you like," Dolphy told Leonard Feather, in a desperate attempt to convey the essence of the new music. "Of course, you can only play what you can hear, and quite naturally... more or less I guess what I hear is not your hearing."
"As I play more and more, I hear more notes to play against the more
common chord progressions. And a lot of people say they're wrong. Well, I
can't say they're right, and I can't say they're wrong. To my hearing,
they're exactly correct," Eric mused.
It seems that Dolphy was simultaneously cursed and blessed with, as
he put it "a whole different type of hearing." Ultimately it was Eric's
refreshingly open and inquisitive nature to life and sound that allowed
him to utilize a wider range of expression than many of his peers.
"Eric Dolphy is a hell of a musician, and he plays a lot of horn.
When he is up there searching and experimenting I learn a lot from him,"
John Coltrane commented.
"He was just brimming over with ideas all the time," Elvin Jones
said. "In fact that was probably his biggest problem… he just had too
much to say, and this occasionally would get in the way of his saying
it."
Jones felt Dolphy lacked the "self discipline" needed to express all
his ideas clearly. Although the last time Eric played with Coltrane's
group Elvin felt Dolphy "was better organized in his musical thinking."
Jones also admired Eric's confidence on the bandstand, claiming he
"never heard him hesitate" in the heat of the moment. "He was always
ready – if you wanted to play, he was there," Elvin declared.
"Eric never stood still with his music," George Avakian once said. The
pianist/producer believed one day Dolphy would get his props as "the
father of the new thing."
"He was very influential in the avant-garde movement," close friend,
bassist Richard Davis said in a phone interview. "He was one of the
forerunners in that area. I was fortunate to work with him," Richard
said, claiming that Eric was a major inspiration on his musical
development.
"I rate him as a genius. I knew what was inside his music; I was
familiar with it and how he put it together." Davis believed that
whether or not people understood Dolphy's music they could still
"appreciate the tremendous feeling in his playing."
Their interpretation of "Come Sunday," Duke Ellington's wistful
ballad was their finest of many duets. Notes from Dolphy's bass clarinet
sputter and bubble up like black tar on a hot July afternoon while
Davis serenely bows the melody. Eric's clarinet suddenly leaps registers
in a single bound, reeling and collapsing like Ray Bolger's weak in the
knee scarecrow until finally catching up to Richard and taking over the
melody, allowing Davis to stretch out.
On classic recordings like Dolphy's own Iron Man and Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth,
Eric's alto sax can be heard zigzagging like a crazy figure skater,
carving figure eights into your brain. Sound splashes and sloshes around
in your ears like Jackson Pollock spilling his drink. Perhaps to some
Dolphy's playing comes off as a bit of sonic slapstick at times, but he
knows how take it right to the edge, like a carnival clown riding a
unicycle on a tight-rope wire who appears out of control. But just
before falling to his certain death, he suddenly regains his balance,
much to the crowd's relief. If you think for a moment that Eric Dolphy
is lost, the joke is on you. His intent was to stretch musical
boundaries, not to deliberately shatter them.
"Eric was, first and foremost a person who respected the tradition
and wanted to extend the tradition or extend the creativity in
accordance with the most positive aspects of what he brought forth from
the tradition," Anthony Braxton once said.
"Many musicians did not understand Eric and were critical of his
work," Third Stream composer Gunther Schuller claimed. "I could never
understand, for example, how perfectly respectable musicians could say
that Eric didn't know his changes," Schuller said, sighting Dolphy's
inspired soloing on the Mingus arrangement of "Stormy Weather."
"I play notes that would not ordinarily said to be in a given key,
but I hear them as proper. I don't think I ‘leave the changes' as the
expression goes; every note I play has some reference to the chords of
the piece," Eric offered.
In a Down Beat Blindfold Test, Miles Davis once famously quipped that Dolphy sounded "like somebody was standing on his foot."
Avant-garde guitarist/reedman/composer Elliott Sharp had a different
response altogether. "It was pure mystery. When I heard Dolphy's bass
clarinet playing, it was like a voice from Mars. It was so vocal. It was
like he was speaking in tongues," Sharp told me. "I knew I had to get
one at some point."
Surprisingly, the daddy of dada rock Captain Beefheart (a neophyte at
best on the bass clarinet) found Eric's music "real limited." "It
didn't move me," he complained to Lester Bangs years ago in Musician magazine.
"Dolphy didn't MOVE you?" Bangs replied incredulously. "Well he moved
me," Beefheart allowed, "but he didn't move me as much as a goose, say.
Now that could be a hero, a gander goose could definitely be a hero,
the way they blow their heart out for nothing like that."
"Like any mature, creative musician, Eric was not unduly disturbed by
such comments," Gunther Schuller countered. "It was his nature to turn
everything – even harsh criticism – to some positive, useful purpose. In
the seven or eight years I knew Eric, I never heard him say a harsh
word about anything or anybody connected with music. This was a sacred
territory to him and I think he sincerely believed that anything as
beautiful as music could only produce more beauty in people."
"He was always real modest," his mother Sadie recalled. "We never
realized either how well thought of he was. He was always a happy
person. Even if things weren't going well you'd never notice. He was
always happy and always helping someone else, even though he didn't have
too much money. He'd always be takin' somethin' to somebody else, some
musician, if they were out of work. When musicians came to town and he
found out they had a family he would give them his job. He'd take them
to the job sometimes because he always had a car. He'd tell them, ‘you
have kids while I live at home where I can always eat.'"
Tales of Eric Dolphy's gentle, compassionate nature are almost as
legendary as his musicianship. Richard Davis remembered Eric as "a
beautiful person." "Even when he didn't have enough for himself, he'd
try to help others," he said, recalling Eric's generosity and concern
for others. "I remember how he once bought groceries for a friend who
was out of work, though he was just as much in need himself."
Mingus simply referred to Eric as "a saint," and named his son the singer, Eric Dolphy Mingus in his honor.
In the spring of 1964, Dolphy left Mingus' band while on a tour of Europe and planned to live in Paris where quite a number of expatriate musicians found themselves welcome with open arms. But that June, Dolphy suddenly died due to complications from diabetes. Two months earlier Mingus had composed and recorded a blues entitled "So Long Eric" which he maintained was not a "eulogy" but a "complaint."
Eric Dolphy died in Berlin, on June 29, 1964 just nine days after his
thirty-sixth birthday. He'd arrived two days earlier to play a new club
called the Tangente. Seriously ill, he barely made it through the first
two of the evening's three scheduled sets before having to leave the
bandstand. The next day, wracked with pain and delirious, Eric could
barely utter the words "Take me home… Take me home..."
The next day Eric Allan Dolphy got his hat. According to doctors at
Berlin Achenbach, Hospital the brilliant multi-instrumentalist was a
diabetic with too much sugar in his bloodstream. They claimed that Eric
was unaware of his condition. He had also suffered a complete collapse
of his circulatory system as well.
Sadie Dolphy said her son never suffered from heart disease or
diabetes. "He never complained about anything," she lamented. Mrs.
Dolphy believed her son died so young as a result of always pushing
himself too hard. The funeral took place on July 9, in Los Angeles.
"Whatever I say would be an understatement. I can only say my life
was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people
I've ever known, as a man, a friend, an as a musician," a shocked John
Coltrane murmured after hearing the news of his friend's death.
"So close was their relationship that Dolphy's mother gave Trane
Eric's bass clarinet because she claims that she had nightmares about
Eric playing the instruments," Bill Cole recalled in his biography of
John Coltrane.
Mingus and Eric's relationship was of a far more complex nature.
"There was not a lot of conversation; at times it seemed as though
Charles disliked him but at the same time it was also the feeling that
he loved him dearly," Danny Richmond surmised. "And there were times
when they dueled musically with each other on the bandstand. So that
Eric's death I know it affected Charles very, very deeply. I have a
feeling that there was something left unsaid between the two of them."
Mingus maintained that Dolphy had been murdered. Charles recalled
that a Manhattan physician named Finklestein had given Eric a thorough
check-up and a clean bill of health before leaving on their tour of
Europe. Before departing Eric had undergone an operation to remove the
egg-shaped tumor from his forehead. "This would not have been done if
Eric had been a diabetic," Mingus protested.
At the time, drummer Sunny Murray had also been touring Europe with
saxophonist Albert Ayler, playing their unique brand of spiritual free
jazz in an explosive quartet featuring bassist Gary Peacock and Don
Cherry.
"See I was getting strange vibrations all the time we was in Europe,"
Murray said. "We were getting very in tune with the spirits when the
Free Jazz group was over there – we were the most spiritual band in
Europe at the time. Eric Dolphy, who had come over earlier with Mingus
had remained in Europe to play with us, with the Free Jazz group. He
wanted to bust loose and really play free. But he died suddenly. Rumor
was that he was poisoned. That set me off and I began to realize that a
lot of people were doing things to me to hang me up and I started to get
very nervous."
As we know, the sixties was a politically volatile era. Everywhere,
the air was rife with revolution and conspiracy. It has been said time
and time again of that highly romanticized decade - if you weren't
paranoid, you weren't paying attention.
Eventually, Coltrane and Dolphy's devotion to music developed into a
relentless quest to find God. They began living on a steady diet of
honey, and conversation was reserved for all things holy.
"Eric Dolphy died from an over dose of honey," arranger/band leader
Gil Evans believed. "Everybody thinks that he died from an overdose of
dope but he was on a health kick. He got instant diabetes. He didn't
know he had it. He's eating nuts and a couple little jars of honey every
day [and] it killed him. He went into a coma and never came out of it."
At the end of Alan Saul's video, he sits on Dolphy's sofa asking if they ever feel bitter about the way things all went down.
"He wasn't that big," Eric Sr. lamented. "Just before he died he was
just getting up; just coming into his own, but he passed away."
"No... No..." Sadie answered with a sigh. "It could have been better
but life is a struggle and we are people that are used to strugglin'."
December 28, 2008
Out There: The Music of Eric Dolphy
'When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.'
--Eric Dolphy
I first encountered Eric Dolphy's name on the cover of his most famous solo album, Out to Lunch (Blue
Note). I've seen it in a thousand jazz bargain bins, and it surfaces
time and again in the classic all-time lists. It took me awhile to get
my head around Dolphy's playing, whether it was the flute, the clarinet
or the alto saxophone: his approach often sounded more like a
cacophonous noise than an attempt to play, and the lack of coherency was
something that completely turned me off. In some ways, I associated his
playing with the spoofs and potshots often attributed to avant garde
jazz: the image of the jazz musician as pretentious and aloof, making a
ridiculous noise and calling it art.
So I put Out to Lunch to
one side for awhile, and instead settled for more traditional jazz
music. I have always been a great fan of Charles Mingus, not simply for
his mastery of the double-bass but for his big, brash compositions -
filled with an energy and a power that was invigorating for my walk home
from work. I listened to Blues and Roots and Mingus Ah Um during this period, before extending myself toward some of the live recordings. Mingus at Antibes came
at the top of this particular list, and I found myself playing it on my
iPod every time I left the house. It was the perfect music for
footsteps, and for a sense of gathering momentum.
Mingus is the master of powerful build-ups, and Mingus At Antibes includes
some of his greatest works. But what makes them so precious is the fact
that they are live life recordings: they are at times sloppy and
disorganized, but the momentum carries each tune forward to its climax,
and it's all completely captivating. There's a lust for life in this
music that's difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. And in all
honesty, I think that Charles Mingus was one of the key figures that
drew me toward jazz music. The bass got you hooked, and the music
carried you away. I can't even count the number of times I've listened
to Mingus while walking down a busy city street, a beaming smile all
over my face. It's joyous stuff.
It was at this point that I discovered Eric Dolphy all over
again, as an alto saxophonist in Mingus's band. There are seconds where
the tumultuous storm of the music, or the swelling of the melody, falls
into silence, and Dolphy takes over. The sound, or tone, of the
instrument is so clear and unique, that you begin to hear it in other
recordings as distinct and unique to Dolphy himself. Suddenly I could
recognize him in a crowd: no one else plays like that.
But it wasn't just the sound of the instrument that stuck with me,
but the notes he played. Eric Dolphy's approach would take something
from the overall narrative of a given piece, and then blast off with
something that was absolutely his own. This could mean a repetition of a
main theme, or notes played in harmony with the rhythm, but at its apex
it would dart and blast and resist all of these things at once. The
music would suddenly take off in a saxophone solo that sounded
simultaneously catchy and avant garde, although there was no longer a
tune to be heard or grappled with. Eric Dolphy's solo would reduce each
recording to a series of super-fast squeaks and squawks and crazy
hell-bent yelps. But, by some miracle, you could tap your foot to it.
I started to hear some kind of logic in Dolphy's music from
that point onwards. He fitted perfectly into the Mingus ensemble, and
managed to bring something new to the table without detracting from the
talent that was around him: they worked together seamlessly, in a way
that added finesse and excitement and drama to the music. It gave each
track the sense that it really was performed live and in the moment, and
this has a captivating effect on the listener.
So I began to trace some of Eric Dolphy's solo work, from Out to Lunch to Outward Bound and Out There.
A pattern begins to emerge, that self-consciously separates Dolphy from
his time and place in the history of jazz: he continually positions
himself outside of traditional, conventional musical standards and finds
his niche in the exterior of avant garde music. This was the way many
listeners identified with his work in the early 1960s, as his records
were released, alongside other 'out there' musicians like alto
saxophonist Ornette Coleman. But there is a little more tradition, and a
little more coherence, than the album covers would have you believe.
One of the tracks that always gets me is a flute piece on Outward Bound called
'Glad to be Unhappy'. It's a simple melody with a slow bass
accompaniment, and a quiet piano playing softly in the background. The
tune is driven by Dolphy's flute-playing, and superbly evokes the title
with a sense of wallowing and melancholy. There is a lyrical
improvisation halfway through the track, which wonderfully captures the
paradoxical sense of happiness that a depressed state can bring, before
recounting the original melody and tone at the end. It's perfect
night-listening, and I never tire of it.
Rather than adopting a strictly 'out to lunch' style, leaping
out into the dark of chaotic, frenetic free jazz 'noise', Eric Dolphy
achieves a welcome balance between rhythm, melody, and the occasional
offshoot into bewildering mess. But, when I call it a mess, I don't mean
it in a dismissive way (believe it or not). Dolphy's gift is in finding
harmony between the harmonious and the disharmonious, and running with
it, with compositions that feel like they have a logic and a rationale
all of their own. And the result gives off the most fantastic feeling.
Each recording is blistering with invention and virtuosity, while
retaining the sense of atmosphere and resonance that all those great
1950s records had to offer.
While on a European tour in 1964, Dolphy suddenly collapsed,
and later died in a diabetic coma. A tragic event, occurring just as
recognition and success was beginning to dawn. He had featured on a
number of records by Charles Mingus, by this time a close personal
friend, and had worked on Andrew Hill's Point of Departure.
He was also familiar with musicians like Bobby Hutcherson and Herbie
Hancock, who were not only influenced by Dolphy's work but later became
great in their own right.
For those interested in exploring some of Eric Dolphy's music, AllAboutJazz offers its own biography of the virtuoso, alongside reviews and retrospectives of his work. You can view their profile of Dolphy by clicking here.
Topics:
Blue Note,
Charles Mingus,
Eric Dolphy,
Jazz,
Music
http://stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=1051
A TRIBUTE TO ERIC DOLPHY (1928–1964)
Reflections on the virtuoso reedman, from his formative days in Los Angeles to his last date in Berlin
http://stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=1051
BOBBY HUTCHERSON on Eric Dolphy
Highlights from Issue 34: Jazz
PHOTOGRAPHY by FRANCIS WOLFF
MOSAIC IMAGES
Monday, May 05, 2008
A TRIBUTE TO ERIC DOLPHY (1928–1964)
Reflections on the virtuoso reedman, from his formative days in Los Angeles to his last date in Berlin
Also featured in the Jazz Issue, comments on Eric Dolphy from Bobby Hutcherson, Sonny Rollins, Ted Curson, Peter Brotzmann, Gary Giddins, Ira Gitler and more
Click here to read an interview about Dolphy with Richard Davis
BOBBY HUTCHERSON
Vibraphonist, performed on Out to Lunch
I’m rehearsing with Eric at his loft — myself, Tony Williams, Richard Davis and a trumpet player named Eddie Armour. We were rehearsing for about an hour and a half. It was a cold winter day. All of a sudden, right in the middle of the tune, the trumpet player, Eddie, starts cussing and packing up his horn. We get to the end of the tune and Eddie says to Eric, “You’re nasty.” And Eric was real sweet, just like Trane was — you know, a real sweet cat. Eric said, “What?” Eddie says, “I don’t like you, I don’t like your music, and I’m not going to play this gig. I’m out of here. F you. F this band. That’s it. How do you like that?”
We’re all standing there thinking, “My God, how can this cat say this?” And he continues to put his horn away, clip the fasteners on his trumpet case. He grabs his coat, pulls his hat down and goes stomping to the door. He gets to the door — I mean, just yanks it open. The door hits the wall. Bam! He’s just about to go out the door.
Eric had just been sitting there with his head down. We’re all thinking, “Eric must feel horrible. What’s he going to do?” All of a sudden, Eric says, “Hey, Eddie.” Eddie turns around and says [in growling voice] “What?” Eric, with the most conviction and love, says, “If I can ever do anything you need, please don’t hesitate to call me. I’ll be there for you anytime.”
Whoa! And Eric was serious. With that, this cat really got upset — he slammed the door and stormed out. We just stood there all quiet. It was like he Sunday punched him with love. The lesson was, “Love conquers all,” you know? It’s like the devil couldn’t take that love, and this is what Eric was showing him. He went out that door with so much hate, but with a message that Eric still cared about him. This was one of the biggest lessons Eric showed me — that if you can forgive somebody right when they do the most horrible thing they can to you, you just immediately take the weight of what they did off your back and just make it this beautiful experience, so that you can go on and do the things you want to do during the day and not waste time with negative feelings and negative thoughts.
Well, we sat there quiet for two or three minutes — didn’t say anything. Then we went on with rehearsal and we never played so hard in our lives. We were just overcome. Then Eric called Freddie Hubbard, and that’s when we did Out to Lunch.
A TRIBUTE TO ERIC DOLPHY (1928–1964)
Reflections on the virtuoso reedman, from his formative days in Los Angeles to his last date in Berlin
Also featured in the Jazz Issue, comments on Eric Dolphy from Bobby Hutcherson, Sonny Rollins, Ted Curson, Peter Brotzmann, Gary Giddins, Ira Gitler and more
RICHARD DAVIS
Bassist, performed on Out to Lunch
and Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2
For more on Richard Davis, visit his website
Stop Smiling: When did you and Eric first meet?
Richard Davis: New York, 1961.
SS: You recorded some duets with Eric, including “Ode to CP” and “Come Sunday.” Can you talk about playing with Eric one-on-one?
RD: It was a delightful experience. Eric had a lot of ideas that I needed to hear — ideas that I was, in a sense, wanting to hear, because my ear was going in that same direction.
Eric had a very even temperament. He was angelic. It’s hard to say much about Eric that isn’t close to him being an angel. He had a way about him — he was just a sweet guy. Most people would say that about him. When I met his mother and father, I could see that they must have raised him that way. They were angelic types, too. I don’t think Eric worried about things that much. He would give money to people who didn’t have any — musicians would come to town and he’d give them money. Eric was an unusual guy. You could take him groceries sometimes. Somebody told me he gave other musicians his gigs. They’d come to town and he’d give them the gig.
Eric was an exceptional human being. We had the same car — he had a Volkswagen, I had a Karmann Ghia — and I said, “I can’t get this tire changed. It’s flat.” He was instructing me with what to do. Within two minutes he said, “I’ll be right there.” He lived 40 minutes from me. He came out there and changed that tire, man. He was that kind of guy — all giving.
SS: When you met his parents, was that in California?
RD: Yeah. I told Eric I was going out there. He gave me his mother’s address and told me to say hello. He called his mother, Sadie. He had a garage out there, which had been converted into a practice studio. I was in that studio and his mother would make me a glass of lemonade from a big lemon tree.
SS: Did Eric speak with you about his interest in birds and how he tried to replicate the sounds of birds in his music?
RD: No, Eric didn’t talk to me much about that. Eric talked to me mostly about encouraging me to use my bow more.
SS: When you would spend time together in New York, what were some of the things Eric enjoyed doing other than playing?
RD: Cooking swordfish steak. It was the first I’d ever heard of a swordfish steak. He went out to the neighborhood fish market, bought it and cooked it.
SS: When you two played together in New York and wanted to go out and celebrate after a great show, what kinds of things would Eric like to do?
RD: I think Eric would probably go hear some other musicians. We used to go hear Cecil Taylor a lot because he was working in the same neighborhood we were in, the Village. Eric was not a partygoer — he would go and hear other musicians.
SS: Did Eric like New York City?
RD: I never heard him say anything against New York City.
SS: How about yourself, did you take to it?
RD: I had no problems. I lived there for 23 years, from 1954 to 1977. I liked it because it was a place where everything could happen in music. One day I’m working in a sawdust, gutbucket place, the next day I’m working with Igor Stravinsky. It all rolled there.
SS: When Eric went to play overseas, did you stay in touch?
RD: I never traveled with Eric. I remember seeing him off when he went on that trip. I was working at Radio City Music Hall, and I went to say goodbye to him. I had no idea that would be the last time I’d see him.
SS: Do you remember what you talked about?
RD: I was a very busy studio musician, and Eric was beginning to get a lot of work recording. He said, “I’m getting like you now. I’ll have to get a date book.” I remember giving him a watch as a going-away present. And that was it. Next thing I know, Charles Lloyd called me. Charles thought I knew Eric had died. He was calling to give me condolences, because he knew how tight Eric and I were. That was the first I’d heard of it. But then I called Eric’s father, because I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t say to his father, “Is Eric dead?” I just asked him how he was. He said, “My boy is gone.” Then I knew Eric was gone.
Eric’s girlfriend was with him in New York at some of those gigs. She said he was playing more than she’d ever heard him play, and she heard him a lot. She said he was trying to get it all out.
Click here to read an interview about Dolphy with Richard Davis
BOBBY HUTCHERSON
Vibraphonist, performed on Out to Lunch
I’m rehearsing with Eric at his loft — myself, Tony Williams, Richard Davis and a trumpet player named Eddie Armour. We were rehearsing for about an hour and a half. It was a cold winter day. All of a sudden, right in the middle of the tune, the trumpet player, Eddie, starts cussing and packing up his horn. We get to the end of the tune and Eddie says to Eric, “You’re nasty.” And Eric was real sweet, just like Trane was — you know, a real sweet cat. Eric said, “What?” Eddie says, “I don’t like you, I don’t like your music, and I’m not going to play this gig. I’m out of here. F you. F this band. That’s it. How do you like that?”
We’re all standing there thinking, “My God, how can this cat say this?” And he continues to put his horn away, clip the fasteners on his trumpet case. He grabs his coat, pulls his hat down and goes stomping to the door. He gets to the door — I mean, just yanks it open. The door hits the wall. Bam! He’s just about to go out the door.
Eric had just been sitting there with his head down. We’re all thinking, “Eric must feel horrible. What’s he going to do?” All of a sudden, Eric says, “Hey, Eddie.” Eddie turns around and says [in growling voice] “What?” Eric, with the most conviction and love, says, “If I can ever do anything you need, please don’t hesitate to call me. I’ll be there for you anytime.”
Whoa! And Eric was serious. With that, this cat really got upset — he slammed the door and stormed out. We just stood there all quiet. It was like he Sunday punched him with love. The lesson was, “Love conquers all,” you know? It’s like the devil couldn’t take that love, and this is what Eric was showing him. He went out that door with so much hate, but with a message that Eric still cared about him. This was one of the biggest lessons Eric showed me — that if you can forgive somebody right when they do the most horrible thing they can to you, you just immediately take the weight of what they did off your back and just make it this beautiful experience, so that you can go on and do the things you want to do during the day and not waste time with negative feelings and negative thoughts.
Well, we sat there quiet for two or three minutes — didn’t say anything. Then we went on with rehearsal and we never played so hard in our lives. We were just overcome. Then Eric called Freddie Hubbard, and that’s when we did Out to Lunch.
RICHARD DAVIS on Eric Dolphy
Highlights from Issue 34: Jazz
Photography by FRANCIS WOLFF
MOSAIC IMAGES
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Reflections on the virtuoso reedman, from his formative days in Los Angeles to his last date in Berlin
Also featured in the Jazz Issue, comments on Eric Dolphy from Bobby Hutcherson, Sonny Rollins, Ted Curson, Peter Brotzmann, Gary Giddins, Ira Gitler and more
RICHARD DAVIS
Bassist, performed on Out to Lunch
and Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2
For more on Richard Davis, visit his website
Stop Smiling: When did you and Eric first meet?
Richard Davis: New York, 1961.
SS: You recorded some duets with Eric, including “Ode to CP” and “Come Sunday.” Can you talk about playing with Eric one-on-one?
RD: It was a delightful experience. Eric had a lot of ideas that I needed to hear — ideas that I was, in a sense, wanting to hear, because my ear was going in that same direction.
Eric had a very even temperament. He was angelic. It’s hard to say much about Eric that isn’t close to him being an angel. He had a way about him — he was just a sweet guy. Most people would say that about him. When I met his mother and father, I could see that they must have raised him that way. They were angelic types, too. I don’t think Eric worried about things that much. He would give money to people who didn’t have any — musicians would come to town and he’d give them money. Eric was an unusual guy. You could take him groceries sometimes. Somebody told me he gave other musicians his gigs. They’d come to town and he’d give them the gig.
Eric was an exceptional human being. We had the same car — he had a Volkswagen, I had a Karmann Ghia — and I said, “I can’t get this tire changed. It’s flat.” He was instructing me with what to do. Within two minutes he said, “I’ll be right there.” He lived 40 minutes from me. He came out there and changed that tire, man. He was that kind of guy — all giving.
SS: When you met his parents, was that in California?
RD: Yeah. I told Eric I was going out there. He gave me his mother’s address and told me to say hello. He called his mother, Sadie. He had a garage out there, which had been converted into a practice studio. I was in that studio and his mother would make me a glass of lemonade from a big lemon tree.
SS: Did Eric speak with you about his interest in birds and how he tried to replicate the sounds of birds in his music?
RD: No, Eric didn’t talk to me much about that. Eric talked to me mostly about encouraging me to use my bow more.
SS: When you would spend time together in New York, what were some of the things Eric enjoyed doing other than playing?
RD: Cooking swordfish steak. It was the first I’d ever heard of a swordfish steak. He went out to the neighborhood fish market, bought it and cooked it.
SS: When you two played together in New York and wanted to go out and celebrate after a great show, what kinds of things would Eric like to do?
RD: I think Eric would probably go hear some other musicians. We used to go hear Cecil Taylor a lot because he was working in the same neighborhood we were in, the Village. Eric was not a partygoer — he would go and hear other musicians.
SS: Did Eric like New York City?
RD: I never heard him say anything against New York City.
SS: How about yourself, did you take to it?
RD: I had no problems. I lived there for 23 years, from 1954 to 1977. I liked it because it was a place where everything could happen in music. One day I’m working in a sawdust, gutbucket place, the next day I’m working with Igor Stravinsky. It all rolled there.
SS: When Eric went to play overseas, did you stay in touch?
RD: I never traveled with Eric. I remember seeing him off when he went on that trip. I was working at Radio City Music Hall, and I went to say goodbye to him. I had no idea that would be the last time I’d see him.
SS: Do you remember what you talked about?
RD: I was a very busy studio musician, and Eric was beginning to get a lot of work recording. He said, “I’m getting like you now. I’ll have to get a date book.” I remember giving him a watch as a going-away present. And that was it. Next thing I know, Charles Lloyd called me. Charles thought I knew Eric had died. He was calling to give me condolences, because he knew how tight Eric and I were. That was the first I’d heard of it. But then I called Eric’s father, because I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t say to his father, “Is Eric dead?” I just asked him how he was. He said, “My boy is gone.” Then I knew Eric was gone.
Eric’s girlfriend was with him in New York at some of those gigs. She said he was playing more than she’d ever heard him play, and she heard him a lot. She said he was trying to get it all out.
It will be difficult to avoid clichés here. In their defense, clichés originate from an authentic place; they are mostly an attempt, at least initially, to articulate something honest and immutable. And so: Eric Dolphy is among the foremost supernovas in all of jazz (Clifford Brown, Booker Little and Lee Morgan—all trumpeters incidentally—also come quickly to mind): he burned very brightly and very briefly, and then he was gone. Speaking of clichés, not a single one of the artists just mentioned—all of whom left us well before their fortieth birthdays—died from a drug overdose. Dolphy, the grand old man of the bunch, passed away at the age of 36, in Europe. How? After lapsing into a diabetic coma. Why? The doctors on duty presumed the black musician who had collapsed in the street was nodding off on a heroin buzz. To attempt to put the magnitude of this loss in perspective, consider that Charles Mingus, perhaps the most difficult and demanding band leader of them all, declared Dolphy a saint, and regarded his death as one of a handful of setbacks he could never completely get over. Dolphy holds the distinction of quite possibly being the one artist nobody has gone on record to say a single negative thing about. His body of work, the bulk of which was recorded during an almost miraculously productive five-year stretch, is deep, challenging, and utterly enjoyable. Outward Bound, then, holds a special place as his debut recording as a leader.
Dolphy often draws comparisons to Ornette Coleman, another avatar of
the free jazz movement. Not surprisingly, the two were friendly and
obviously saw, in one another, a reflection of the intensely sensitive
and eccentric misfit. But where Coleman sought to recreate the temple by
first razing its very foundation, Dolphy constructed his singular
edifice in accordance with a vision rooted on firm and familiar ground:
the bebop innovations of Charlie Parker (who, fittingly, was initially
ostracized by many of the mere mortals who still believed the jazz world
was flat). Suffice it to say, like any artist who helps redefine the
rules by recreating them, Dolphy had to first master the idiom before
daring to transcend it. Although already intelligent and advanced beyond
his years, he was 31 at the time of this recording, making him somewhat
of a late bloomer by typical jazz icon standards (young hotshot Freddie
Hubbard, for instance, was only 21 on this session). Point being,
Dolphy served his apprenticeship wisely, and his incalculable hours in
the woodshed left the sawdust offstage and off record, so that when his
time finally came, it was on.
One of the paradoxical reasons Dolphy tends to get overlooked, even
slighted, is not because of any lack of proficiency, but rather an
abundance of it. It does not quite seem possible—particularly for lazier
critics and ringleaders amongst the jazz intelligentsia—that such a
relatively young musician could master three instruments. In actuality,
Dolphy was an exceedingly accomplished alto sax player, drawing freely
(pun intended) from Bird while pointing the way toward Braxton. Perhaps
most egregiously disregarded is his flute playing, which not only
achieves a consistent and uncommon beauty, but more than holds its own
against fellow multi-reedists Yusef Lateef and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
Nevertheless, it is the signature, unmistakable sounds he makes with the
bass clarinet that ensure his place in the pantheon: no one of note,
excepting Harry Carney, employed this instrument on the front line
before Dolphy and, arguably, no one has used it as effectively and
indelibly since.
Outward Bound, aside from its import as Dolphy’s inaugural
session as a leader, assembles what could accurately—if unfairly—be
described as one of jazz music’s all-time second tier collectives.
Whenever discussions of the unrivaled masters occur (whatever those
types of discussions are worth), none of these players make the first
cut: you hear about Monk and Ellington and Tatum and maybe Hancock (for
starters) before you ever hear about Jaki Byard; you hear about
Armstrong, Miles, and Clifford Brown before you hear about Freddie
Hubbard; you hear about Max Roach, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, and Tony
Williams before you eventually get around to Roy Haynes; you don’t hear
much of anything about George Tucker (and this is unfortunate); and you
hear about Parker, Coltrane, Rollins, and maybe a half-dozen legitimate
heavyweight contenders before most folks might happen to mention Eric
Dolphy. All of which is to say that this session brings together a
handful of the finest musicians who ever played their respective
instruments, and it’s more than a little coincidental that, when put in
the same environment with a common purpose, there was an affinity and
extra edge they conjured up, seemingly out of nowhere.
The tone is set with a Dolphy original, “G.W.”—a tribute to
trumpeter, bandleader, and early mentor Gerald Wilson—which is a calling
card and statement of purpose: not only does each musician get ample
time and space to have their say, but the composition can be heard as
the first major indication of where Dolphy was heading: up and away from
convention and into a freer, flowing space—outward bound. After a
throat-clearing flourish from Haynes, Dolphy and Hubbard enter in
electrifying unison, a sound that still sounds brazen and irreverent
today; one can easily imagine the ears of jazz “purists” turning
sideways in 1961. Dolphy’s extended solo evinces his facility with the
alto saxophone: he packs notes into undulating clusters that, of course,
call to mind Charlie Parker, but this voice, which at once cries and
laughs, is intense without being off-putting, ferocious yet still
friendly. Jaki Byard takes a typical romp down memory lane, rolling and
tumbling from stride to bebop and beyond. Repeated listens reveal how
active his fingers—and mind—always are; he is never busy or noisy, yet
he constantly colors the corners of the canvass, urging the vibe in and
out of focus while offering running commentary, a playful and
authoritative raconteur. The group then tackles the familiar standard
“On Green Dolphin Street”, which is a showcase for Hubbard’s muted
trumpet and Dolphy’s bass clarinet. While “G.W.” introduces the early
foundation of a new type of language, here Dolphy uses that language to
translate a classic text, encapsulating his greatest gift: making the
old sound new and vice versa. Haynes, as always, is too cool to call
unnecessary attention to himself. Content to provide supple, solid
support for the soloists, he works subtle wonders while George Tucker’s
bass is the calming and utterly professional presence throughout. It
is, in fact, Haynes and Tucker whose contributions are most amplified by
the excellent remastering of this release—there is a clarity and
immediacy absent in earlier editions. “Les”, another tribute from Dolphy
(this time for trombonist Lester Robinson), presents another scorching
alto sax workout and, like “G.W.”, allows Hubbard and Byard to share the
spotlight. Hubbard and Dolphy duel throughout the piece, trading solos
that invariably recall Coltrane and Davis from that quintet’s
celebrated tenure. Dolphy remains with the alto sax on “245”, but
Hubbard takes center stage bursting with ideas and energy, offering his
own introduction of sorts to the imminent run of classic albums he would
make, leading his own bands, over the next decade and change.
Finally, the flute makes its first appearance on the winsome cover of
the Rodgers-Hart standard “Glad To Be Unhappy”, an especially inspired
and affecting choice. Dolphy speaks, sings and cries, conveying
beautiful feelings trying to break out from under some inexpressible
sadness. Everyone rises to the occasion for “Miss Toni”—another remake
and the song that concluded the original release—a rollicking, exultant
showcase for the entire group: Haynes and Tucker lock in while Dolphy,
once more on the bass clarinet, sprints out of the gate, again
engineering a solo that swings with the best any hard bop has to offer,
yet is uniquely off-kilter with that slightly disorienting, distinctive
sound. Hubbard blows sparks out of his horn while Byard prances and
prods, adding commas, parentheses and exclamation points as he so
pleases. It seems quite fortuitous that this particular session was
recorded on April 1, making the first bonus track, very appropriately
entitled “April Fool”, extra special, particularly as it provides
another opportunity to hear Dolphy on flute. Along with an alternate
take of “245”, the real treat is the other version of “G.W.”, which
stretches out over ten minutes and affords the soloists—especially
Dolphy—to cut loose with greater urgency and abandon.
Admittedly, some of these remastered classics are less than
essential: if you already own the original, there’s no real need to
cough up the extra cash. This is most definitely an exception: the
significantly improved sound quality (typical of all the Rudy Van Gelder
reissues) along with three bonus cuts makes this an imperative
purchase. If you’ve never experienced the joy that is Eric Dolphy, there
is no better place to begin since this is where it all officially
began. If, in the final analysis, it is not the unqualified masterpiece
that Out To Lunch would be, and does not possess the truly strange and unfathomable wonder of Out There, it can contentedly settle for merely being a great album. Outward Bound,
in sum, is a top tier effort from a tremendous quintet, and it signals
the start of an abbreviated but incendiary burst of creative genius. Let
there be no doubt that Eric Dolphy warrants mention amongst jazz
music’s all-time immortals.
- Eric Dolphy: "GW" Video
- Eric Dolphy: "245" Video
Sean
Murphy loves music, books, and movies and can't imagine a world without
sub-titles. He was born in northern Virginia and has never found a
compelling reason to leave. He studied English at George Mason
University and has an MA in Literature. One of his thesis papers dealt
with the utopian impulse in '70s rock (which, depending upon one's
perspective, at least partially explains why he opted not to purse that
PhD in Cultural Studies). During his time at PopMatters he has
written extensively about music, movies and books, and his column "The
Amazing Pudding" appears every other month. His memoir Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone was published in 2013; his novel Not To Mention a Nice Life will be available in June 2015. Visit him online at http://seanmurphy.net/.
http://www.allmusic.com/album/conversations-mw0000199276
AllMusic Review by Steve Huey
In 1963 (probably July, though some sources place the dates in May or June), Eric Dolphy recorded some sessions in New York with producer Alan Douglas, the fruits of which were issued on small labels as the LPs Conversations and Iron Man. They've been reissued a number of times on various labels, occasionally compiled together, but never with quite the treatment they deserve (which is perhaps why they're not as celebrated as they should be). In whatever form, though, it's classic, essential Dolphy that stands as some of his finest work past Out to Lunch. Conversations is the more eclectic of the two, featuring radical re-imaginings of three standards, plus the jubilant, Caribbean-flavored "Music Matador" (by ensemble members Prince Lasha on flute and Sonny Simmons on alto). That cut, and a classic inside/outside reworking of Fats Waller's "Jitterbug Waltz" feature Dolphy leading ensembles of up-and-coming "new thing" players, which prominently feature vibist Bobby Hutcherson and trumpeter Woody Shaw. The second half of the album takes a far more minimalist approach, with Dolphy performing unaccompanied (extremely rare prior to Anthony Braxton's For Alto) on "Love Me." "Alone Together" is an over-13-minute duet between Dolphy and bassist Richard Davis, featuring some astoundingly telepathic exchanges that more than justify its length. Even if the selections don't completely hang together as an LP statement, they're united by Dolphy's generally brilliant playing and a sense that -- after several years without entering the studio much as a leader -- Dolphy was really striving to push his (and others') music forward. The results are richly rewarding, making Conversations one of the landmarks in his catalog.
http://www.allmusic.com/album/conversations-mw0000199276
AllMusic Review by Steve Huey
In 1963 (probably July, though some sources place the dates in May or June), Eric Dolphy recorded some sessions in New York with producer Alan Douglas, the fruits of which were issued on small labels as the LPs Conversations and Iron Man. They've been reissued a number of times on various labels, occasionally compiled together, but never with quite the treatment they deserve (which is perhaps why they're not as celebrated as they should be). In whatever form, though, it's classic, essential Dolphy that stands as some of his finest work past Out to Lunch. Conversations is the more eclectic of the two, featuring radical re-imaginings of three standards, plus the jubilant, Caribbean-flavored "Music Matador" (by ensemble members Prince Lasha on flute and Sonny Simmons on alto). That cut, and a classic inside/outside reworking of Fats Waller's "Jitterbug Waltz" feature Dolphy leading ensembles of up-and-coming "new thing" players, which prominently feature vibist Bobby Hutcherson and trumpeter Woody Shaw. The second half of the album takes a far more minimalist approach, with Dolphy performing unaccompanied (extremely rare prior to Anthony Braxton's For Alto) on "Love Me." "Alone Together" is an over-13-minute duet between Dolphy and bassist Richard Davis, featuring some astoundingly telepathic exchanges that more than justify its length. Even if the selections don't completely hang together as an LP statement, they're united by Dolphy's generally brilliant playing and a sense that -- after several years without entering the studio much as a leader -- Dolphy was really striving to push his (and others') music forward. The results are richly rewarding, making Conversations one of the landmarks in his catalog.
Music
Jazz Enigma of the ’60s Has an Encore
A New Focus on Eric Dolphy, in Washington and Montclair
MAY 27, 2014
New York Times
Slide Show
A Virtuoso Revisited
CreditFrancis Wolff/Mosaic Images, via CORBIS.
Critic’s Notebook
by BEN RATLIFF
New York Times
by BEN RATLIFF
New York Times
In the jazz of the 1960s, Eric Dolphy was an original: a hero to some, but also a mystery, a virtuosic improviser searching for ways of expression outside of common practice. He died of an undiagnosed diabetic condition in Berlin in June 1964, at 36, old enough to consolidate his experience and wisdom but perhaps too young to settle his reputation, which had by then taken some knocks from those who found his music abstract or abrasive.
Though he had recorded a fair amount, especially in his last four years, culminating in the 1964 album “Out to Lunch!” and a Dutch performance recorded 27 days before his death and released as “Last Date,” there is still more to be known about what produced and drove him. Right now, a half-century after his death, might be a significant turning point. His musical papers have just been acquired by the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and his music, including pieces never performed before, will be played at a two-day festival in his honor, called Eric Dolphy: Freedom of Sound, this weekend in Montclair, N.J.
The papers were long in the possession of Dolphy’s close friends the composer Hale Smith, who died in 2009, and his wife, Juanita, who later gave them to the flutist and composer James Newton. The cache, five boxes of material, is available to scholars in the Library of Congress Performing Arts Reading Room. It includes several previously unperformed works, as well as extensions or alternative arrangements of Dolphy pieces, including “Hat and Beard,” “Gazzelloni” and “The Prophet.”
It also holds a key to how he thought and what he practiced: his transcriptions of other music, including bits of Charlie Parker and Stravinsky; Bach’s Partita in A minor for flute; and a bass-clarinet arrangement for Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. There are also many scales of Dolphy’s own devising, which he was using as the basis for improvisation; practice books and lead sheets; and a page of transcriptions of bird calls.
“The thing that really astounded me,” Mr. Newton said recently, “was that this was a person who thought very profoundly about the organization of his music.” Dolphy wrote out hundreds of his altered or “synthetic” scales. In some cases, including on the individual parts for “Out to Lunch!,” he wrote out the unusual scales beneath the composition, as a possible basis for improvisation.
“Eric was developing multiple styles of music simultaneously,” Mr. Newton continued. “There was this highly chromatic post-bop; then music that combined elements of jazz and contemporary classical; and jazz combined with world music.” (Dolphy, along with his friend John Coltrane, was listening to Hindustani music and the songs of the so-called Pygmy peoples of Central Africa.)
The festival, organized by the drummer Pheeroan akLaff and produced by his nonprofit organization, Seed Artists, will be held this Friday and Saturday at Montclair State University. It will include some of those previously unperformed works, which Mr. Newton is reasonably sure come from the end of Dolphy’s life. It will also include other Dolphy-related music performed by several generations of musicians, including Andrew Cyrille, Henry Threadgill, Don Byron, Vernon Reid, Oliver Lake, Marty Ehrlich, David Virelles, James Brandon Lewis and Dolphy’s former bandmate the 84-year old bassist Richard Davis.Dolphy, born in 1928, played alto saxophone, bass clarinet and flute. He grew up in Los Angeles and didn’t move to New York until the age of 30 — not the standard narrative of most great figures in jazz during that time. He was an only child, and a prodigy: While still in junior high, he won a two-year scholarship to study at the music school of the University of Southern California, and his parents built him a music studio behind the house.
Dolphy came into a compositional style that used wide interval jumps in various ways, sensuous or fractured. He also organized an original improvising language, both in and out of traditional Western harmony and jazz convention. He was influenced by, among others, Parker, Art Tatum and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as the microtones and quick-pivoting phrasing of bird song.
“In my own playing,” he told the critic Martin Williams in 1960, “I am trying to incorporate what I hear. I hear other resolutions on the basic harmonic patterns, and I try to use them. And I try to get the instrument to more or less speak — everybody does.”
Toward the end of his life, Dolphy wasn’t getting enough work playing his own music. He’d been derided in the jazz press, especially after touring with Coltrane in 1961 and 1962. “He was getting criticized even by friends,” Ms. Smith said.
He left New York for Europe in early 1964, to tour with Charles Mingus. (He eventually quit that tour, determined to work on his own in Europe and to settle down with his fiancée, the dancer Joyce Mordecai, who was living in Paris.) Before leaving, he dropped off his papers and other things, including tapes and a reel-to-reel recorder, with the Smiths. The tapes yielded “Other Aspects,” an album released in 1987. But the sheet music, finally given to Mr. Newton in 2004, took a while longer to be sorted out.
Among the never previously performed pieces scheduled for the weekend are an untitled solo bass-clarinet work, to be played by Mr. Byron; a short piece for flute and bass, “To Tonio, Dead”; and “Song F.T.R.H.” and “On the Rocks,” for jazz ensembles.
Those last two were written without tempo markings, but Mr. Newton and Mr. akLaff agree that they are to be played slowly. Mr. akLaff said the pieces could be described as ceremonial music, having a “deep, dark grandeur.” (Dolphy seemed to like word puzzles; we don’t know what F.T.R.H. stands for, nor the meaning of words written in pencil on one version of the score: “Split clock birds drink wood’s angel through longhouse.”)
If Dolphy didn’t have enough cultural capital at his death to inspire a school of imitators, he became a model for how to be dedicated and curious. Mr. Lewis, 30, a saxophonist who will perform in an ensemble on Saturday, said that Dolphy suggests “a figure determined to say what he had to say at the highest level in which he had to say it.” (Like everyone who talks about Dolphy, at a certain point Mr. Lewis just had to indicate an example and listen, agog: He specified Dolphy’s bass-clarinet solo on Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train,” live with Mingus in 1964, which can be easily found on YouTube. )
“He’s just amazing,” Mr. Lewis added. “He sounds completely different than anyone else on stage, but he sounds confident.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 28, 2014, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Jazz Enigma of the ’60s Has an Encore.
Though he had recorded a fair amount, especially in his last four years, culminating in the 1964 album “Out to Lunch!” and a Dutch performance recorded 27 days before his death and released as “Last Date,” there is still more to be known about what produced and drove him. Right now, a half-century after his death, might be a significant turning point. His musical papers have just been acquired by the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and his music, including pieces never performed before, will be played at a two-day festival in his honor, called Eric Dolphy: Freedom of Sound, this weekend in Montclair, N.J.
The papers were long in the possession of Dolphy’s close friends the composer Hale Smith, who died in 2009, and his wife, Juanita, who later gave them to the flutist and composer James Newton. The cache, five boxes of material, is available to scholars in the Library of Congress Performing Arts Reading Room. It includes several previously unperformed works, as well as extensions or alternative arrangements of Dolphy pieces, including “Hat and Beard,” “Gazzelloni” and “The Prophet.”
It also holds a key to how he thought and what he practiced: his transcriptions of other music, including bits of Charlie Parker and Stravinsky; Bach’s Partita in A minor for flute; and a bass-clarinet arrangement for Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. There are also many scales of Dolphy’s own devising, which he was using as the basis for improvisation; practice books and lead sheets; and a page of transcriptions of bird calls.
“The thing that really astounded me,” Mr. Newton said recently, “was that this was a person who thought very profoundly about the organization of his music.” Dolphy wrote out hundreds of his altered or “synthetic” scales. In some cases, including on the individual parts for “Out to Lunch!,” he wrote out the unusual scales beneath the composition, as a possible basis for improvisation.
“Eric was developing multiple styles of music simultaneously,” Mr. Newton continued. “There was this highly chromatic post-bop; then music that combined elements of jazz and contemporary classical; and jazz combined with world music.” (Dolphy, along with his friend John Coltrane, was listening to Hindustani music and the songs of the so-called Pygmy peoples of Central Africa.)
The festival, organized by the drummer Pheeroan akLaff and produced by his nonprofit organization, Seed Artists, will be held this Friday and Saturday at Montclair State University. It will include some of those previously unperformed works, which Mr. Newton is reasonably sure come from the end of Dolphy’s life. It will also include other Dolphy-related music performed by several generations of musicians, including Andrew Cyrille, Henry Threadgill, Don Byron, Vernon Reid, Oliver Lake, Marty Ehrlich, David Virelles, James Brandon Lewis and Dolphy’s former bandmate the 84-year old bassist Richard Davis.Dolphy, born in 1928, played alto saxophone, bass clarinet and flute. He grew up in Los Angeles and didn’t move to New York until the age of 30 — not the standard narrative of most great figures in jazz during that time. He was an only child, and a prodigy: While still in junior high, he won a two-year scholarship to study at the music school of the University of Southern California, and his parents built him a music studio behind the house.
Dolphy came into a compositional style that used wide interval jumps in various ways, sensuous or fractured. He also organized an original improvising language, both in and out of traditional Western harmony and jazz convention. He was influenced by, among others, Parker, Art Tatum and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as the microtones and quick-pivoting phrasing of bird song.
“In my own playing,” he told the critic Martin Williams in 1960, “I am trying to incorporate what I hear. I hear other resolutions on the basic harmonic patterns, and I try to use them. And I try to get the instrument to more or less speak — everybody does.”
Toward the end of his life, Dolphy wasn’t getting enough work playing his own music. He’d been derided in the jazz press, especially after touring with Coltrane in 1961 and 1962. “He was getting criticized even by friends,” Ms. Smith said.
He left New York for Europe in early 1964, to tour with Charles Mingus. (He eventually quit that tour, determined to work on his own in Europe and to settle down with his fiancée, the dancer Joyce Mordecai, who was living in Paris.) Before leaving, he dropped off his papers and other things, including tapes and a reel-to-reel recorder, with the Smiths. The tapes yielded “Other Aspects,” an album released in 1987. But the sheet music, finally given to Mr. Newton in 2004, took a while longer to be sorted out.
Among the never previously performed pieces scheduled for the weekend are an untitled solo bass-clarinet work, to be played by Mr. Byron; a short piece for flute and bass, “To Tonio, Dead”; and “Song F.T.R.H.” and “On the Rocks,” for jazz ensembles.
Those last two were written without tempo markings, but Mr. Newton and Mr. akLaff agree that they are to be played slowly. Mr. akLaff said the pieces could be described as ceremonial music, having a “deep, dark grandeur.” (Dolphy seemed to like word puzzles; we don’t know what F.T.R.H. stands for, nor the meaning of words written in pencil on one version of the score: “Split clock birds drink wood’s angel through longhouse.”)
If Dolphy didn’t have enough cultural capital at his death to inspire a school of imitators, he became a model for how to be dedicated and curious. Mr. Lewis, 30, a saxophonist who will perform in an ensemble on Saturday, said that Dolphy suggests “a figure determined to say what he had to say at the highest level in which he had to say it.” (Like everyone who talks about Dolphy, at a certain point Mr. Lewis just had to indicate an example and listen, agog: He specified Dolphy’s bass-clarinet solo on Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train,” live with Mingus in 1964, which can be easily found on YouTube. )
“He’s just amazing,” Mr. Lewis added. “He sounds completely different than anyone else on stage, but he sounds confident.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 28, 2014, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Jazz Enigma of the ’60s Has an Encore.
Fifty years after his death, the multi-instrumentalist and composer Eric Dolphy,
one of the most original improvisers and composers in the history of
jazz, will have a major two-day festival in his honor. Eric Dolphy:
Freedom of Sound will take place at Montclair State University in
Montclair, N.J., on May 30 and 31; the festival was announced this week
by Seed Artists, its producer.
Among the festival’s
events will be the first performances of several previously unperformed
Dolphy compositions that had long been in the possession of the composer
Hale Smith, including chamber works, to be conducted by the flutist and
composer James Newton. There will also be Dolphy-related performances
by Henry Threadgill and David Virelles; the group Tarbaby, with the
saxophonist Oliver Lake; a bass-clarinet quartet, including Don Byron,
Marty Ehrlich, Oscar Noriega and Howard Johnson; a symposium including
the scholars Gunther Schuller, John F. Szwed and Michael Veal; and
appearances by Dolphy’s near-contemporaries Richard Davis, Andrew
Cyrille and Grachan Moncur III.
Dolphy played alto
saxophone, flute and bass clarinet, and outside of his own work was a
favored collaborator of Chico Hamilton, John Coltrane and Charles
Mingus. He died of a diabetic disorder in Berlin in 1964, at 36, four
months after recording the landmark album “Out to Lunch,” which has just
been released on vinyl by Blue Note records, in the first batch of the
label’s year-long reissue program of its greatest records. Tickets for
the festival will be available in mid-April; information is at seedartists.org.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/eric-dolphy-freedom-of-sound#/story
TWO NIGHTS IN MAY
May 30th & 31st - Montclair, New Jersey. For two nights, the center of the jazz universe.
Seed Artists has gathered world-class musicians and artists to celebrate visionary multi-instrumentalist and composer Eric Dolphy, who died 50 years ago this June. Legends of the Sixties avant garde, today’s leading innovators, from solo cello to large ensemble—the slate and scope are unrivaled. (The nightly schedules are listed at the end of the pitch.)
But it gets even better:
We are profoundly honored to debut Eric Dolphy compositions that have NEVER BEEN RECORDED, NEVER PERFORMED. They have sat unplayed for 50 years, and it is unclear if even Dolphy ever heard them played. From solo bass clarinet to a full ensemble, we will present them both nights in a world premiere of historical importance. This is Holy Grail of Jazz territory.
A Dolphy symposium will feature revelations from his personal papers that show a theoretical and conceptual sophistication far beyond what anyone had imagined. Dolphy Reborn.
And in keeping with Seed’s core mission of Great Art for Good Works, we will donate proceeds to two partner nonprofits: the Jazz Foundation of America (JFA) and the Montclair Academy of Dance and Laboratory of Music (MADLOM).
The pieces are in place, now we need to complete funding. We hope that you will help us to help others, and to make music history.
Launching the Freedom of Sound series—each year another visionary—with this tribute is fitting not just because of Dolphy’s genius
or the anniversary but also because of who he was: a risk-taker and seeker of
the highest order, a deeply committed craftsman, and a man of uncommon kindness
and generosity.
Unfamiliar with Dolphy? Check out our video at the top. And this and this.
This, too.
(If you haven't already done so, click into the rectangle at the bottom center of the screen at the end of the pitch video. It's our cellphone-video tribute to Dolphy.)
As fans ourselves,
we’re counting the days (and humbled) to see and hear this unparalleled gathering of legends and young innovators. You’ll find nothing like it anywhere.
Gunther Schuller, giant of modern music? Yes.
The Richard Davis? Yes!
Don Byron, Oliver Lake, Vernon Reid…a debut composition from Henry Threadgill, a birdsong suite from Diane Moser, a bass-clarinet quartet, God Bless the Child on cello…And not just music but dance from an Alvin Ailey instructor, a National Book Ward-nominated poet, photography, video--a slate and scope for the devotee and the Dolphy-curious, a tonic for the merely bored. (See the performance schedules at the end of this pitch. You'll be floored.)
A Bit About Seed Artists
Renowned drummer Pheeroan akLaff and his wife, Luz Marina Bueno, founded Seed Artists in Brooklyn in 2005. Seed used jazz and creative music to bridge cultural and generational gaps, spark community engagement, and bring the arts to at-risk youth. From music instruction at underserved schools to concerts at nursing homes and in community gardens. DIY through and through.
When Pheeroan and Luz Marina moved to Montclair, Seed was initially dormant. Then he met Chris Napierala (me) and Michael Schreiber at a yard sale, and we fell into the Jazz Wormhole.
We emerged with plans to revive Seed. When we realized that this summer would mark 50 years since Dolphy’s death, and we found no planned tribute (!), we decided to do it ourselves. Absent existing funding, we put in the volunteer hours to create an event that would do Dolphy justice. A grand project, but such a significant anniversary merits an equally significant celebration.
Why Are We Donating Proceeds to JFA and MADLOM? Simple. They are good at what they do and can do more good with the funds at this stage we can.
JFA’s vital work ranges from pro bono medical care to housing assistance, music in underserved schools, and free public concerts. MADLOM’s innovative performing-arts programs develop creative minds and spirits, but they’d like to bring in more at-risk kids who can’t afford the modest tuition. We are happy to be the conduit.
Our first major Sponsor, RetailMeNot, got us started. Performers took reduced pay, and the venue reduced the rental by a third. But a two-day event of this size is still costly to produce. Performance and venue fees, travel and lodgings, production staff, printing and promotions, equipment rental, insurance, food…To cover expenses and still donate funds to JFA and MADLOM, we need your help.
At $38,000…we can professionally audio-record the event. Our primary goal is to preserve jazz history and provide audio files to music schools and programs, to help inspire the next generation of visionaries.
It also opens the possibility of limited-edition CDs and music files, which we can then add as bonus perks.
At $55,000…a filmmaker is ready to begin a documentary exploring the story of the “lost” Dolphy compositions and his legacy 50 years on. The festival and interviews with performers frame the story. It would be a shame to miss such an opportunity given the remarkable gathering of artists and the world premiere. Beyond providing copies of the film to music programs, we plan to enter it in next year’s Montclair Film Festival and pitch it to public television. For starters.
$70 - DOLPHY CALENDAR! A stunning 27"h x 18"w labor of love from graphic designer Oscar Schnider, created in 1991 as an homage to Dolphy. Full-color, glossy, heavy stock. Features Dolphy photos and musician quotes, and 4000+ birthdates of musicians and composers fill the calendar days. Each month is co-titled with a tune that Dolphy composed or played. Plus an index and discography, and a wonderful intro written for the calendar by NAT HENTOFF. No joke.
You can't find it on EBay or Craigslist. Google it: not for sale. CAN"T GET THEM ANYWHERE BUT HERE. A privilege to be able to offer this. Get a rare piece of Dolphy memorabilia and do some good in the process.
$201 - TWO TICKETS to the show of your choice at the legendary BLUE NOTE in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. A very hip place in a very hip place. Not enough hands to count the greats who played, play and will play the Blue Note. Name your show, get your table. Depending on the show, value up to $130. ONE SET OF TWO TICKETS, so grab it while you can.
$400 - Drummer Pheeroan akLaff has
played with the likes of Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill and Anthony Braxton,
among many (many) modern greats. He has taught at Wesleyan University
for 20 years. And he can be your personal instructor on Skype for an hour. One-on-one, drums or a broader music lesson or discussion. And two t-shirts.
OR
Cover your walls and yourself with Dolphy: The Bodge and the KHB artwork, a t-shirt and a poster.
$500 - The posters are great in their own right. But signed by all of the performers? Living legends and legends-n-the-making. There will be only 12 of these. A rare piece of memorabilia from an historic event. Plus we'll throw in two t-shirts.
$600 - Want to control the dial? You can. Curate the Music. Before the show each night, Dolphy's music will play in the theater and lobby. Whether it's his own releases or work with Coltrane, Mingus, Booker Little…You choose, we list you in the program and post your name on the onstage screen as the night's Ambient-Music Curator. Plus two shirts.
$1,000 - Two full-color banners with the Bodge graphic, roughly 4’ x 6', will bookend the stage. The green-backed flyer image, no text but the logo. Be one of only two people in the known universe with a Dolphy banner. Or grab them both and corn the market. Plus two shirts.
OR
If available, Curate and add the Bodge or KHB artwork, plus two t-shirts, two posters.
OR
Curate and receive a signed poster.
$5,000 - THE BIG PERK: At this level, the biggest perk is the good that you will do. Don't worry you'll still get "stuff," but right off the top we'll donate 40% ($2,000) to JFA, MADLOM, or a combination. Your call. You will be specially acknowledged in the program and onstage; you will receive a signed poster and two t-shirts…and you will get to hang out behind the scenes for a while and meet the artists. (Keep in mind that $5,000 is the starting point. You can go higher.)
Also keep in mind that these perks "make wonderful gifts." Really. Everyone looks better with a Dolphy t-shirt, and every room feels more hep with a Dolphy print.
What if We Don’t Reach Our Goal? We'll be disappointed. Briefly. But we'll still use the funds to produce the show. They will not move from the bank account, and we raise funds until we can produce it. No monies will be used for any purpose other than those stated above.
LET'S GO!
We are launching a new cultural institution, and we hope that you will hep us make it happen, and do some good in the process. We can't wait to put on our Dolphy t-shirts and to hear those first notes, and who-knows-what Dolphy created but never got to perform.
Please help us make it happen.
IF YOU CAN’T CONTRIBUTE…
•Spread the word—through the Share tools on this site (Facebook, Twitter, G+ and email icons right below the video), by bringing people to our website or our Facebook page, or by word of mouth. We know the Dolphyites are out there, we just need to reach them.
•If you’re in the Montclair area, volunteer for Seed Artists or MADLOM. In New York City, you can volunteer for JFA. Elsewhere, there is no shortage of community-based programs that could use a hand. Even a couple hours a week. And you can always do it yourself.
Thank you. Please contribute if you can, and DROP THE NEEDLE ON SOME DOLPHY.
_________________________________
THE SCHEDULE
FRIDAY, MAY 30 – 7pm-10:30pm
Andrew Cyrille & Pheeroan akLaff
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/eric-dolphy-freedom-of-sound#/story
Eric Dolphy: Freedom of Sound
A two-day celebration of jazz icon Eric Dolphy. The debut of unheard
Dolphy works (!!), more than 30 world-class musicians, and proceeds to
two great causes.
"As I developed, I found I could play a lot of notes against a common chord progression that some people would call wrong. To my hearing it's right. You can play any note you like. It's based on freedom of sound." - Eric Dolphy
May 30th & 31st - Montclair, New Jersey. For two nights, the center of the jazz universe.
Seed Artists has gathered world-class musicians and artists to celebrate visionary multi-instrumentalist and composer Eric Dolphy, who died 50 years ago this June. Legends of the Sixties avant garde, today’s leading innovators, from solo cello to large ensemble—the slate and scope are unrivaled. (The nightly schedules are listed at the end of the pitch.)
But it gets even better:
We are profoundly honored to debut Eric Dolphy compositions that have NEVER BEEN RECORDED, NEVER PERFORMED. They have sat unplayed for 50 years, and it is unclear if even Dolphy ever heard them played. From solo bass clarinet to a full ensemble, we will present them both nights in a world premiere of historical importance. This is Holy Grail of Jazz territory.
A Dolphy symposium will feature revelations from his personal papers that show a theoretical and conceptual sophistication far beyond what anyone had imagined. Dolphy Reborn.
And in keeping with Seed’s core mission of Great Art for Good Works, we will donate proceeds to two partner nonprofits: the Jazz Foundation of America (JFA) and the Montclair Academy of Dance and Laboratory of Music (MADLOM).
The pieces are in place, now we need to complete funding. We hope that you will help us to help others, and to make music history.
DOLPHY
and FREEDOM OF SOUND
Unfamiliar with Dolphy? Check out our video at the top. And this and this.
This, too.
(If you haven't already done so, click into the rectangle at the bottom center of the screen at the end of the pitch video. It's our cellphone-video tribute to Dolphy.)
As fans ourselves,
we’re counting the days (and humbled) to see and hear this unparalleled gathering of legends and young innovators. You’ll find nothing like it anywhere.
Gunther Schuller, giant of modern music? Yes.
Don Byron, Oliver Lake, Vernon Reid…a debut composition from Henry Threadgill, a birdsong suite from Diane Moser, a bass-clarinet quartet, God Bless the Child on cello…And not just music but dance from an Alvin Ailey instructor, a National Book Ward-nominated poet, photography, video--a slate and scope for the devotee and the Dolphy-curious, a tonic for the merely bored. (See the performance schedules at the end of this pitch. You'll be floored.)
A Bit About Seed Artists
Renowned drummer Pheeroan akLaff and his wife, Luz Marina Bueno, founded Seed Artists in Brooklyn in 2005. Seed used jazz and creative music to bridge cultural and generational gaps, spark community engagement, and bring the arts to at-risk youth. From music instruction at underserved schools to concerts at nursing homes and in community gardens. DIY through and through.
When Pheeroan and Luz Marina moved to Montclair, Seed was initially dormant. Then he met Chris Napierala (me) and Michael Schreiber at a yard sale, and we fell into the Jazz Wormhole.
We emerged with plans to revive Seed. When we realized that this summer would mark 50 years since Dolphy’s death, and we found no planned tribute (!), we decided to do it ourselves. Absent existing funding, we put in the volunteer hours to create an event that would do Dolphy justice. A grand project, but such a significant anniversary merits an equally significant celebration.
Why Are We Donating Proceeds to JFA and MADLOM? Simple. They are good at what they do and can do more good with the funds at this stage we can.
JFA’s vital work ranges from pro bono medical care to housing assistance, music in underserved schools, and free public concerts. MADLOM’s innovative performing-arts programs develop creative minds and spirits, but they’d like to bring in more at-risk kids who can’t afford the modest tuition. We are happy to be the conduit.
Our first major Sponsor, RetailMeNot, got us started. Performers took reduced pay, and the venue reduced the rental by a third. But a two-day event of this size is still costly to produce. Performance and venue fees, travel and lodgings, production staff, printing and promotions, equipment rental, insurance, food…To cover expenses and still donate funds to JFA and MADLOM, we need your help.
Seed staff will
receive none of the funds from Indiegogo or the event receipts, nor do we
receive salaries.
THE DREAM…At $38,000…we can professionally audio-record the event. Our primary goal is to preserve jazz history and provide audio files to music schools and programs, to help inspire the next generation of visionaries.
It also opens the possibility of limited-edition CDs and music files, which we can then add as bonus perks.
At $55,000…a filmmaker is ready to begin a documentary exploring the story of the “lost” Dolphy compositions and his legacy 50 years on. The festival and interviews with performers frame the story. It would be a shame to miss such an opportunity given the remarkable gathering of artists and the world premiere. Beyond providing copies of the film to music programs, we plan to enter it in next year’s Montclair Film Festival and pitch it to public television. For starters.
PERKS! PERKS! PERKS!
We hope that you will dig our
perks as much as we do. (We do.)
$10 - Our
eternal and cyberspacial thanks. In addition to our quiet but very earnest thankfulness, we will post your name on the Eric Dolphy: Freedom of Sound Facebook page--please do check it out--and in a large placard of donors at the event. (This applies to all proceeding perks.)
$35 You get ONE GENERAL-ADMISSION TICKET, night of your choice. Which one? Tough call. (Check the schedule at the end.)
Technically a "$20 value," but plainly far more valuable than that. We
expressly set a low price because deep pockets shouldn't be a condition
to see and hear great music. So that $35 easily gets you a $35 value, plus you help two great causes.
$40 - A limited-edition 24” x 36” Eric Dolphy:
Freedom of Sound poster featuring the artwork of
Peter Bodge, through the lens
of graphic designer Chris Drukker. Bodge's jazz portraits are in the
Smithsonian’s permanent collection. For us, he created the linoleum-cut
print that is the central graphic for the festival, based on the famous
Chuck Stewart photo. (Mr. Stewart personally approved Bodge's concept.)
We're damned excited to see it get around.
$50 Better than one ticket? TWO GENERAL-ADMISSION TICKETS. Two! (2!) A steal. One for each night or two tickets for one night, you decide. A bargain among bargains.
$60 - The
Coolest T-Shirt You Will Ever Own: Get a knockout two-sided Dolphy t-shirt in one of two formats:
(A) the original (see below) in one of three color combinations, on a colored t-shirt--we will soon post the color options...
(A) the original (see below) in one of three color combinations, on a colored t-shirt--we will soon post the color options...
or (B) the green event shirt from Chris Drukker that you saw above.
Both shirts will feature the logo and performance slate on the back.
We're already getting requests. Beautify your neighborhood by just
walking down the street.
$70 - DOLPHY CALENDAR! A stunning 27"h x 18"w labor of love from graphic designer Oscar Schnider, created in 1991 as an homage to Dolphy. Full-color, glossy, heavy stock. Features Dolphy photos and musician quotes, and 4000+ birthdates of musicians and composers fill the calendar days. Each month is co-titled with a tune that Dolphy composed or played. Plus an index and discography, and a wonderful intro written for the calendar by NAT HENTOFF. No joke.
You can't find it on EBay or Craigslist. Google it: not for sale. CAN"T GET THEM ANYWHERE BUT HERE. A privilege to be able to offer this. Get a rare piece of Dolphy memorabilia and do some good in the process.
$100 - Two T-shirts of your choosing plus a Dolphy Poster. Nice.
$125 - Two T-shirts and two tickets. Another steal. Go ahead, we encourage your thievery.
$150 - Graphic Artist Keith H. Brown (KHB)
does work for the Newport Jazz Fetival, among much else. Great stuff,
but when we found out about his Dolphy graphic novel--!!!--we flipped. That is cool.
The novel's not printed yet, but he did swing us some 18" x 24"
gallery-quality prints of one of the plates, signed and numbered from an
edition of 250.
$200 - Brown's print, a t-shirt and a poster. And your name in the program as a Friend of Seed Artists (FSA). (This applies to all proceeding perks.)
$201 - TWO TICKETS to the show of your choice at the legendary BLUE NOTE in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. A very hip place in a very hip place. Not enough hands to count the greats who played, play and will play the Blue Note. Name your show, get your table. Depending on the show, value up to $130. ONE SET OF TWO TICKETS, so grab it while you can.
$275 - Original Bodge: Bodge
layered two separate linoleum cuts to make his image--one with the
amazing letter work, the other with the Dolphy profile. Hand-pressed
them. Two of the original 11" x 13" images appear above. In person
they're even better. Because each one features unique colors, they are one-of-a-kind prints, signed and numbered. (PLEASE NOTE THIS CHANGE FROM THE ORIGINAL POSTING. IT CANNOT BE CHANGED IN THE PERKS COLUMN ON THE RIGHT.) And a shirt.
OR
Cover your walls and yourself with Dolphy: The Bodge and the KHB artwork, a t-shirt and a poster.
$500 - The posters are great in their own right. But signed by all of the performers? Living legends and legends-n-the-making. There will be only 12 of these. A rare piece of memorabilia from an historic event. Plus we'll throw in two t-shirts.
$600 - Want to control the dial? You can. Curate the Music. Before the show each night, Dolphy's music will play in the theater and lobby. Whether it's his own releases or work with Coltrane, Mingus, Booker Little…You choose, we list you in the program and post your name on the onstage screen as the night's Ambient-Music Curator. Plus two shirts.
$1,000 - Two full-color banners with the Bodge graphic, roughly 4’ x 6', will bookend the stage. The green-backed flyer image, no text but the logo. Be one of only two people in the known universe with a Dolphy banner. Or grab them both and corn the market. Plus two shirts.
OR
If available, Curate and add the Bodge or KHB artwork, plus two t-shirts, two posters.
OR
Curate and receive a signed poster.
$5,000 - THE BIG PERK: At this level, the biggest perk is the good that you will do. Don't worry you'll still get "stuff," but right off the top we'll donate 40% ($2,000) to JFA, MADLOM, or a combination. Your call. You will be specially acknowledged in the program and onstage; you will receive a signed poster and two t-shirts…and you will get to hang out behind the scenes for a while and meet the artists. (Keep in mind that $5,000 is the starting point. You can go higher.)
Also keep in mind that these perks "make wonderful gifts." Really. Everyone looks better with a Dolphy t-shirt, and every room feels more hep with a Dolphy print.
What if We Don’t Reach Our Goal? We'll be disappointed. Briefly. But we'll still use the funds to produce the show. They will not move from the bank account, and we raise funds until we can produce it. No monies will be used for any purpose other than those stated above.
LET'S GO!
We are launching a new cultural institution, and we hope that you will hep us make it happen, and do some good in the process. We can't wait to put on our Dolphy t-shirts and to hear those first notes, and who-knows-what Dolphy created but never got to perform.
Please help us make it happen.
IF YOU CAN’T CONTRIBUTE…
•Spread the word—through the Share tools on this site (Facebook, Twitter, G+ and email icons right below the video), by bringing people to our website or our Facebook page, or by word of mouth. We know the Dolphyites are out there, we just need to reach them.
•If you’re in the Montclair area, volunteer for Seed Artists or MADLOM. In New York City, you can volunteer for JFA. Elsewhere, there is no shortage of community-based programs that could use a hand. Even a couple hours a week. And you can always do it yourself.
Thank you. Please contribute if you can, and DROP THE NEEDLE ON SOME DOLPHY.
_________________________________
THE SCHEDULE
FRIDAY, MAY 30 – 7pm-10:30pm
Andrew Cyrille & Pheeroan akLaff
Richard Davis
solo; duo w/ Marty Ehrlich; guests of choice
Russ Johnson's “Still Out to Lunch”
Roy Nathanson, Orrin Evans, Brad Jones, George Schuller
Henry Threadgill w/ David Virelles
Veronica Nunn w/ Sean Conly
Diane Moser Quintet feat. Howard Johnson
Marty Ehrlich, Anton Denner, Ken Filiano, Michael Sarin
Don Byron solo
The Dolphy Bass Clarinet Quartet
Howard Johnson, Don Byron, Marty Ehrlich, Oscar Noriega
SATURDAY, MAY 31 – 5pm-10:30pm
Eric Dolphy: Architect of Possibility
SYMPOSIUM featuring GUNTHER SCHULLER, Richard Davis, James Newton, John Szwed, PhD (Columbia Univ), Michael E. Veal, PhD (Yale)
To Eric: Works by Hale Smith
Arranged by Chris White
Adegoke Steve Colson, Pheeroan akLaff, Jerome Harris, Andy McKee, Jun Miyake
Tarbaby featuring Oliver Lake
Orrin Evans, Nasheet Waits, Luques Curtis
Richard Davis
w/ Andrew Cyrille, Angelica Sanchez, Aska Kaneko; duo w/ Aska Kaneko
Tomeka Reid w/ Beatrice Capote (dance) & Andrew Cyrille
Michael S. Harper (poetry)
Vernon Reid & Pheeroan akLaff w/ guests
Grachan Moncur III
The Sound of Freedom Ensemble
James
Newton (conductor), Pheeroan akLaff, Jerome Harris, Ted Daniel, Alfred
Patterson, Jay Hoggard, Andy McKee, James Brandon Lewis, Jun Miyake
What’s It All About, Then? Part One: Jazz, Featuring Eric Dolphy
May 11, 2010
By
Question: What’s it all about?
Answer: I don’t know.
But I do know a few things.
I know some of the things that make me tick.
Even though I write (for fun, for real and forever), I would still say that music has always been the central element of my existence. Or the elemental center. Writing is a compulsion, a hobby, a skill, a craft, an obsession, a mystery and at times a burden. Music simply is. For just about anyone, all you need is an ear (or two); that is all that’s required for it to work its magic. But, as many people come to realize, if you approach it with your mind, and your heart and, eventually (inevitably) your soul, it is capable of making you aware of other worlds, it can help you achieve the satisfaction material possessions are intended to inspire, it will help you feel the feelings drugs are designed to approximate. Et cetera.
I know that jazz music has made my life approximately a million times more satisfying and enriching than it would have been had I never been fortunate enough to discover, study and savor it.
During the last 4-5 years, I’ve had (or taken) the opportunity to write in some detail about Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Freddie Hubbard, Ornette Coleman, John Zorn, and Herbie Hancock. This has been important to me, because I feel that in some small way, if I can help other people better appreciate, or discover any (or all) of these artists, I will be sharing something bigger and better than anything I alone am capable of creating.
Before this blog (and PopMatters, where virtually all of my music writing appears), and during the decade or so that stretched from my mid-’20s to mid-’30s, I used to have more of an evangelical vibe. It’s not necessarily that I’m less invested, now, then I was then; quite the contrary. But, if I wasn’t particuarly interested in converting people then (I wasn’t), I’m even less so today. When it comes to art in general and music in particular, entirely too many people are very American in their tastes: they know what they like and they like what they know. And there’s nothing wrong with that, since what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Also, let’s face it, the only thing possibly more annoying than some yahoo proselytizing their religion on your doorstep is some jackass getting in your grill about how evolved or enviable his or her musical tastes happen to be. Life is way too short, for all involved.
On the other hand, back in the day I was obliged to talk about music using only words. Now there is YouTube. You can’t believe everything you read, but you can always have faith in what you hear; the ears never lie. Not when it comes to music. Not when it comes to jazz music.
How to talk about jazz music? Well, perhaps it’s better to determine how not to talk about jazz music. Hearing is believing. That’s it. And if you hear something that speaks to you, keep listening. Whatever effort you put in will be immeasurably rewarded. Trust me. But first, eradicate cliché. Possibly the most despicable myth (that, fortunately doesn’t seem as widespread, perhaps –sigh– because less people talk or care about jazz music in 2010) is one I found myself ceaselessly rebutting back in the bad old days. You know which one: that lazy, anecdotally innacurate and often racist assumption that all jazz artists are (or at least were) heroin addicts. That’s like saying all pro athletes are steroid abusers. Oh wait…
There are several dozen top-tier jazz musicians whose artistic (and personal) lives could be held up as examples any sane person should want to emulate. And while geniuses like Wayne Shorter, Jackie McLean, McCoy Tyner, Max Roach, Henry Threadgill and Sonny Rollins all spring immediately to mind, the one I believe serves as the ultimate example of everything sublime about jazz music is Eric Dolphy. I’ve discussed –and celebrated– the man at length here, as well as here, here and here.
This is an excerpt from my review of Dolphy’s Outward Bound:
It will be difficult to avoid clichés here. In their defense, clichés originate from an authentic place; they are mostly an attempt, at least initially, to articulate something honest and immutable. And so: Eric Dolphy is among the foremost supernovas in all of jazz (Clifford Brown, Booker Little and Lee Morgan—all trumpeters incidentally—also come quickly to mind): he burned very brightly and very briefly, and then he was gone. Speaking of clichés, not a single one of the artists just mentioned—all of whom left us well before their fortieth birthdays—died from a drug overdose. Dolphy, the grand old man of the bunch, passed away at the age of 36, in Europe. How? After lapsing into a diabetic coma. Why? The doctors on duty presumed the black musician who had collapsed in the street was nodding off on a heroin buzz. To attempt to put the magnitude of this loss in perspective, consider that Charles Mingus, perhaps the most difficult and demanding band leader of them all, declared Dolphy a saint, and regarded his death as one of a handful of setbacks he could never completely get over. Dolphy holds the distinction of quite possibly being the one artist nobody has gone on record to say a single negative thing about. His body of work, the bulk of which was recorded during an almost miraculously productive five-year stretch, is deep, challenging, and utterly enjoyable.
One of the paradoxical reasons Dolphy tends to get overlooked, even slighted, is not because of any lack of proficiency, but rather an abundance of it. It does not quite seem possible—particularly for lazier critics and ringleaders amongst the jazz intelligentsia—that such a relatively young musician could master three instruments. In actuality, Dolphy was an exceedingly accomplished alto sax player, drawing freely (pun intended) from Bird while pointing the way toward Braxton. Perhaps most egregiously disregarded is his flute playing, which not only achieves a consistent and uncommon beauty, but more than holds its own against fellow multi-reedists Yusef Lateef and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Nevertheless, it is the signature, unmistakable sounds he makes with the bass clarinet that ensure his place in the pantheon: no one of note, excepting Harry Carney, employed this instrument on the front line before Dolphy and, arguably, no one has used it as effectively and indelibly since…Let there be no doubt that Eric Dolphy warrants mention amongst jazz music’s all-time immortals.
So: a sample of some of Dolphy’s finer moments
1. “Hat And Beard” from Out To Lunch.
This song, the first track from his last proper album, can serve as well as virtually any other composition I can think of to best illustrate what jazz is; what it is capable of conveying. In this song, the primary feeling is ecstasy. The ecstasy of discovery; the ecstasy of shared purpose amongst the musicians (and this is an unbelievable group of masters, including Freddie Hubbard, Tony Williams and Bobby Hutcherson) and the ecstasy of expression. This song’s title is a tribute to Thelonious Monk, but the notes are all Dolphy. Here is his slightly surreal, intentionally off-kilter, totally focused and deeply, darkly beautiful vision fully developed and delivered. This is not the easiest music to absorb, at least initially, but once you “get it”, you stay got.
2. “Come Sunday” from Iron Man.
That Dolphy is able to cover the immortal Duke Ellington so convincingly is remarkable; that he is able to do it so indelibly with only one other musician (Richard Davis) is more than a little miraculous. The sheer volume of feeling in this performance is mind boggling, and life changing. Dolphy’s bass clarinet sings, cries and cajoles. It whispers and it pleads, and then it sighs. By the end, it has exhausted itself; it has said everything there is to say.
3. “Eclipse” from Out There.
Another tribute to another great composer: his friend, mentor and bandmate Charles Mingus. Writing recently about Jimi Hendrix, I observed that “The Wind Cries Mary” captures the feeling of melancholy as well as any song ever has. And it does. But to do similar work without words, as Dolphy does here, is a truly staggering achievement. The mournful cadence of Dolphy’s clarinet here gets right inside you, and the feeling expressed is magnified by Ron Carter’s bowed cello, which weaves in and around, at once among the corners and right within the heart of the song. The sounds these two men achieve are so unusual, so unsettling and (the word has to be used again) so surreal, it almost defies explanation. This is music best categorized as other and the album title, Out There, is more than a little appropriate. Dolphy was indeed “out there” in the sense that most of us are blissful or oblivious inside our little boxes, incapable of hearing, much less expressing, the joyful noises that reside in those most inaccessible spaces: within each of us.
4. “Left Alone” from Far Cry.
So, you might ask, are you really telling me I should want to listen to music that is capable of making me cry?
Yes, I would reply.
And, you might add, why would I want to do such a thing?
It’s simple, I’d say. So that you know you are alive.
5. “Miss Ann” from Last Date.
Eric Dolphy, dead at 36. There is nothing anyone can say that could possibly begin to explain or rationalize that travesty of justice; that affront to life. It is the intolerable enigmas like these that make certain people hope against hope that there is a bigger purpose and plan, a way to measure or quantify this madness. But in the final, human analysis, whatever we lost can never overwhelm all that we received. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It helps that we will always have the gifts the artist left behind. It’s never enough; it’s more than enough.
After the final cut of his final recording, Dolphy offers the following observation: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air…you can never capture it again.”
What he said.
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2011/06/happy-birthday-eric-tribute-to-eric.html
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ERIC!
A TRIBUTE TO ERIC DOLPHY, 1928-1964--Multi-instrumentalist, Composer, Artist
ERIC DOLPHY, 1928-1964"Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician." – John Coltrane on Eric Dolphy
“When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.” – Eric Dolphy
"I'm leaving to live in Europe. Why? Because if you try to do something new and different in this country (the U.S.) people put you down for it."
--Eric Dolphy (6 months before his death in 1964)
http://www.jazzonthetube.com/page/782.html
In only thirty six years (1928-1964) Eric Dolphy was able to leave a legacy as one of the most unique and influential artists in Jazz. Today we pay tribute to the amazing life and extraordinary music of a true master on his 83rd birthday.
Happy Birthday Eric Dolphy!
Eric Allen Dolphy, Jr. was born on June 20, 1928 in Los Angeles, California. Eric began playing music on harmonica in elementary school before exploring other instruments. Dolphy also sang in the choir at his local church as a child led by Reverend Dr. Hampton B Hawes, the father of Eric’s childhood friend and later legendary Jazz piano player Hampton Hawes. By the time Dolphy was in middle school he won a two year scholarship to the U.S.C. School of Music in a city wide competition but didn’t need it as he would be playing professionally in high school. Eric also did chores for music teacher Lloyd Reese in exchange for lessons and after high school would continue his studies for a short time at Los Angeles City College while gigging locally. He was able to play and perform on alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet and flute. After entering the army and the U.S. Naval School of Music, Dolphy returned home in 1953 and began playing with George Brown, Gerald Wilson and Buddy Collette. Collette suggested to Eric that he make his way to New York and join Chico Hamilton and he did.
In New York Eric would play with just about every legendary Jazz musician in the area. In 1960 he recorded on Ornette Coleman’s album ‘Free Jazz’ as well as played with Freddie Hubbard, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Scott LaFaro, Billy Higgins, Max Roach, Oliver Nelson and Eddie Blackwell among others. Dolphy toured and performed with John Coltrane in ’61 and ’62 contributed to Trane’s albums ‘Africa Brass’, ‘Impressions’, ‘Live at the Village Vanguard’ and ‘Ole’. Also in the early 1960s Eric performed and became close with Charles Mingus and some of those classic albums they made together include ‘Mingus!’, ‘Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus’, ‘Mingus at Antibes’, ‘The Town Hall Concert’, ‘Revenge!’ and more.
Dolphy also performed and recorded extensively as a leader and his first albums include ‘Out There’, ‘Outward Bound’, ‘Far Cry’ with Booker Little and ‘Magic’ all recorded in 1960 among even more that year. Some other notable albums Eric recorded as a leader includes ‘Here and There’ and ‘Live! At the Five Spot’ in 1961 as well as ‘The Illinois Concert’ in 1963 and ‘Out to Lunch!’ with Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Richard Davis and Tony Williams in 1964. Eric left on a European tour with Mingus in early 1964 planning to settle down there with his fiancé after the tour. However, in June 1964 Dolphy suffered a stroke from undiagnosed diabetes and passed away in Berlin at just thirty six years old. That same year Eric was inducted in Down Beat Magazine’s Hall of Fame.
Eric Dolphy’s short life did not prevent him from leaving a legacy as one of the most unique and influential voices in Jazz history. Dolphy was one of the first important bass clarinet players in Jazz as well as one of the most influential flautists. Even with contributions on those instruments he is best known as being one of the greatest alto saxophone players in this music. Eric’s way of living, music and style of play continues to influence and inspire young musicians today to explore themselves and the unknown through their music and find their own voice.
"Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician." – John Coltrane on Eric Dolphy
“When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.” – Eric Dolphy
In only thirty six years (1928-1964) Eric Dolphy was able to leave a legacy as one of the most unique and influential artists in Jazz. Today we pay tribute to the amazing life and extraordinary music of a true master on his 83rd birthday.
Happy Birthday Eric Dolphy!
Eric Allen Dolphy, Jr. was born on June 20, 1928 in Los Angeles, California. Eric began playing music on harmonica in elementary school before exploring other instruments. Dolphy also sang in the choir at his local church as a child led by Reverend Dr. Hampton B Hawes, the father of Eric’s childhood friend and later legendary Jazz piano player Hampton Hawes. By the time Dolphy was in middle school he won a two year scholarship to the U.S.C. School of Music in a city wide competition but didn’t need it as he would be playing professionally in high school. Eric also did chores for music teacher Lloyd Reese in exchange for lessons and after high school would continue his studies for a short time at Los Angeles City College while gigging locally. He was able to play and perform on alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet and flute. After entering the army and the U.S. Naval School of Music, Dolphy returned home in 1953 and began playing with George Brown, Gerald Wilson and Buddy Collette. Collette suggested to Eric that he make his way to New York and join Chico Hamilton and he did.
In New York Eric would play with just about every legendary Jazz musician in the area. In 1960 he recorded on Ornette Coleman’s album ‘Free Jazz’ as well as played with Freddie Hubbard, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Scott LaFaro, Billy Higgins, Max Roach, Oliver Nelson and Eddie Blackwell among others. Dolphy toured and performed with John Coltrane in ’61 and ’62 contributed to Trane’s albums ‘Africa Brass’, ‘Impressions’, ‘Live at the Village Vanguard’ and ‘Ole’. Also in the early 1960s Eric performed and became close with Charles Mingus and some of those classic albums they made together include ‘Mingus!’, ‘Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus’, ‘Mingus at Antibes’, ‘The Town Hall Concert’, ‘Revenge!’ and more.
Dolphy also performed and recorded extensively as a leader and his first albums include ‘Out There’, ‘Outward Bound’, ‘Far Cry’ with Booker Little and ‘Magic’ all recorded in 1960 among even more that year. Some other notable albums Eric recorded as a leader includes ‘Here and There’ and ‘Live! At the Five Spot’ in 1961 as well as ‘The Illinois Concert’ in 1963 and ‘Out to Lunch!’ with Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Richard Davis and Tony Williams in 1964. Eric left on a European tour with Mingus in early 1964 planning to settle down there with his fiancé after the tour. However, in June 1964 Dolphy suffered a stroke from undiagnosed diabetes and passed away in Berlin at just thirty six years old. That same year Eric was inducted in Down Beat Magazine’s Hall of Fame.
Eric Dolphy’s short life did not prevent him from leaving a legacy as one of the most unique and influential voices in Jazz history. Dolphy was one of the first important bass clarinet players in Jazz as well as one of the most influential flautists. Even with contributions on those instruments he is best known as being one of the greatest alto saxophone players in this music. Eric’s way of living, music and style of play continues to influence and inspire young musicians today to explore themselves and the unknown through their music and find their own voice.
"Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician." – John Coltrane on Eric Dolphy
“When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.” – Eric Dolphy
Labels:
20th century Art,
African American Art,
Avant Garde art,
Eric Dolphy,
Improvisation,
Jazz composition,
Jazz history,
Virtuosity
Eric Allan Dolphy was a jazz musician who played alto saxophone, flute and bass clarinet.
Dolphy was one of several groundbreaking jazz alto players to rise to prominence in the 1960s. He was also the first important bass clarinet soloist in jazz, and among the earliest significant flute soloists; he is arguably the greatest jazz improviser on either instrument. On early recordings, he occasionally played traditional B-flat soprano clarinet. His improvisational style was characterized by a near volcanic flow of ideas, utilizing wide intervals based largely on the 12-tone scale, in addition to using an array of animal- like effects which almost made his instruments speak. Although Dolphy's work is sometimes classified as free jazz, his compositions and solos had a logic uncharacteristic of many other free jazz musicians of the day; even as such, he was definitively avant-garde. In the years after his death his music was more aptly described as being “too out to be in and too in to be out.”
Dolphy was born in Los Angeles and was educated at Los Angeles City College. He performed locally for several years, most notably as a member of the big band led by Roy Porter. Dolphy finally had his big break as a member of Chico Hamilton's quintet, with Hamilton he became known to a wider audience and was able to tour extensively through 1958, when he parted ways with Hamilton and moved to New York City.
Dolphy wasted little time upon settling in New York City, quickly forming several fruitful musical partnerships, the two most important ones being with jazz legends Charles Mingus and John Coltrane, musicians he'd known for several years. While his formal musical collaboration with Coltrane was short (less than a year between 1961-62), his association with Mingus continued intermittently from 1959 until Dolphy's death in 1964. Dolphy was held in the highest regard by both musicians - Mingus considered Dolphy to be his most talented interpreter and Coltrane thought him his only musical equal.
Coltrane had gained an audience and critical notice with Miles Davis's quintet. Although Coltrane's quintets with Dolphy (including the Village Vanguard and Africa/Brass sessions) are now legendary, they provoked Down Beat magazine to brand Coltrane and Dolphy's music as 'anti- jazz.' Coltrane later said of this criticism “they made it appear that we didn't even know the first thing about music (...) it hurt me to see (Dolphy) get hurt in this thing.”
The initial release of Coltrane's stay at the Vanguard selected three tracks, only one of which featured Dolphy. After being issued haphazardly over the next 30 years, a comprehensive box set featuring all of the recorded music from the Vanguard was released by Impulse! in 1997. The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings carried over 15 tracks featuring Dolphy on alto saxophone and bass clarinet, adding a new dimension to these already classic recordings. A later Pablo box set from Coltrane's European tours of the early 1960s collected more recordings with Dolphy for the buying public.
During this period, Dolphy also played in a number of challenging settings, notably in key recordings by Ornette Coleman (Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation), Oliver Nelson (The Blues and the Abstract Truth) and George Russell (Ezz- thetic), but also with Gunther Schuller and Max Roach among others.
Dolphy's recording career as a leader began with the Prestige label. His association with the label spanned across 13 albums recorded from April 1960 to September 1961, though he was not the leader for all of the sessions. Prestige eventually released a nine-CD box set containing all of Dolphy's recorded output for the label.
Dolphy's first two albums as leader were Outward Bound and Out There. The first is more accessible and rooted in the style of bop than some later releases, but it still offered up challenging performances, which at least partly accounts for the record label's choice to include “out” in the title. Out There is closer to the third stream music which would also form part of Dolphy's legacy, and reminiscent also of the instrumentation of the Hamilton group with Ron Carter on cello. Far Cry was also recorded for Prestige in 1960 and represented his first pairing with trumpeter Booker Little, a like-minded spirit with whom he would go on to make a set of legendary live recordings (At the Five Spot) before Little's tragic death at the age of 23.
Dolphy would record several unaccompanied cuts on saxophone, which at the time had been done only by Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins before him. The album Far Cry contains one of his more memorable performances on the Gross-Lawrence standard Tenderly on alto saxophone, but it was his subsequent tour of Europe that quickly set high standards for solo performance with his exhilarating bass clarinet renditions of Billie Holiday's God Bless The Child. Numerous recordings were made of live performances by Dolphy, and these have been issued by many sometimes dubious record labels, drifting in and out of print ever since.
20th century classical music also played a significant role in Dolphy's musical career, having performed and recorded Edgard Varèse's Density 21.5 for solo flute as well as other classical works, and participated heavily in the Third Stream efforts of the 1960s.
In July 1963, Dolphy and producer Alan Douglas arranged recording sessions for which his sidemen were among the leading emerging musicians of the day. The results were his Iron Man and Conversations LPs.
In 1964, Dolphy signed with the legendary Blue Note label and recorded Out to Lunch (once again, the label insisted on using “out” in the title). This album was deeply rooted in the avant garde, and Dolphy's solos are as dissonant and unpredictable as anything he ever recorded. Out to Lunch is often regarded not only as Dolphy's finest album, but also as one of the greatest jazz recordings ever made.
After Out to Lunch and an appearance as a sideman on Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Dolphy left to tour Europe with Charles Mingus' sextet (one of Mingus' most underrated bands and without a doubt one of the most exciting) in early 1964. From there he intended to settle in Europe with his fiancée, who was working on the ballet scene in Paris. After leaving Mingus, he performed with and recorded a few sides with various European bands and was preparing to join Albert Ayler for a recording.
On the evening of June 28, 1964, Dolphy collapsed on the streets of Berlin and was brought to a hospital. The attending hospital physicians, who had no idea that Dolphy was a diabetic, thought that he (like so many other jazz musicians) had overdosed on drugs, so they left him to lie in a hospital bed until the “drugs” had run their course.
The notes to the Prestige nine-disc set say he “collapsed in his hotel room and when brought to the hospital he was diagnosed as being in a diabetic coma. After being administered a shot of insulin (apparently a type stronger than what was then available in the US) he lapsed into insulin shock and died.”
Dolphy would die the next day in a diabetic coma, leaving a short but tremendous legacy in the jazz world, which was immediately honored with his induction into the Down Beat magazine Hall of Fame that same year. Coltrane paid tribute to Dolphy in an interview: “Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician.”
Dolphy's musical presence was deeply influential to a who's who of young jazz musicians who would become legends in their own right. Dolphy worked intermittently with Ron Carter and Freddie Hubbard throughout his career, and in later years he hired Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson and Woody Shaw at various times to work in his live and studio bands. Out to Lunch featured yet another young lion who had just begun working with Dolphy in drummer Tony Williams, just as his participation on the Point of Departure session brought his influence into contact with up and coming tenor man Joe Henderson.
Carter, Hancock and Williams would go on to become one of the quintessential avant-garde rhythm sections of the decade, both together on their own albums and as the backbone of the second great quintet of Miles Davis. This part of the second great quintet is an ironic footnote for Davis, who was not fond of Dolphy's music yet absorbed a rhythm section who had all worked under Dolphy and created a band whose brand of “out” was unsurprisingly very similar to Dolphy's.
In addition, his work with jazz and rock producer Alan Douglas allowed Dolphy's unique brand of musical expression to posthumously spread to musicians in the jazz fusion and rock environments, most notably with artists John McLaughlin and Jimi Hendrix. Frank Zappa, an eclectic performer who drew some of his inspiration from jazz music, paid tribute to Dolphy's style in the instrumental The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/eric-dolphy-a-deeply-dedicated-musician-eric-dolphy-by-nic-jones.php
Brian Morton has referred to Dolphy's career as a series of transitions1 and there is something in this, hinting as it does at a more fundamental truth about Dolphy's music, namely that it didn't stay in one place. Certainly Dolphy underwent a relatively public process of musical evolution the like of which recordings were and continue to be too capricious to capture fully, and as such his legacy on record represents perhaps too deterministic a picture of his work. The nature of his music is also perhaps reflected in the scant attention it has received from writers and commentators in the decades since his death.2
He remains an elusive figure, and this is due in some part to the leaders with whom he recorded. Whilst the likes of John Coltrane and Charles Mingus are mentioned in any roster of the music's greats, Dolphy remains awkwardly placed by comparison, and considered perhaps only as some kind of iconoclast for whom death came too early for rational evaluation. This does not of course address one of the central characteristics of his life -as an African American intellectual Dolphy enjoyed a status with far greater implications than that of the jazz musician alone.
If he is dealt with in purely stylistic terms things are no easier. Two of his three principal horns of choice -the flute and the bass clarinet- had and continue to have only the most cursory histories within the music, and Dolphy's approach to both of them was always quirkily inndividualistic. His alto sax playing was more firmly rooted in the jazz continuum, and like so many others he drew from the deep well of inspiration that was Charlie Parker.
But as was his way Dolphy took that influence and fashioned something from it that was his. This is well exemplified by Curtsy from an album he cut in partnership with Ken McIntyre, where it's Dolphy whose work seems somehow the more secure within the post-bop idiom whilst at the same time it also hints strongly at where the music might have gone.
If with the questionable benefit of hindsight Dolphy's work seems like some kind of artistic cul-de-sac this is due in no small part to the fact that his influence has never been as deeply entrenched as, say, that of Coltrane. That aside, the sheer awkwardness of his oeuvre renders it far from being the easiest thing to navigate a way around. The old standby about some given musician being his own man -or her own woman- can only too readily be applied to Dolphy. But this again falls well short of an evaluation of his work.
To hear his clarinet work on Mal Waldron's "Warm Canto"3 for example is to hear the work of a musician with more than a passing acquaintance with the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, hardly the most obvious points of reference for the improvising jazz musician, and the point is underlined by the way a musician like Freddie Hubbard comprehended Dolphy's music. If nothing else, Hubbard proved by default that Dolphy's concerns lay with things other than technically flawless musicianship.
Perhaps the nearest thing we have to a present day Eric Dolphy is Greg Osby, although Dolphy's influence has been heard in the work of both Anthony Braxton and Oliver Lake. Osby has proven himself similarly willing to question the forms of jazz at the same time as he goes about the task of assembling a distinctive body of music on record with no little intellectual rigour. Ultimately, however, what the passing of time has revealed is just how awkward a figure Dolphy remains. In times when individual Coltrane albums are subject to commemorative froth, the neglect of Dolphy suggests an unwillingness to grapple with his uneasy legacy.
1 Gone In The Air, Article in Jazz Review , March 2004
2 To the best of this writer's knowledge Vladimir Simosko and Barry Tepperman's Eric Dolphy. A Musical Biography & Discography (1971) is the only extended work devoted to Dolphy and his music.
3 On Looking Ahead (Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 252-2)
Related Article:
Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings
Born: June 20, 1928 | Died: June 29, 1964
Eric Allan Dolphy was a jazz musician who played alto saxophone, flute and bass clarinet.
Dolphy was one of several groundbreaking jazz alto players to rise to prominence in the 1960s. He was also the first important bass clarinet soloist in jazz, and among the earliest significant flute soloists; he is arguably the greatest jazz improviser on either instrument. On early recordings, he occasionally played traditional B-flat soprano clarinet. His improvisational style was characterized by a near volcanic flow of ideas, utilizing wide intervals based largely on the 12-tone scale, in addition to using an array of animal- like effects which almost made his instruments speak. Although Dolphy's work is sometimes classified as free jazz, his compositions and solos had a logic uncharacteristic of many other free jazz musicians of the day; even as such, he was definitively avant-garde. In the years after his death his music was more aptly described as being “too out to be in and too in to be out.”
Dolphy was born in Los Angeles and was educated at Los Angeles City College. He performed locally for several years, most notably as a member of the big band led by Roy Porter. Dolphy finally had his big break as a member of Chico Hamilton's quintet, with Hamilton he became known to a wider audience and was able to tour extensively through 1958, when he parted ways with Hamilton and moved to New York City.
Dolphy wasted little time upon settling in New York City, quickly forming several fruitful musical partnerships, the two most important ones being with jazz legends Charles Mingus and John Coltrane, musicians he'd known for several years. While his formal musical collaboration with Coltrane was short (less than a year between 1961-62), his association with Mingus continued intermittently from 1959 until Dolphy's death in 1964. Dolphy was held in the highest regard by both musicians - Mingus considered Dolphy to be his most talented interpreter and Coltrane thought him his only musical equal.
Coltrane had gained an audience and critical notice with Miles Davis's quintet. Although Coltrane's quintets with Dolphy (including the Village Vanguard and Africa/Brass sessions) are now legendary, they provoked Down Beat magazine to brand Coltrane and Dolphy's music as 'anti- jazz.' Coltrane later said of this criticism “they made it appear that we didn't even know the first thing about music (...) it hurt me to see (Dolphy) get hurt in this thing.”
The initial release of Coltrane's stay at the Vanguard selected three tracks, only one of which featured Dolphy. After being issued haphazardly over the next 30 years, a comprehensive box set featuring all of the recorded music from the Vanguard was released by Impulse! in 1997. The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings carried over 15 tracks featuring Dolphy on alto saxophone and bass clarinet, adding a new dimension to these already classic recordings. A later Pablo box set from Coltrane's European tours of the early 1960s collected more recordings with Dolphy for the buying public.
During this period, Dolphy also played in a number of challenging settings, notably in key recordings by Ornette Coleman (Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation), Oliver Nelson (The Blues and the Abstract Truth) and George Russell (Ezz- thetic), but also with Gunther Schuller and Max Roach among others.
Dolphy's recording career as a leader began with the Prestige label. His association with the label spanned across 13 albums recorded from April 1960 to September 1961, though he was not the leader for all of the sessions. Prestige eventually released a nine-CD box set containing all of Dolphy's recorded output for the label.
Dolphy's first two albums as leader were Outward Bound and Out There. The first is more accessible and rooted in the style of bop than some later releases, but it still offered up challenging performances, which at least partly accounts for the record label's choice to include “out” in the title. Out There is closer to the third stream music which would also form part of Dolphy's legacy, and reminiscent also of the instrumentation of the Hamilton group with Ron Carter on cello. Far Cry was also recorded for Prestige in 1960 and represented his first pairing with trumpeter Booker Little, a like-minded spirit with whom he would go on to make a set of legendary live recordings (At the Five Spot) before Little's tragic death at the age of 23.
Dolphy would record several unaccompanied cuts on saxophone, which at the time had been done only by Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins before him. The album Far Cry contains one of his more memorable performances on the Gross-Lawrence standard Tenderly on alto saxophone, but it was his subsequent tour of Europe that quickly set high standards for solo performance with his exhilarating bass clarinet renditions of Billie Holiday's God Bless The Child. Numerous recordings were made of live performances by Dolphy, and these have been issued by many sometimes dubious record labels, drifting in and out of print ever since.
20th century classical music also played a significant role in Dolphy's musical career, having performed and recorded Edgard Varèse's Density 21.5 for solo flute as well as other classical works, and participated heavily in the Third Stream efforts of the 1960s.
In July 1963, Dolphy and producer Alan Douglas arranged recording sessions for which his sidemen were among the leading emerging musicians of the day. The results were his Iron Man and Conversations LPs.
In 1964, Dolphy signed with the legendary Blue Note label and recorded Out to Lunch (once again, the label insisted on using “out” in the title). This album was deeply rooted in the avant garde, and Dolphy's solos are as dissonant and unpredictable as anything he ever recorded. Out to Lunch is often regarded not only as Dolphy's finest album, but also as one of the greatest jazz recordings ever made.
After Out to Lunch and an appearance as a sideman on Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Dolphy left to tour Europe with Charles Mingus' sextet (one of Mingus' most underrated bands and without a doubt one of the most exciting) in early 1964. From there he intended to settle in Europe with his fiancée, who was working on the ballet scene in Paris. After leaving Mingus, he performed with and recorded a few sides with various European bands and was preparing to join Albert Ayler for a recording.
On the evening of June 28, 1964, Dolphy collapsed on the streets of Berlin and was brought to a hospital. The attending hospital physicians, who had no idea that Dolphy was a diabetic, thought that he (like so many other jazz musicians) had overdosed on drugs, so they left him to lie in a hospital bed until the “drugs” had run their course.
The notes to the Prestige nine-disc set say he “collapsed in his hotel room and when brought to the hospital he was diagnosed as being in a diabetic coma. After being administered a shot of insulin (apparently a type stronger than what was then available in the US) he lapsed into insulin shock and died.”
Dolphy would die the next day in a diabetic coma, leaving a short but tremendous legacy in the jazz world, which was immediately honored with his induction into the Down Beat magazine Hall of Fame that same year. Coltrane paid tribute to Dolphy in an interview: “Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician.”
Dolphy's musical presence was deeply influential to a who's who of young jazz musicians who would become legends in their own right. Dolphy worked intermittently with Ron Carter and Freddie Hubbard throughout his career, and in later years he hired Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson and Woody Shaw at various times to work in his live and studio bands. Out to Lunch featured yet another young lion who had just begun working with Dolphy in drummer Tony Williams, just as his participation on the Point of Departure session brought his influence into contact with up and coming tenor man Joe Henderson.
Carter, Hancock and Williams would go on to become one of the quintessential avant-garde rhythm sections of the decade, both together on their own albums and as the backbone of the second great quintet of Miles Davis. This part of the second great quintet is an ironic footnote for Davis, who was not fond of Dolphy's music yet absorbed a rhythm section who had all worked under Dolphy and created a band whose brand of “out” was unsurprisingly very similar to Dolphy's.
In addition, his work with jazz and rock producer Alan Douglas allowed Dolphy's unique brand of musical expression to posthumously spread to musicians in the jazz fusion and rock environments, most notably with artists John McLaughlin and Jimi Hendrix. Frank Zappa, an eclectic performer who drew some of his inspiration from jazz music, paid tribute to Dolphy's style in the instrumental The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/eric-dolphy-a-deeply-dedicated-musician-eric-dolphy-by-nic-jones.php
Eric Dolphy: A Deeply Dedicated Musician
In the forty years since his death Eric Dolphy's career has taken on a
kind of substance that it never had in his lifetime. Partly this is due
to the course jazz has taken within those forty years, one of the end
results of which is a scene that in many ways is more conservative now
than it was then.
Brian Morton has referred to Dolphy's career as a series of transitions1 and there is something in this, hinting as it does at a more fundamental truth about Dolphy's music, namely that it didn't stay in one place. Certainly Dolphy underwent a relatively public process of musical evolution the like of which recordings were and continue to be too capricious to capture fully, and as such his legacy on record represents perhaps too deterministic a picture of his work. The nature of his music is also perhaps reflected in the scant attention it has received from writers and commentators in the decades since his death.2
He remains an elusive figure, and this is due in some part to the leaders with whom he recorded. Whilst the likes of John Coltrane and Charles Mingus are mentioned in any roster of the music's greats, Dolphy remains awkwardly placed by comparison, and considered perhaps only as some kind of iconoclast for whom death came too early for rational evaluation. This does not of course address one of the central characteristics of his life -as an African American intellectual Dolphy enjoyed a status with far greater implications than that of the jazz musician alone.
If he is dealt with in purely stylistic terms things are no easier. Two of his three principal horns of choice -the flute and the bass clarinet- had and continue to have only the most cursory histories within the music, and Dolphy's approach to both of them was always quirkily inndividualistic. His alto sax playing was more firmly rooted in the jazz continuum, and like so many others he drew from the deep well of inspiration that was Charlie Parker.
But as was his way Dolphy took that influence and fashioned something from it that was his. This is well exemplified by Curtsy from an album he cut in partnership with Ken McIntyre, where it's Dolphy whose work seems somehow the more secure within the post-bop idiom whilst at the same time it also hints strongly at where the music might have gone.
If with the questionable benefit of hindsight Dolphy's work seems like some kind of artistic cul-de-sac this is due in no small part to the fact that his influence has never been as deeply entrenched as, say, that of Coltrane. That aside, the sheer awkwardness of his oeuvre renders it far from being the easiest thing to navigate a way around. The old standby about some given musician being his own man -or her own woman- can only too readily be applied to Dolphy. But this again falls well short of an evaluation of his work.
To hear his clarinet work on Mal Waldron's "Warm Canto"3 for example is to hear the work of a musician with more than a passing acquaintance with the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, hardly the most obvious points of reference for the improvising jazz musician, and the point is underlined by the way a musician like Freddie Hubbard comprehended Dolphy's music. If nothing else, Hubbard proved by default that Dolphy's concerns lay with things other than technically flawless musicianship.
Perhaps the nearest thing we have to a present day Eric Dolphy is Greg Osby, although Dolphy's influence has been heard in the work of both Anthony Braxton and Oliver Lake. Osby has proven himself similarly willing to question the forms of jazz at the same time as he goes about the task of assembling a distinctive body of music on record with no little intellectual rigour. Ultimately, however, what the passing of time has revealed is just how awkward a figure Dolphy remains. In times when individual Coltrane albums are subject to commemorative froth, the neglect of Dolphy suggests an unwillingness to grapple with his uneasy legacy.
1 Gone In The Air, Article in Jazz Review , March 2004
2 To the best of this writer's knowledge Vladimir Simosko and Barry Tepperman's Eric Dolphy. A Musical Biography & Discography (1971) is the only extended work devoted to Dolphy and his music.
3 On Looking Ahead (Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 252-2)
Related Article:
Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings
THE MUSIC OF ERIC DOLPHY: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. DOLPHY:
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/eric-dolphy-the-complete-prestige-recordings-by-mike-neely.php
Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings
Eric Dolphy was no ordinary musical talent. While attending junior high
school Dolphy was offered a scholarship to the University of Southern
California School of Music. His parents subsequently renovated a garage
into a rehearsal studio on their modest Los Angeles city lot, a studio
that would host the sounds of Gerald Wilson, Buddy Collette, Max Roach,
and Clifford Brown during Dolphy's youth and early twenties.
Dolphys's boyhood dream of playing for the L.A. Symphony would never be fulfilled, but his intensive classical training would be funneled into the career of a major jazz musician and composer. Eric Dolphy's talent and dedication quickly opened doors to the highest echelons of the jazz world including the recordings of Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. His accomplishments also brought him to the attention of such classical music notables as Gunther Schuller and Edgar Varese.
Dolphy's short life extended from 1928 to 1964. During these 36 years he established himself as a significant new voice in jazz, developing the resources of the primary instruments he chose to play - alto saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute. He was also a composer and arranger of note as his work on Coltrane's Africa Brass and on his own album Out To Lunch will attest.
During his career Dolphy recorded with many of the finest musicians of his time and Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings includes the bulk of his recordings as a leader. This superb box set covers the time period of April. 1960 to September, 1961, a time when the incredibly in demand Dolphy recorded enough material to result in the nine discs of this compilation.
Six of the sessions are Dolphy led sessions. On the other six, Oliver
Nelson, Ken McIntyre, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Ron Carter, and Mal Waldron
are the leaders. Nelson is the leader of two sessions. The quality of
the bands, whether Dolphy led or not, is, with a couple of exceptions,
remarkable. Dolphy had the authority and drawing power to play with the
best musicians of his day from the very beginning of his career as a
leader. To help put Eric Dolphy into perspective, his first recording
session as a leader, Outward Bound , was graced by the presence
of Freddie Hubbard, Jaki Byard, George Tucker, and Roy Haynes. The
sound engineer for the recording was Rudy Van Gelder. At the time,
Dolphy was 32 years old.
The box set opens with Dolphy's composition "G.W." a tribute to his mentor - trumpeter, composer, arranger, and big band leader Gerald Wilson. The introduction to "G.W." is a complex unison alto sax and trumpet passage that establishes the band as being at home in the harmonies of not only the traditions of jazz but also those of 20th century classical music. A spectacular Dolphy solo follows, almost as if brashly announcing a major new voice in jazz. The drama of the opening track - the nod to his mentor, then the fast paced angular alto solo with its intervallic leaps of striking originality - add up to one of the more astounding debut tracks in the history of jazz.
In short, this 1960 recording of "G.W." demonstrates that Dolphy has mastered the most severe challenges of be-bop, and then has added some new challenges of his own. The question becomes not who is this new leader and can he play, but rather who is this young master and who are his peers? After his saxophone virtuosity and sophistication is established (for anyone with the ears to hear), Dolphy proceeds in an almost casual manner to switch to bass clarinet on the next track, doubling the opening melody line of "On Green Dolphin Street" with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet. Dolphy then slides into a lyrical, restrained solo that brings home that this new leader not only is a virtuoso on alto sax (and composer of note) but he is also a master of the bass clarinet. To add another twist - who in 1960 played jazz bass clarinet?
The third track "Les" has Dolphy returning to alto saxophone, significantly ratcheting up the tempo from the opening alto performance "G.W." If there was any doubt about the sax mastery of Dolphy, this track seems intent on burying the issue forever. The interplay between Hubbard and Dolphy is playful and fascinating for its breathtaking precision and imaginative risk taking.
The recording, having already established Dolphy as a composer,
saxophonist, and bass clarinetist, moves on to the next track in which
he picks up the flute on the Rodgers-Hart composition "Glad To Be
Unhappy." The opening sad, sweet Dolphy solo, poignantly accompanied by
Byard, takes off suddenly in mid-flight to become a display of the
startling technique and the depth of emotion that was to typify the best
of Eric Dolphy. By the end of the solo the realization sets in that
this is the third instrument that this musician has mastered. The
question concerning Outward Bound becomes has there ever been a more accomplished debut album by a young leader?
Of course, by the age of 32 Dolphy had extensive experience as a performer and sideman in the studio, but the maturity of his playing, the performance of the band, and the quality of Dolphy's four original compositions suggest to this listener that anyone would be challenged to find the equal of this debut. To try to put this in a larger perspective, on his first recording as a leader Eric Dolphy set the standard for many of the most talented multi-instrumentalists of the next forty years of jazz. David Murray, Julius Hemphill, James Carter, and Marty Ehrlich can all be considered to have followed the lead of Dolphy, but even in this group of astounding talents it is doubtful that the jazz world has yet heard Dolphy's equal.
Part of the pleasure of listening to Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings is hearing the various bands Dolphy played in as a leader or a sideman. The second session in the box set opens with Oliver Nelson's "Screaming the Blues," the title track to the album. This is a far more traditional, gospel and blues influenced session featuring a thoughtful band with a rhythm section that can boast of Richard Wyands, George Duvivier, and Roy Haynes. Not surprisingly, this session has a wonderful, dance like undercurrent that doesn't let up. As a soloist Dolphy shares the lead horn duties with the underrated Richard Williams on trumpet and the always solid Oliver Nelson on tenor sax. These three musicians cohere into a marvelous horn/sax section. Dolphy solos on alto and bass clarinet throughout the session, and although he is a bit more restrained harmonically than during his own sessions, Dolphy fits right in nudging along the other very able soloists.
Sometimes when listening to Dolphy both Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker come to mind in the context of their bands, that although these three great soloists were in many ways conceptually beyond their peers they do fit in somehow in a curious straddling of the past and future. Dolphy could play the blues and the very satisfactory Oliver Nelson session demonstrates how innovation and tradition can mesh in a fruitful alliance. As a closer to the session, Dolphy is featured on a modernistic "Alto-It is," a Nelson boppish composition that features Dolphy in an outrageously showy solo, framed by the horn/sax section in a sharp, vigorous performance - this is powerful ensemble work.
The next session finds Dolphy playing as a sideman on Ken McIntyre's Looking Ahead. Both Dolphy and McIntyre play alto and flute. Again, the band personnel is first rate with Walter Bishop Jr. on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Arthur Taylor on drums. Five of the six compositions are McIntyre compositions featuring tight ensemble work. As a soloist McIntyre is somewhat predictable and not in class with Dolphy or the other musicians but McIntyre and Dolphy play beautifully on unison passages. The rhythm section casually keeps everything in the groove. The combination of McIntyre on flute and Dolphy on alto works especially well together on "Dianna."
Disc three starts off with the second Dolphy session as a leader. Out There features Ron Carter on cello and George Duvivier on bass. Roy Haynes returns in the drummer slot. The title track of the album has Dolphy in fleet form moving at a be-bop pace with somewhat dissonant harmonies. Dolphy's weaving in and out of the rhythm section in a wide looping manner suggests a different relationship to the rhythm section than the typical be-bop soloist.
The doubled voices of Dolphy on bass clarinet and Carter's bowed cello opens Dolphy's composition "Serene." This is a fascinating composition with a later pizzicato cello solo followed by a concise Haynes and Dolphy solo exchange. George Duvivier holds everything together throughout with a solid bass foundation. The session is interesting throughout with doubled voice combinations of cello and Dolphy on alto or clarinets (bass or B-flat). Solo exchanges and intertwining lines between Carter and Dolphy are particularly interesting; the combination of flute and bowed cello has a fresh sound and is affective throughout. There are flaws. At times Carter's intonation on bowed cello sounds a little off, but overall the exchanges between Carter and Dolphy and between Carter and Duvivier are worth a careful study. The rapport is wonderful.
This daring session was recorded only four months after Dolphy's Outward Bound debut as a leader. The contrast between the extroverted Freddie Hubbard/Dolphy debut exchange and the introverted Ron Carter/Dolphy follow-up exchange is striking. Certainly anyone following the development of the young Eric Dolphy must have cocked their heads at the emotional range demonstrated in these two sessions.
The next session issued as Caribe is not heavyweight Dolphy. It's akin to Charlie Parker's latin tinged South of the Border recordings, although Dolphy plays in a small group setting paired with the Latin Jazz Quintet. The instrumentation includes piano, bass, drums, vibes, timbales, and congas. Throughout Dolphy is the predominant soloist. There is something appealing about hearing Dolphy in this relaxed setting. The band plays comfortably together, and pianist Gene Casey and bassist Bill Ellington are notable. Dolphy provides a bit of intensity to the session but no one gets too worked up, and oddly enough Dolphy fits right in. At times there is a blues or gospel overlay to the proceedings with "Sunday Go Meetin' " being a highlight for the playing of the band as a unit and for Dolphy's flute solo.
The following session finds Dolphy as a sideman in Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis' fourteen piece big band. This is quite a band with the likes of Jimmy Cleveland, Clark Terry , Richard Williams, Jerome Richardson, Oliver Nelson, and Roy Haynes aboard. The able pair of Oliver Nelson and Ernie Wilkens provided the arrangements. With this lineup, and Davis in the solo spotlight, not much is likely to go wrong, and that was the case. The band and Davis are inspired throughout. Dolphy in the second alto sax chair, behind Nelson, doesn't get to solo on these six tracks but the session does leave you wondering how much of Davis did Dolphy listen to growing up. They do share a vocal orientation to the instrument and in moments, and I do stress moments, the bluesy Davis sounds like a much more conservative Eric Dolphy.
The second half of disc four presents another classic Dolphy session as a leader. Far Cry presents the talented quintet of Dolphy, Booker Little, Jaki Byard, Ron Carter, and Roy Haynes. The performance is as good as the cast. What is notable it that the disc opens with two Jaki Byard compositions "Mrs. Parker Of K.C." and "Ode To Charlie Parker." The Byard and Dolphy solos suggest how far away from a classic be-bop conception the band has moved. The "Ode To Charlie Parker" opens with a plaintive trumpet and flute dialogue. Booker Little's beautiful ballad paced solo intertwines with Dolphy's more aggressive, faster paced flute. The be-bop of Dolphy, no matter what instrument he plays, is not the be-bop of the 1945-55 era. The intense linear focus of classic bebop has been broadened rhythmically and harmonically.
Dolphy's now fairly well known composition "Miss Ann" is notable for the boppish unison opening and subsequent Dolphy solo on alto. As in many of Dolphy's recordings he seems to be waiting on the other soloists. His intensity and daring is imposing and I would imagine more than a bit intimidating. Booker Little holds his own in the fast paced exchange with Dolphy toward the end of the performance. The last track of the session, the solo alto performance of Dolphy on "Tenderly" is a Dolphy show piece and could be played to good effect to most any Dolphy doubter.
Disc five returns us to the Oliver Nelson band of Screamin' The Blues minus the trumpeter Richard Williams. Again, this is Nelson's session. Much of the music is along the lines of Nelson's early blues and R & B influenced work. The rhythm section of Wyands, Duvivier, and Haynes can hardly be praised enough for their precision and clarity of conception as a unit. The rapport and the energy generated between Nelson and Dolphy in their unison work is something to behold; there is great power in their passages together. The solo contrast between the simpler, bluesy sax style of Nelson and Dolphy's sometimes almost baroque solo style is somehow compatible. Dolphy's deep sense of the blues is conveyed through even in the complexities of his most modernist mode. This is another excellent Nelson/Dolphy session. "Images," "Ralph's New Blues," and the title track "Straight Ahead" are highlights.
The following session presents bassist/cellist Ron Carter as the leader with the very able cast of Dolphy, Mal Waldron, George Duvivier, and Charlie Persip. Entitled Where? this session opens with an intriguing bass clarinet and cello unison line in "Rally". The Dolphy/Carter combination of sonorities is odd and surprising. The following track "Duet" features and extended dialog between Duvivier and Carter. Waldron and Persip provide low key, excellent support for the two bass masters at play. At times, one bassist switches off into the solo slot while the other bassist drops back into the trio.
"Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise" has an energetic Dolphy on alto above a very attentive band. Charlie Persip's low-key ego is a real plus throughout the session, his accompaniment and his sharp, lively solos add to this impressive group. Throughout this session Carter's bowed bass work is excellent. Being Ron Carter's session, we hear a considerably more restrained Dolphy than in most of the box set. Perhaps out of respect for Carter's conception of the overall session, he tones down his typical harmonic and rhythmic flights. He certainly is far more conservative than on his own session Out There which presents the exact same musicians minus Waldron. Pianist Mal Waldron is a welcome addition, and the comfortable rapport of the band is evident. Dolphy contributes a series of solid, imaginative solos on all three of his instruments.
The next session is Mal Waldron's classic recording The Quest.
It opens with a fiery, somewhat meandering Dolphy alto solo on "Status
Seeking," followed by Booker Ervin's tenor that is earthbound and
intense. The session long dialog between Dolphy and Booker is a fruitful
study in contrasts. The rhythm section is outstanding with Waldron, Joe
Benjamin, and Charlie Persip. Ron Carter plays cello throughout.
Pianist Mal Waldron's lyrical solos play off well against the
Dolphy/Ervin horn section. Waldron is a brilliant accompanist who plays
in a subtle, measured solo manner that meshes particularly well with
Dolphy. All six compositions are by Waldron including the magnificent
"Fire Waltz." A highlight of the session is Dolphy's melodic flute solo
on "Warm Canto," the interaction among Dolphy, Waldron, and Carter's
plucked cello is intricately beautiful. This is an exquisite trio of
soloists playing off of each others creating sheer magic.
The famous session that completes disc 6 is the Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot
recording. With Booker Little on trumpet, Mal Waldron on piano, Richard
Davis on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums, this is one of the truly
great jazz bands. It is one of the endless number of jazz misfortunes
that this band did not record more than once, and that this unit could
not have stayed together to develop into what they could have become.
Booker Little was to die a few months after this recording at the age of
23, of uremia.
The music recorded that night in July of 1961 takes up three tracks on disc 6, all of disc 7, and two tracks on disc 8. It opens with an extended Dolphy/Little duet on "Someone In Love." This lovely track is followed by Dolphy playing a long solo bass clarinet version of "God Bless The Child." The latter has been discussed as being one of Dolphy's finest performances on record. What is notable about this band is the easy going comfort of these five musicians playing together. Certainly the music is not casual; it's often intense, but there is an underlying feeling of trust and confidence in what is transpiring. In short, the lack of a big ego in the way is part of the success of this band. Waldron, Davis, and Blackwell each solo superbly on the long Dolphy composition "Aggression" highlighting the balance of this unit; they are also an immensely flexible, responsive rhythm section that is a match for the brilliance of the two major soloists. This is classic jazz.
The bulk of disc 8 and all of disc 9 takes us to Copenhagen, Denmark for two concert performances. Dolphy is backed by the Danish rhythm section of Bent Axen on piano, Erik Moseholm on bass, and Jorn Elniff on drums. The fare is standards and two Dolphy compositions. Chuck Israels steps in on one track of the second night playing a 13 minute duet, with Dolphy on flute. This is an able trio though not brilliant. The playing is somewhat uneven but throughout Dolphy soars above the rough spots which usually involve an over eager young drummer or a pianist who at times seems more worried about not making a mistake than being creative. The core of this band is the relationship between Dolphy and the impressive Erik Moseholm on bass.
Some of the highlights of the concert recordings are the opening to "Don't Blame Me," an excellent extended flute solo backed by the trio. The alternate take is also a gem. Dolphy is consistently interesting especially playing bass clarinet on "God Bless The Child" and on Benny Carter's "When Lights Are Low." The duet between Dolphy and Chuck Israels is also memorable. Dolphy plays beautifully track by track and when the band is playing well it becomes obvious why these promising musicians were chosen by Dolphy.
Overall, Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings presents some of the best work that Eric Dolphy recorded in his too short career. The musicians and bands Dolphy recorded with on these discs are always interesting and many of the bands are extraordinary. It has been a pleasure to listen to this music. In our time Eric Dolphy's place in jazz history seems somewhat up in the air. At times he seems to be acknowledged in a cursory manner deprived of the sustained attention that a major figure deserves. By the evidence of this box set alone we are talking about one of the finest jazz musicians to have graced the history of jazz.
It should be noted that 6 of the 9 discs are studio recordings engineered by Rudy Van Gelder. The sound quality is excellent, as one would expect. The live recordings are well recorded with minor flaws. All of the tracks have been re-mastered since the original releases. The accompanying booklet is one of the better box set booklets I've seen, with a clear presentation of the details of the recordings. The photos add up to a memorable jazz essay on Dolphy, along with two written pieces by Zan Stewart and Bill Kirchner. As if it isn't already obvious, this box set is highly recommended.
Personnel
Disc 1) "Outward Bound" with Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbbard, Jaki Byard, George Tucker, and Roy Haynes (tracks 1-9). "Screamin' The Blues" with Oliver Nelson, Eric Dolphy, Richard Williams, Richard Wyands, George Duvivier, and Roy Haynes (tracks 10-11).
Disc 2) above band continued (tracks 1-4). "Looking Ahead" with Ken McIntyre, Eric Dolphy, Walter Bishop, Jr., Sam Jones, and Arthur Taylor (tracks 5-10). "Out There" with Eric Dolphy, Ron Carter, George Duvivier, and Roy Haynes (track 11).
Disc 3) above band continued (tracks 1-6). "Caribe" with Eric Dolphy and the Latin Jazz Quintet, including Gene Casey, Charlie Simons, Bill Ellington, Manny Ramos, and Juan Amalbert (tracks 7-12). "Trane Whistle" with Eddie "Lockjaw Davis," Melba Liston, Jimmy Cleveland, Clark Terry, Richard Williams, Bobby Bryant, George Barrow, Jerome Richardson, Bob Ashton, Oliver Nelson, Eric Dolphy, Richard Wyands, Wendell Marshall, and Roy Haynes. Arrangements are by Oliver Nelson and Ernie Wilkens. (tracks 13-14).
Disc 4) same band continued (tracks 5-12). "Straight Ahead" with Oliver Nelson, Eric Dolphy, Richard Wyands, George Duvivier, and Roy Haynes (track 13).
Disc 5) same band as above (tracks 1-5). "Where?" with Ron Carter, Eric Dolphy, Mal Waldron, George Duvivier, and Charlie Persip (tracks 6-11). "The Quest" with Mal Waldron, Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin, Ron Carter, Joe Benjamin, and Charlie Persip (track 12).
Disc 6) same band as above (tracks 1-6). "Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot" with Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, Mal Waldron, Richard Davis, and Ed Blackwell (tracks 7-9).
Disc 7) same band as above on the entire disc (tracks 1-5).
Disc 8) same band as above (tracks 1-2). "Eric Dolphy in Europe" with Eric Dolphy, Bent Axen, Erik Moseholm, and Jorn Elniff (tracks 3-7) add Chuck Israels on track 6 only for a duet with Dolphy.
Disc 9) same trio as above with Dolphy on the entire disc (tracks 1-7).
* In the above list, the leader of the session is listed first in order of musicians.
Track Listing
Disc 1) G.W., On Green Dolphin Street, Les, 245, Glad To Be Unhappy, Miss Toni, April Fool, G.W., 245, Screamin' The Blues, March On, March On.
Disc 2) The Drive, The Meetin', Three Seconds, Alto-Itis, Lautir, Curtsy, Geo's Tune, They All Laughed, Head Shakin', Dianna, Out There.
Disc 3) Serene, The Baron, Eclipse, 17 West, Sketch of Melba, Feather, Caribe, Blues In 6/8, First Bass Line, Mambo Ricci, Spring Is Here, Sunday Go Meetin', Trane Whistle, Whole Nelson.
Disc 4) You Are Too Beautiful, The Stolen Moment, Walk Away, Jaws, Mrs. Parker Of K.C., Ode To Charlie Parker, Far Cry, Miss Ann, Left Alone, Tenderly, It's Magic, Serene, Images.
Disc 5) Six And Four, Mama Lou, Ralph's New Blues, Straight Ahead, III-44, Rally, Bass Duet, Softly As In A Morning Sunrise, Where?, Yes Indeed, Saucer Eyes, Status Seeking.
Disc 6) Duquility, Thirteen, We Diddit, Warm Canto, Warp And Woof, Fire Waltz, Like Someone In Love, God Bless The Child, Aggression.
Disc 7) Fire Waltz, Bee Vamp, The Prophet, Booker's Waltz, Status Seeking.
Disc 8) Numbers Eight/Potsa Lotsa, Bee Vamp, Don't Blame Me, When Lights Are Low, Don't Blame Me, Les, The Way You Look Tonight.
Disc 9) Woody'n You, Laura, Glad To Be Unhappy, God Bless The Child, In The Blues, Hi-Fly, Oleo.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/far-cry-eric-dolphy-fantasy-jazz-review-by-david-rickert.php
Track Listing: 1. Mrs. Parker of K.C. (Bird's Mother) 2. Ode to Charlie Parker 3. Far Cry
4. Miss Ann 5. Left Alone 6. Tenderly 7. It's Magic 8. Serene.
Personnel: Eric Dolphy-bass clarinet, alto sax, flute; Booker Little-trumpet; Jaki Byard-piano; Ron Carter-bass; Roy Haynes-drums.
Record Label: Fantasy Jazz
Style: Straight-ahead/Mainstream
Eric Dolphy - 'Out to Lunch!' (1964) [Full Album]
Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch!
Recorded and released in 1964
Tracklist:
00:00 Hat and Beard
08:23 Something Sweet, Something Tender
14:27 Gazzelloni
21:51 Out to Lunch
34:00 Straight Up and Down
Personnel:
Eric Dolphy - alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet
Freddie Hubbard - trumpet
Bobby Hutcherson - vibraphone
Richard Davis - bass
Tony Williams - drums
Dolphys's boyhood dream of playing for the L.A. Symphony would never be fulfilled, but his intensive classical training would be funneled into the career of a major jazz musician and composer. Eric Dolphy's talent and dedication quickly opened doors to the highest echelons of the jazz world including the recordings of Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. His accomplishments also brought him to the attention of such classical music notables as Gunther Schuller and Edgar Varese.
Dolphy's short life extended from 1928 to 1964. During these 36 years he established himself as a significant new voice in jazz, developing the resources of the primary instruments he chose to play - alto saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute. He was also a composer and arranger of note as his work on Coltrane's Africa Brass and on his own album Out To Lunch will attest.
During his career Dolphy recorded with many of the finest musicians of his time and Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings includes the bulk of his recordings as a leader. This superb box set covers the time period of April. 1960 to September, 1961, a time when the incredibly in demand Dolphy recorded enough material to result in the nine discs of this compilation.
Six of the sessions are Dolphy led sessions. On the other six, Oliver
Nelson, Ken McIntyre, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Ron Carter, and Mal Waldron
are the leaders. Nelson is the leader of two sessions. The quality of
the bands, whether Dolphy led or not, is, with a couple of exceptions,
remarkable. Dolphy had the authority and drawing power to play with the
best musicians of his day from the very beginning of his career as a
leader. To help put Eric Dolphy into perspective, his first recording
session as a leader, Outward Bound , was graced by the presence
of Freddie Hubbard, Jaki Byard, George Tucker, and Roy Haynes. The
sound engineer for the recording was Rudy Van Gelder. At the time,
Dolphy was 32 years old. The box set opens with Dolphy's composition "G.W." a tribute to his mentor - trumpeter, composer, arranger, and big band leader Gerald Wilson. The introduction to "G.W." is a complex unison alto sax and trumpet passage that establishes the band as being at home in the harmonies of not only the traditions of jazz but also those of 20th century classical music. A spectacular Dolphy solo follows, almost as if brashly announcing a major new voice in jazz. The drama of the opening track - the nod to his mentor, then the fast paced angular alto solo with its intervallic leaps of striking originality - add up to one of the more astounding debut tracks in the history of jazz.
In short, this 1960 recording of "G.W." demonstrates that Dolphy has mastered the most severe challenges of be-bop, and then has added some new challenges of his own. The question becomes not who is this new leader and can he play, but rather who is this young master and who are his peers? After his saxophone virtuosity and sophistication is established (for anyone with the ears to hear), Dolphy proceeds in an almost casual manner to switch to bass clarinet on the next track, doubling the opening melody line of "On Green Dolphin Street" with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet. Dolphy then slides into a lyrical, restrained solo that brings home that this new leader not only is a virtuoso on alto sax (and composer of note) but he is also a master of the bass clarinet. To add another twist - who in 1960 played jazz bass clarinet?
The third track "Les" has Dolphy returning to alto saxophone, significantly ratcheting up the tempo from the opening alto performance "G.W." If there was any doubt about the sax mastery of Dolphy, this track seems intent on burying the issue forever. The interplay between Hubbard and Dolphy is playful and fascinating for its breathtaking precision and imaginative risk taking.
The recording, having already established Dolphy as a composer,
saxophonist, and bass clarinetist, moves on to the next track in which
he picks up the flute on the Rodgers-Hart composition "Glad To Be
Unhappy." The opening sad, sweet Dolphy solo, poignantly accompanied by
Byard, takes off suddenly in mid-flight to become a display of the
startling technique and the depth of emotion that was to typify the best
of Eric Dolphy. By the end of the solo the realization sets in that
this is the third instrument that this musician has mastered. The
question concerning Outward Bound becomes has there ever been a more accomplished debut album by a young leader? Of course, by the age of 32 Dolphy had extensive experience as a performer and sideman in the studio, but the maturity of his playing, the performance of the band, and the quality of Dolphy's four original compositions suggest to this listener that anyone would be challenged to find the equal of this debut. To try to put this in a larger perspective, on his first recording as a leader Eric Dolphy set the standard for many of the most talented multi-instrumentalists of the next forty years of jazz. David Murray, Julius Hemphill, James Carter, and Marty Ehrlich can all be considered to have followed the lead of Dolphy, but even in this group of astounding talents it is doubtful that the jazz world has yet heard Dolphy's equal.
Part of the pleasure of listening to Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings is hearing the various bands Dolphy played in as a leader or a sideman. The second session in the box set opens with Oliver Nelson's "Screaming the Blues," the title track to the album. This is a far more traditional, gospel and blues influenced session featuring a thoughtful band with a rhythm section that can boast of Richard Wyands, George Duvivier, and Roy Haynes. Not surprisingly, this session has a wonderful, dance like undercurrent that doesn't let up. As a soloist Dolphy shares the lead horn duties with the underrated Richard Williams on trumpet and the always solid Oliver Nelson on tenor sax. These three musicians cohere into a marvelous horn/sax section. Dolphy solos on alto and bass clarinet throughout the session, and although he is a bit more restrained harmonically than during his own sessions, Dolphy fits right in nudging along the other very able soloists.
Sometimes when listening to Dolphy both Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker come to mind in the context of their bands, that although these three great soloists were in many ways conceptually beyond their peers they do fit in somehow in a curious straddling of the past and future. Dolphy could play the blues and the very satisfactory Oliver Nelson session demonstrates how innovation and tradition can mesh in a fruitful alliance. As a closer to the session, Dolphy is featured on a modernistic "Alto-It is," a Nelson boppish composition that features Dolphy in an outrageously showy solo, framed by the horn/sax section in a sharp, vigorous performance - this is powerful ensemble work.
The next session finds Dolphy playing as a sideman on Ken McIntyre's Looking Ahead. Both Dolphy and McIntyre play alto and flute. Again, the band personnel is first rate with Walter Bishop Jr. on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Arthur Taylor on drums. Five of the six compositions are McIntyre compositions featuring tight ensemble work. As a soloist McIntyre is somewhat predictable and not in class with Dolphy or the other musicians but McIntyre and Dolphy play beautifully on unison passages. The rhythm section casually keeps everything in the groove. The combination of McIntyre on flute and Dolphy on alto works especially well together on "Dianna."
Disc three starts off with the second Dolphy session as a leader. Out There features Ron Carter on cello and George Duvivier on bass. Roy Haynes returns in the drummer slot. The title track of the album has Dolphy in fleet form moving at a be-bop pace with somewhat dissonant harmonies. Dolphy's weaving in and out of the rhythm section in a wide looping manner suggests a different relationship to the rhythm section than the typical be-bop soloist.
The doubled voices of Dolphy on bass clarinet and Carter's bowed cello opens Dolphy's composition "Serene." This is a fascinating composition with a later pizzicato cello solo followed by a concise Haynes and Dolphy solo exchange. George Duvivier holds everything together throughout with a solid bass foundation. The session is interesting throughout with doubled voice combinations of cello and Dolphy on alto or clarinets (bass or B-flat). Solo exchanges and intertwining lines between Carter and Dolphy are particularly interesting; the combination of flute and bowed cello has a fresh sound and is affective throughout. There are flaws. At times Carter's intonation on bowed cello sounds a little off, but overall the exchanges between Carter and Dolphy and between Carter and Duvivier are worth a careful study. The rapport is wonderful.
This daring session was recorded only four months after Dolphy's Outward Bound debut as a leader. The contrast between the extroverted Freddie Hubbard/Dolphy debut exchange and the introverted Ron Carter/Dolphy follow-up exchange is striking. Certainly anyone following the development of the young Eric Dolphy must have cocked their heads at the emotional range demonstrated in these two sessions.
The next session issued as Caribe is not heavyweight Dolphy. It's akin to Charlie Parker's latin tinged South of the Border recordings, although Dolphy plays in a small group setting paired with the Latin Jazz Quintet. The instrumentation includes piano, bass, drums, vibes, timbales, and congas. Throughout Dolphy is the predominant soloist. There is something appealing about hearing Dolphy in this relaxed setting. The band plays comfortably together, and pianist Gene Casey and bassist Bill Ellington are notable. Dolphy provides a bit of intensity to the session but no one gets too worked up, and oddly enough Dolphy fits right in. At times there is a blues or gospel overlay to the proceedings with "Sunday Go Meetin' " being a highlight for the playing of the band as a unit and for Dolphy's flute solo.
The following session finds Dolphy as a sideman in Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis' fourteen piece big band. This is quite a band with the likes of Jimmy Cleveland, Clark Terry , Richard Williams, Jerome Richardson, Oliver Nelson, and Roy Haynes aboard. The able pair of Oliver Nelson and Ernie Wilkens provided the arrangements. With this lineup, and Davis in the solo spotlight, not much is likely to go wrong, and that was the case. The band and Davis are inspired throughout. Dolphy in the second alto sax chair, behind Nelson, doesn't get to solo on these six tracks but the session does leave you wondering how much of Davis did Dolphy listen to growing up. They do share a vocal orientation to the instrument and in moments, and I do stress moments, the bluesy Davis sounds like a much more conservative Eric Dolphy.
The second half of disc four presents another classic Dolphy session as a leader. Far Cry presents the talented quintet of Dolphy, Booker Little, Jaki Byard, Ron Carter, and Roy Haynes. The performance is as good as the cast. What is notable it that the disc opens with two Jaki Byard compositions "Mrs. Parker Of K.C." and "Ode To Charlie Parker." The Byard and Dolphy solos suggest how far away from a classic be-bop conception the band has moved. The "Ode To Charlie Parker" opens with a plaintive trumpet and flute dialogue. Booker Little's beautiful ballad paced solo intertwines with Dolphy's more aggressive, faster paced flute. The be-bop of Dolphy, no matter what instrument he plays, is not the be-bop of the 1945-55 era. The intense linear focus of classic bebop has been broadened rhythmically and harmonically.
Dolphy's now fairly well known composition "Miss Ann" is notable for the boppish unison opening and subsequent Dolphy solo on alto. As in many of Dolphy's recordings he seems to be waiting on the other soloists. His intensity and daring is imposing and I would imagine more than a bit intimidating. Booker Little holds his own in the fast paced exchange with Dolphy toward the end of the performance. The last track of the session, the solo alto performance of Dolphy on "Tenderly" is a Dolphy show piece and could be played to good effect to most any Dolphy doubter.
Disc five returns us to the Oliver Nelson band of Screamin' The Blues minus the trumpeter Richard Williams. Again, this is Nelson's session. Much of the music is along the lines of Nelson's early blues and R & B influenced work. The rhythm section of Wyands, Duvivier, and Haynes can hardly be praised enough for their precision and clarity of conception as a unit. The rapport and the energy generated between Nelson and Dolphy in their unison work is something to behold; there is great power in their passages together. The solo contrast between the simpler, bluesy sax style of Nelson and Dolphy's sometimes almost baroque solo style is somehow compatible. Dolphy's deep sense of the blues is conveyed through even in the complexities of his most modernist mode. This is another excellent Nelson/Dolphy session. "Images," "Ralph's New Blues," and the title track "Straight Ahead" are highlights.
The following session presents bassist/cellist Ron Carter as the leader with the very able cast of Dolphy, Mal Waldron, George Duvivier, and Charlie Persip. Entitled Where? this session opens with an intriguing bass clarinet and cello unison line in "Rally". The Dolphy/Carter combination of sonorities is odd and surprising. The following track "Duet" features and extended dialog between Duvivier and Carter. Waldron and Persip provide low key, excellent support for the two bass masters at play. At times, one bassist switches off into the solo slot while the other bassist drops back into the trio.
"Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise" has an energetic Dolphy on alto above a very attentive band. Charlie Persip's low-key ego is a real plus throughout the session, his accompaniment and his sharp, lively solos add to this impressive group. Throughout this session Carter's bowed bass work is excellent. Being Ron Carter's session, we hear a considerably more restrained Dolphy than in most of the box set. Perhaps out of respect for Carter's conception of the overall session, he tones down his typical harmonic and rhythmic flights. He certainly is far more conservative than on his own session Out There which presents the exact same musicians minus Waldron. Pianist Mal Waldron is a welcome addition, and the comfortable rapport of the band is evident. Dolphy contributes a series of solid, imaginative solos on all three of his instruments.
The next session is Mal Waldron's classic recording The Quest.
It opens with a fiery, somewhat meandering Dolphy alto solo on "Status
Seeking," followed by Booker Ervin's tenor that is earthbound and
intense. The session long dialog between Dolphy and Booker is a fruitful
study in contrasts. The rhythm section is outstanding with Waldron, Joe
Benjamin, and Charlie Persip. Ron Carter plays cello throughout.
Pianist Mal Waldron's lyrical solos play off well against the
Dolphy/Ervin horn section. Waldron is a brilliant accompanist who plays
in a subtle, measured solo manner that meshes particularly well with
Dolphy. All six compositions are by Waldron including the magnificent
"Fire Waltz." A highlight of the session is Dolphy's melodic flute solo
on "Warm Canto," the interaction among Dolphy, Waldron, and Carter's
plucked cello is intricately beautiful. This is an exquisite trio of
soloists playing off of each others creating sheer magic. The famous session that completes disc 6 is the Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot
recording. With Booker Little on trumpet, Mal Waldron on piano, Richard
Davis on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums, this is one of the truly
great jazz bands. It is one of the endless number of jazz misfortunes
that this band did not record more than once, and that this unit could
not have stayed together to develop into what they could have become.
Booker Little was to die a few months after this recording at the age of
23, of uremia. The music recorded that night in July of 1961 takes up three tracks on disc 6, all of disc 7, and two tracks on disc 8. It opens with an extended Dolphy/Little duet on "Someone In Love." This lovely track is followed by Dolphy playing a long solo bass clarinet version of "God Bless The Child." The latter has been discussed as being one of Dolphy's finest performances on record. What is notable about this band is the easy going comfort of these five musicians playing together. Certainly the music is not casual; it's often intense, but there is an underlying feeling of trust and confidence in what is transpiring. In short, the lack of a big ego in the way is part of the success of this band. Waldron, Davis, and Blackwell each solo superbly on the long Dolphy composition "Aggression" highlighting the balance of this unit; they are also an immensely flexible, responsive rhythm section that is a match for the brilliance of the two major soloists. This is classic jazz.
The bulk of disc 8 and all of disc 9 takes us to Copenhagen, Denmark for two concert performances. Dolphy is backed by the Danish rhythm section of Bent Axen on piano, Erik Moseholm on bass, and Jorn Elniff on drums. The fare is standards and two Dolphy compositions. Chuck Israels steps in on one track of the second night playing a 13 minute duet, with Dolphy on flute. This is an able trio though not brilliant. The playing is somewhat uneven but throughout Dolphy soars above the rough spots which usually involve an over eager young drummer or a pianist who at times seems more worried about not making a mistake than being creative. The core of this band is the relationship between Dolphy and the impressive Erik Moseholm on bass.
Some of the highlights of the concert recordings are the opening to "Don't Blame Me," an excellent extended flute solo backed by the trio. The alternate take is also a gem. Dolphy is consistently interesting especially playing bass clarinet on "God Bless The Child" and on Benny Carter's "When Lights Are Low." The duet between Dolphy and Chuck Israels is also memorable. Dolphy plays beautifully track by track and when the band is playing well it becomes obvious why these promising musicians were chosen by Dolphy.
Overall, Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings presents some of the best work that Eric Dolphy recorded in his too short career. The musicians and bands Dolphy recorded with on these discs are always interesting and many of the bands are extraordinary. It has been a pleasure to listen to this music. In our time Eric Dolphy's place in jazz history seems somewhat up in the air. At times he seems to be acknowledged in a cursory manner deprived of the sustained attention that a major figure deserves. By the evidence of this box set alone we are talking about one of the finest jazz musicians to have graced the history of jazz.
It should be noted that 6 of the 9 discs are studio recordings engineered by Rudy Van Gelder. The sound quality is excellent, as one would expect. The live recordings are well recorded with minor flaws. All of the tracks have been re-mastered since the original releases. The accompanying booklet is one of the better box set booklets I've seen, with a clear presentation of the details of the recordings. The photos add up to a memorable jazz essay on Dolphy, along with two written pieces by Zan Stewart and Bill Kirchner. As if it isn't already obvious, this box set is highly recommended.
Personnel
Disc 1) "Outward Bound" with Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbbard, Jaki Byard, George Tucker, and Roy Haynes (tracks 1-9). "Screamin' The Blues" with Oliver Nelson, Eric Dolphy, Richard Williams, Richard Wyands, George Duvivier, and Roy Haynes (tracks 10-11).
Disc 2) above band continued (tracks 1-4). "Looking Ahead" with Ken McIntyre, Eric Dolphy, Walter Bishop, Jr., Sam Jones, and Arthur Taylor (tracks 5-10). "Out There" with Eric Dolphy, Ron Carter, George Duvivier, and Roy Haynes (track 11).
Disc 3) above band continued (tracks 1-6). "Caribe" with Eric Dolphy and the Latin Jazz Quintet, including Gene Casey, Charlie Simons, Bill Ellington, Manny Ramos, and Juan Amalbert (tracks 7-12). "Trane Whistle" with Eddie "Lockjaw Davis," Melba Liston, Jimmy Cleveland, Clark Terry, Richard Williams, Bobby Bryant, George Barrow, Jerome Richardson, Bob Ashton, Oliver Nelson, Eric Dolphy, Richard Wyands, Wendell Marshall, and Roy Haynes. Arrangements are by Oliver Nelson and Ernie Wilkens. (tracks 13-14).
Disc 4) same band continued (tracks 5-12). "Straight Ahead" with Oliver Nelson, Eric Dolphy, Richard Wyands, George Duvivier, and Roy Haynes (track 13).
Disc 5) same band as above (tracks 1-5). "Where?" with Ron Carter, Eric Dolphy, Mal Waldron, George Duvivier, and Charlie Persip (tracks 6-11). "The Quest" with Mal Waldron, Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin, Ron Carter, Joe Benjamin, and Charlie Persip (track 12).
Disc 6) same band as above (tracks 1-6). "Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot" with Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, Mal Waldron, Richard Davis, and Ed Blackwell (tracks 7-9).
Disc 7) same band as above on the entire disc (tracks 1-5).
Disc 8) same band as above (tracks 1-2). "Eric Dolphy in Europe" with Eric Dolphy, Bent Axen, Erik Moseholm, and Jorn Elniff (tracks 3-7) add Chuck Israels on track 6 only for a duet with Dolphy.
Disc 9) same trio as above with Dolphy on the entire disc (tracks 1-7).
* In the above list, the leader of the session is listed first in order of musicians.
Track Listing
Disc 1) G.W., On Green Dolphin Street, Les, 245, Glad To Be Unhappy, Miss Toni, April Fool, G.W., 245, Screamin' The Blues, March On, March On.
Disc 2) The Drive, The Meetin', Three Seconds, Alto-Itis, Lautir, Curtsy, Geo's Tune, They All Laughed, Head Shakin', Dianna, Out There.
Disc 3) Serene, The Baron, Eclipse, 17 West, Sketch of Melba, Feather, Caribe, Blues In 6/8, First Bass Line, Mambo Ricci, Spring Is Here, Sunday Go Meetin', Trane Whistle, Whole Nelson.
Disc 4) You Are Too Beautiful, The Stolen Moment, Walk Away, Jaws, Mrs. Parker Of K.C., Ode To Charlie Parker, Far Cry, Miss Ann, Left Alone, Tenderly, It's Magic, Serene, Images.
Disc 5) Six And Four, Mama Lou, Ralph's New Blues, Straight Ahead, III-44, Rally, Bass Duet, Softly As In A Morning Sunrise, Where?, Yes Indeed, Saucer Eyes, Status Seeking.
Disc 6) Duquility, Thirteen, We Diddit, Warm Canto, Warp And Woof, Fire Waltz, Like Someone In Love, God Bless The Child, Aggression.
Disc 7) Fire Waltz, Bee Vamp, The Prophet, Booker's Waltz, Status Seeking.
Disc 8) Numbers Eight/Potsa Lotsa, Bee Vamp, Don't Blame Me, When Lights Are Low, Don't Blame Me, Les, The Way You Look Tonight.
Disc 9) Woody'n You, Laura, Glad To Be Unhappy, God Bless The Child, In The Blues, Hi-Fly, Oleo.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/far-cry-eric-dolphy-fantasy-jazz-review-by-david-rickert.php
Eric Dolphy: Far Cry (2002)
In the early sixties, Eric Dolphy was one of the young rebels
responsible for moving jazz forward in giant strides, advancements that
led some to call his music “anti-jazz”. Although not quite as
deliberately bizarre as Out to Lunch, Far Cry is still
exactly that: a far cry from what virtually everyone considered jazz to
be. On this session Dolphy is joined by two like-minded weirdos in
Little and Byard, as well as an able rhythm section in Carter and Haynes
(who benefit the most from the 20-bit remastering). Everything that
we’ve come to love about Dolphy is on display here, from the unorthodox
instruments to the stuttering, belligerent solos that seem to go from
New York to LA by way of Saturn. Although the first two tracks bear
titles that pay tribute to Charlie Parker, Dolphy mainly keeps his Bird
influences in his back pocket, instead exploring daring intervallic
leaps and abstract phrasing (there’s even an unaccompanied saxophone
solo, something no one since Coleman Hawkins had really successfully
explored). Like Dolphy, Little was another prodigy who died early in his
career; his smoothly wandering lines provide a sharp contrast to
Dolphy’s prickly approach. Byard, of course, has an affection for all
styles of piano playing and often welds them into the same passage, a
technique he would really perfect in the company of Roland Kirk. At the
time, this was forward thinking music that even today has a whiff of the
avant-garde. However, some may prefer Dolphy’s earlier work as a
sideman; in more straightforward sessions like Oliver Nelson’s Blues and the Abstract Truth or Chico Hamilton’s Gongs East, Dolphy makes more of an impact, simply because his contributions are so startling compared to the other players. Far Cry, a bold attempt to challenge the status quo, shows how others had begun to catch up to the new thing.
Personnel: Eric Dolphy-bass clarinet, alto sax, flute; Booker Little-trumpet; Jaki Byard-piano; Ron Carter-bass; Roy Haynes-drums.
Record Label: Fantasy Jazz
Style: Straight-ahead/Mainstream
Eric Dolphy - 'Out There' (1960) [Full Album]
1. Out There (Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus) – 0:00
2. Serene (Dolphy) – 6:55
3. The Baron (Dolphy) – 13:55
4. Eclipse (Mingus) – 16:53
5. 17 West (Dolphy) – 19:38
6. Sketch of Melba (Randy Weston) – 24:30
7. Feathers (Hale Smith) – 29:10
Eric Dolphy — flute, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, clarinet
Ron Carter — bass, cello
George Duvivier — bass
Roy Haynes — drums
2. Serene (Dolphy) – 6:55
3. The Baron (Dolphy) – 13:55
4. Eclipse (Mingus) – 16:53
5. 17 West (Dolphy) – 19:38
6. Sketch of Melba (Randy Weston) – 24:30
7. Feathers (Hale Smith) – 29:10
Eric Dolphy — flute, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, clarinet
Ron Carter — bass, cello
George Duvivier — bass
Roy Haynes — drums
Eric Dolphy - 'Out to Lunch!' (1964) [Full Album]
Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch!Recorded and released in 1964
Tracklist:
00:00 Hat and Beard
08:23 Something Sweet, Something Tender
14:27 Gazzelloni
21:51 Out to Lunch
34:00 Straight Up and Down
Personnel:
Eric Dolphy - alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet
Freddie Hubbard - trumpet
Bobby Hutcherson - vibraphone
Richard Davis - bass
Tony Williams - drums
Eric Dolphy - 'At The Five Spot, Vol. 1' (1961) (Full Album)
Recorded July 16, 1961.
Tracklist:
A1 Fire Waltz
A2 Bee Vamp
B The Prophet
Alto Saxophone, Bass Clarinet -- Eric Dolphy
Bass -- Richard Davis (2)
Drums -- Ed Blackwell
Piano -- Mal Waldron
Recorded By -- Rudy Van Gelder
Trumpet -- Booker Little
Tracklist:
A1 Fire Waltz
A2 Bee Vamp
B The Prophet
Alto Saxophone, Bass Clarinet -- Eric Dolphy
Bass -- Richard Davis (2)
Drums -- Ed Blackwell
Piano -- Mal Waldron
Recorded By -- Rudy Van Gelder
Trumpet -- Booker Little
Eric Dolphy - 'Here and There'-1961
Track Listing :
"Status Seeking" - 00:00
"God Bless The Child" - 13:18
"April Fool" - 18:52
"G.W. (take 1)" - 23:03
"Dont Blame Me (take 2)" - 35:14
Personnel :
Eric Dolphy - alto sax (tracks 1, 4), bass clarinet (2), flute (3, 5)
Mal Waldron - piano (1)
Booker Little - trumpet (1)
Eddie Blackwell - drums (1)
Richard Davis - double bass (1)
Roy Haynes - drums (3, 4)
Freddie Hubbard - trumpet (4)
George Tucker - double bass (3, 4)
Jaki Byard - piano (3, 4)
Bent Axen - piano (5)
Erik Moseholm - double bass (5)
Jorn Elniff - drums (5)
Eric Dolphy Quintet Feat. Herbie Hancock
Complete Recordings:
Eric Dolphy - 'Outward Bound' (full LP 1960)
Extraordinary musician Eric Dolphy here in 1960 post hard bop Lp as one
of his earlier solo group recordings . as good an introduction to his
soundworld as any.
Track listing :
All songs by Eric Dolphy unless otherwise indicated.
"G.W." - 7:57
"On Green Dolphin Street" (Bronislaw Kaper, Ned Washington) – 5:44
"Les" - 5:12
"245" - 6:49
"Glad To Be Unhappy" (Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart) - 5:26
"Miss Toni" (Charles "Majeed" Greenlee) - 5:40
Side 1:
"Iron Man" -- 0:00
"Mandrake" -- 9:13
"Come Sunday" (Ellington) -- 14:05
Side 2:
"Burning Spear" -- 20:35
"Ode To Charlie Parker" (Byard) -- 32:35
Musicians:
Eric Dolphy -- bass clarinet, flute, alto saxophone
Richard Davis -- bass
Clifford Jordan -- soprano saxophone
Huey (Sonny) Simmons -- alto saxophone
(William) Prince Lasha -- flute
Woody Shaw Jr. -- trumpet
Robert (Bobby) Hutcherson -- vibraphone
J.C. Moses -- drums
Eddie Khan -- bass ("Iron Man")
Eric Dolphy - A great solo on 'Take the A Train'
Live in concert on April 12, 1964
filmed in Norway:
Eric Dolphy - Bass Clarinet
Charles Mingus - Bass
Eric Dolphy - Bass Clarinet
Clifford Jordan - Tenor Sax
Johnny Coles - Trumpet
Jaki Byard - Piano
Dannie Richmond - Drums
Eric Dolphy, who contributed immensely to the sound of free jazz, played with John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Oliver Nelson and others. His bass clarinet and flute playing pioneered the use of these instruments in jazz. Left us MUCH too early, at age 36. A huge soul.
Charles Mingus - Live in Belgium,Norway & Sweden 1964 --Full Concerts--featuring Eric Dolphy
Filmed in Belgium on April 19,1964:
00:00-00:45 Intro
00:46-05:33 So Long Eric
05:35-11:20 Peggy's Blue Skylight
11:23-32:03 Meditations On Integration.(Eric Dolphy on Bass Clarinet and Flute)
Filmed in Norway on April 12.1964:
ERIC DOLPHY-- "Jim Crow"
Album:
"Other Aspects" enregistré entre1960 et 1962 Eric Dolphy — flute,
bass clarinet, alto saxophone Ron Carter — bass Gina Lalli —
tabla Roger Mason — Tamboura, Tambourine David Schwartz —
counter tenor Bob James — Piano Robert Pozar — Percussion
Charles Mingus & Eric Dolphy Sextet (The Complete Bremen Concert):
1. A.T.F.W. (Art Tatum-Fats Waller) 4:51
2. Sophisticated Lady 4:09
3. So Long Eric 26:49 4. Parkeriana 21:49
------
1. Meditations On Integration
2. Fables of Faubus
Ken McIntyre & Eric Dolphy - 'Looking Ahead' (1960):
KEN McINTYRE - alto saxophone, flute
ERIC DOLPHY - alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet
WALTER BISHOP, JR. - piano
SAM JONES - bass
ARTHUR TAYLOR - drums
ERIC DOLPHY - alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet
WALTER BISHOP, JR. - piano
SAM JONES - bass
ARTHUR TAYLOR - drums
John Coltrane Quintet with Eric Dolphy - Complete 1961 Concert:
The
Complete Copenhagen Concert is a 1961 album by jazz musician John
Coltrane. It was recorded November 20, 1961 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
John Coltrane — tenor saxophone/soprano saxophone
Eric Dolphy — bass clarinet/alto saxophone/flute
McCoy Tyner — piano
Reggie Workman — bass
Elvin Jones — drums
John Coltrane — tenor saxophone/soprano saxophone
Eric Dolphy — bass clarinet/alto saxophone/flute
McCoy Tyner — piano
Reggie Workman — bass
Elvin Jones — drums
Eric Dolphy--"God Bless The Child" (Live): Bass Clarinet solo, 1963--Illnois Concert
Drums: J. C. Moses
Piano: Herbie Hancock
Producer: John Garvey
Bass: Eddie Khan
Flute, Clarinet, Bass, Alto Saxophone: Eric Dolphy
Composer: Billie Holiday
Composer: Arthur Herzog
Personnel:
Eric Dolphy (Alto Saxophone, Bass Clarinet, Flute)
Booker Little (Trumpet)
Ron Carter (Bass)
Roy Haynes (Drums)
Jaki Byard (Piano)
Eric Dolphy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Eric Dolphy | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Eric Allan Dolphy, Jr. |
| Born | June 20, 1928 Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Died | June 29, 1964 (aged 36) Berlin, Germany |
| Genres | Jazz, avant-garde jazz, post-bop, third stream, free jazz |
| Occupation(s) | Bandleader, saxophonist, flutist, bass clarinetist, composer, sideman |
| Instruments | Alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet, soprano clarinet, baritone saxophone, piccolo |
| Years active | 1949–1964 |
| Labels | Verve, Impulse!, Prestige, Blue Note, Mercury |
| Associated acts | Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Booker Little, Chico Hamilton, Mal Waldron, Ron Carter, Oliver Nelson, Ornette Coleman, Max Roach, John Lewis, Freddie Hubbard, George Russell, Ted Curson, Abbey Lincoln, Ken McIntyre, Andrew Hill, Benny Golson |
| Website | adale |
Eric Allan Dolphy, Jr. (June 20, 1928 – June 29, 1964) was an American jazz alto saxophonist, flautist, and bass clarinetist. On a few occasions, he also played the clarinet and piccolo. Dolphy was one of several multi-instrumentalists to gain prominence in the 1960s. He was one of the first important bass clarinet soloists in jazz, extended the vocabulary and boundaries of the alto saxophone, and was among the earliest significant jazz flute soloists.
His improvisational style was characterized by the use of wide intervals, in addition to using an array of extended techniques to reproduce human- and animal-like effects which almost literally made his instruments speak. Although Dolphy's work is sometimes classified as free jazz, his compositions and solos were often rooted in conventional (if highly abstracted) tonal bebop harmony and melodic lines that suggest the influences of modern classical composers Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky.
Contents
Biography
Early life
Dolphy was born in Los Angeles to Eric Allan Dolphy, Sr. and Sadie Dolphy, who immigrated to the United States from Panama. He picked up the clarinet at the age of six, and in less than a month was playing in the school's orchestra. He also learned the oboe in junior high school, though he never recorded on the instrument. Hearing Fats Waller, Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins led him towards jazz and he picked up the saxophone and flute while in high school. His father built a studio for Eric in their backyard, and Eric often had friends come by to jam; recordings with Clifford Brown from this studio document this early time.He performed locally for several years, most notably as a member of bebop big bands led by Gerald Wilson and Roy Porter. He was educated at Los Angeles City College and also directed its orchestra. On early recordings, he occasionally played baritone saxophone, as well as alto saxophone, flute and soprano clarinet.
Dolphy finally had his big break as a member of Chico Hamilton's quintet. With the group he became known to a wider audience and was able to tour extensively through 1958-1959, when he parted ways with Hamilton and moved to New York City. Dolphy appears with Hamilton's band in the film Jazz on a Summer's Day playing flute during the Newport Jazz Festival '58.
Partnerships
Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus had known Eric from growing up in Los Angeles, and Dolphy joined his band shortly after arriving in New York. He took part in Mingus' big band recording Pre-Bird, and is featured on "Bemoanable Lady". Later he joined Mingus' working band which also included Dannie Richmond and Ted Curson. They worked at the Showplace during 1960 and recorded the albums, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and Mingus at Antibes (the latter adding Booker Ervin on all tracks except "What Love?" and Bud Powell for "I'll Remember April"). Dolphy, Mingus said, "was a complete musician. He could fit anywhere. He was a fine lead alto in a big band. He could make it in a classical group. And, of course, he was entirely his own man when he soloed.... He had mastered jazz. And he had mastered all the instruments he played. In fact, he knew more than was supposed to be possible to do on them" (Last Date liner notes; Limelight).During this time, Dolphy also recorded a large ensemble session for the Candid label and took part in the Newport Rebels session. Dolphy left Mingus' band in 1961 and went to Europe for a few months, where he recorded in Scandinavia and Berlin, though he would record with Mingus throughout his career. He participated in the big band session for Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus in 1963 and is featured on "Hora Decubitus".
In early 1964, he joined Mingus' working band again, along with Jaki Byard, Johnny Coles, and Clifford Jordan. This sextet worked at the Five Spot before playing shows at Cornell University and Town Hall in New York and subsequently touring Europe. Many recordings were made of their tour, which, although short, is well-documented.
John Coltrane
Dolphy and John Coltrane knew each other long before they formally played together, having met when Coltrane was in Los Angeles with Miles Davis. They would often exchange ideas and learn from each other, and eventually, after many nights sitting in with Coltrane's band, Dolphy was asked to become a full member. Coltrane had gained an audience and critical notice with Miles Davis's quintet, but alienated some jazz critics when he began to move away from hard bop. Although Coltrane's quintets with Dolphy (including the Village Vanguard and Africa/Brass sessions) are now well regarded, they originally provoked Down Beat magazine to brand Coltrane and Dolphy's music as 'anti-jazz'. Coltrane later said of this criticism: "they made it appear that we didn't even know the first thing about music (...) it hurt me to see [Dolphy] get hurt in this thing."[1]The initial release of Coltrane's stay at the Vanguard selected three tracks, only one of which featured Dolphy. After being issued haphazardly over the next 30 years, a comprehensive box set featuring all of the recorded music from the Vanguard was released by Impulse! in 1997, called The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings. The set features Dolphy heavily on both alto saxophone and bass clarinet, with Eric the featured soloist on their renditions of "Naima". A later Pablo box set from Coltrane's European tours of the early 1960s collected more recordings which feature tunes not played at the Village Vanguard, such as "My Favorite Things", which Dolphy performs on flute.
Booker Little
Before trumpeter Booker Little's untimely death at the age of 23, he and Dolphy had a very fruitful musical partnership. Booker's leader date for Candid, Out Front, featured Dolphy mainly on alto, though he played bass clarinet and flute on some ensemble passages. In addition, Dolphy's album Far Cry recorded for Prestige features Little on five tunes (one of which, "Serene", was not included on the original album release).Dolphy and Little also co-led a quintet at the Five Spot during 1961. The rhythm section consisted of Richard Davis, Mal Waldron and Ed Blackwell. One night was documented and has been released on three volumes of At the Five Spot as well as the compilation Here and There. In addition, both Dolphy and Little backed Abbey Lincoln on her album Straight Ahead and played on Max Roach's Percussion Bitter Sweet.
Others
During this period, Dolphy also played in a number of challenging settings, notably in key recordings by George Russell, Oliver Nelson, and Ornette Coleman. He also worked with Gunther Schuller, multi-instrumentalist Ken McIntyre, and bassist Ron Carter, among many others.As a leader
Dolphy's recording career as a leader began with the Prestige label. His association with the label spanned 13 albums recorded from April 1960 to September 1961, though he was not the leader for all of the sessions. Fantasy eventually released a 9-CD box set containing all of Dolphy's recorded output for Prestige.Dolphy's first two albums as leader were Outward Bound and Out There; both featured artwork by Richard "Prophet" Jennings. The first, sounding closer to hard bop than some later releases, was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in New Jersey with then newcomer trumpet player Freddie Hubbard. The album features three Dolphy compositions: "G.W.", dedicated to Gerald Wilson, and the blues "Les" and "245". Out There is closer to third stream music which would also form part of Dolphy's legacy, and features Ron Carter on cello. Charles Mingus' "Eclipse" from this album is one of the rare instances where Dolphy solos on soprano clarinet (others being "Warm Canto" from Mal Waldron's The Quest and "Densities" from the compilation Vintage Dolphy; there is also an untitled, unreleased recording from a 1962 Town Hall concert).
Dolphy recorded several unaccompanied cuts on saxophone, which at the time had been done only by Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins, making Dolphy the first to do so on alto. The album Far Cry contains his famous performance of the Gross-Lawrence standard "Tenderly" on alto saxophone, and his subsequent tour of Europe quickly set high standards for solo performance with his exhilarating bass clarinet renditions of Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child" (the earliest known version was recorded at the Five Spot during his residency with Booker Little). Numerous recordings were made of live performances by Dolphy on this tour, in Copenhagen, Uppsala and other cities, and these have been issued by many record labels, drifting in and out of print, though many if not all have been remastered and are readily available. He also recorded two takes of a short solo rendition of "Love Me" in 1963, released on Conversations and Muses.
Twentieth century classical music also played a significant role in Dolphy's musical career. He performed Edgard Varèse's Density 21.5 for solo flute at the Ojai Music Festival in 1962[2] and participated in Gunther Schuller's and John Lewis' Third Stream efforts of the 1960s.
Around 1962-63, one of Dolphy's working bands included the young pianist Herbie Hancock, who can be heard on The Illinois Concert and Gaslight 1962 and the unissued Town Hall concert with poet Ree Dragonette.
In July 1963, Dolphy and producer Alan Douglas arranged recording sessions for which his sidemen were among the leading emerging musicians of the day, and the results produced the albums Iron Man and Conversations, as well as the Muses album released in Japan in late 2013. These sessions marked the first time Dolphy played with Bobby Hutcherson, whom he knew from Los Angeles. The sessions are perhaps most famous for the three duets Dolphy performs with Richard Davis on "Alone Together", "Ode To Charlie Parker", and "Come Sunday"; the aforementioned release Muses adds another take of "Alone Together" and an original composition for duet from which the album takes its name.
In 1964, Dolphy signed with Blue Note Records and recorded Out to Lunch! with Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Richard Davis and Tony Williams. This album features Dolphy's fully developed avant-garde yet highly structured compositional style rooted in tradition. It is often considered his magnum opus.[3]
Final months
After Out to Lunch! and an appearance on Andrew Hill's classic Point of Departure, Dolphy left for Europe with Charles Mingus' sextet in early 1964. Before a concert in Oslo, he informed Mingus that he planned to stay in Europe after their tour was finished, partly because he had become disillusioned with the United States' reception to musicians who were trying something new. Mingus then named the blues they had been performing "So Long Eric". Dolphy intended to settle in Europe with his fiancée, who was working in the ballet scene in Paris. After leaving Mingus, he performed and recorded a few sides with various European bands, and American musicians living in Paris, such as Donald Byrd and Nathan Davis. The famous Last Date with Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink was recorded in Hilversum, the Netherlands, though it was not actually Dolphy's last concert. Dolphy was also preparing to join Albert Ayler for a recording and spoke of his strong desire to play with Cecil Taylor. He also planned to form a band with Woody Shaw and Billy Higgins, and was writing a string quartet entitled "Love Suite".Eric Dolphy died accidentally in Berlin on June 29, 1964. Some details of his death are still disputed, but it is accepted that he died of a coma brought on by an undiagnosed diabetic condition. The liner notes to the Complete Prestige Recordings box set say that Dolphy "collapsed in his hotel room in Berlin and when brought to the hospital he was diagnosed as being in a diabetic coma. After being administered a shot of insulin he lapsed into insulin shock and died." A later documentary and liner note dispute this, saying Dolphy collapsed on stage in Berlin and was brought to a hospital. The attending hospital physicians had no idea that Dolphy was a diabetic and decided on a stereotypical view of jazz musicians related to substance abuse, that he had overdosed on drugs. He was left in a hospital bed for the drugs to run their course.[4]
Ted Curson remembers, "That really broke me up. When Eric got sick on that date [in Berlin], and him being black and a jazz musician, they thought he was a junkie. Eric didn't use any drugs. He was a diabetic - all they had to do was take a blood test and they would have found that out. So he died for nothing. They gave him some detox stuff and he died, and nobody ever went into that club in Berlin again. That was the end of that club." (Stop Smiling Magazine, Jazz Issue).
Charles Mingus said, "Usually, when a man dies, you remember—or you say you remember—only the good things about him. With Eric, that's all you could remember. I don't remember any drags he did to anybody. The man was absolutely without a need to hurt". (Last Date liner notes, Limelight).
Dolphy was posthumously inducted into the Down Beat magazine Hall of Fame in 1964. John Coltrane paid tribute to Dolphy in an interview: "Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician." (Coltrane On Coltrane). Dolphy's mother, Sadie, who had fond memories of her son practicing in the studio by her house, gave instruments that Dolphy had bought in France but never played to Coltrane,[citation needed] who subsequently played the flute and bass clarinet on several albums before his own death in 1967.
Dolphy was engaged to be married to Joyce Mordecai, a classically trained dancer. Before he left for Europe in 1964, Dolphy left papers and other effects with his friends Hale and Juanita Smith. Eventually much of this material was passed on to the musician James Newton. It was announced in May 2014 that five boxes of music papers had been donated to the Library of Congress.[5]
Influence
Dolphy's musical presence was influential to many young jazz musicians who would later become prominent. Dolphy worked intermittently with Ron Carter and Freddie Hubbard throughout his career, and in later years he hired Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson and Woody Shaw to work in his live and studio bands. Out to Lunch! featured yet another young performer, drummer Tony Williams, and Dolphy's participation on the Point of Departure session brought his influence into contact with up and coming tenor man Joe Henderson.Carter, Hancock and Williams would go on to become one of the quintessential rhythm sections of the decade, both together on their own albums and as the backbone of Miles Davis's second great quintet. This aspect of the second great quintet is an ironic footnote for Davis, who was not fond of Dolphy's music: in a 1964 Down Beat "Blindfold Test", Miles famously quipped, "The next time I see [Dolphy] I'm going to step on his foot."[6] However, Davis absorbed a rhythm section who had all worked under Dolphy, thus creating a band whose brand of "out" was very similar to Dolphy's.
Dolphy's virtuoso instrumental abilities and unique style of jazz - deeply emotional and free but strongly rooted in tradition and structured composition - heavily influenced such musicians as Anthony Braxton, members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, Arthur Blythe, Aki Takase, Rudi Mahall, Don Byron and many others. Dolphy's compositions are the inspiration for many tribute albums, such as Oliver Lake's Prophet and Dedicated to Dolphy, Jerome Harris' Hidden In Plain View, Yoshihide Ōtomo's re-imagining of Out to Lunch!, Silke Eberhard's Potsa Lotsa: The Complete Works of Eric Dolphy, and Aki Takase and Rudi Mahall's duo album Duet For Eric Dolphy.
In addition, his work with jazz and rock producer Alan Douglas allowed Dolphy's style to posthumously spread to musicians in the jazz fusion and rock environments, most notably with artists John McLaughlin and Jimi Hendrix. Frank Zappa, who drew his inspiration from a variety of musical styles and idioms, paid tribute to Dolphy in the instrumental "The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue" (on the 1970 album Weasels Ripped My Flesh) and listed Dolphy as an influence on the liner notes for the Mothers' first LP, Freak Out!.
In 1997 Vienna Art Orchestra released Powerful Ways: Nine Immortal Non-evergreens for Eric Dolphy, as part of their 20th anniversary boxset.
In 2014, marking 50 years since Dolphy's death, Berlin-based pianists Alexander von Schlippenbach and Aki Takase led a project titled "So Long, Eric!", celebrating Dolphy's music and featuring musicians such as Han Bennink, Karl Berger, Rudi Mahall, Axel Dörner and Tobias Delius.
Discography
Authorized releases are ones issued with Dolphy's input and approval, with all but the Blue Note LP appearing in Dolphy's lifetime. Dates for authorized albums are year of release; for posthumous compilations and sideman sessions by year of recording. Some releases with Dolphy as a sideman were issued much later than the date of the recording sessions.Authorized releases
- 1960: Outward Bound (New Jazz)
- 1960: Out There (New Jazz)
- 1961: Far Cry (New Jazz)
- 1961: At the Five Spot, Vol. 1 (New Jazz) (live)
- 1964: Out to Lunch! (Blue Note)
Posthumous compilations
- 1959: Hot & Cool Latin
- 1959: Wherever I Go
- 1960: Candid Dolphy
- 1960: Status
- 1960: Dash One (Prestige)
- 1960: Fire Waltz
- 1960: Magic
- 1960: Other Aspects (Blue Note)
- 1960: Eric Dolphy
- 1961: Here and There
- 1961: Eric Dolphy in Europe, Vols. 1-3 (Prestige) also released as Copenhagen Concert (live)
- 1961: The Complete Uppsala Concert
- 1961: Stockholm Sessions
- 1961: Quartet 1961 also released as Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise (live)
- 1961: At the Five Spot, Vol. 2 (Prestige) (live)
- 1961: Memorial Album (Prestige) (live)
- 1962: Vintage Dolphy
- 1962: Eric Dolphy Quintet featuring Herbie Hancock: Complete Recordings
- 1962: Berlin Concerts (live)
- 1963: Iron Man
- 1963: Conversations (both Conversations and Iron Man were released as a double LP titled Jitterbug Waltz)
- 1963: The Illinois Concert (Blue Note) (live)
- 1964: Last Date (live)
- 1964: Naima
- 1964: Unrealized Tapes
- 1964: The Complete Last Recordings In Hilversum & Paris 1964
As sideman
With Clifford Brown
- Clifford Brown + Eric Dolphy - Together: Recorded live at Dolphy's home, 1954 (Rare Live Records, 2005)
- Where? (New Jazz, 1961)
- Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (Atlantic, 1960)
- Olé Coltrane (Atlantic, 1961)
- Africa/Brass (Impulse!, 1961)
- Live! at the Village Vanguard (Impulse!, 1961)
- Impressions (Impulse!, 1963)
- Trane Whistle (Prestige, 1960)
- The Latin Jazz Quintet (United Artists, 1961)
- Pop + Jazz = Swing (Audio Fidelity, 1961)
- The Original Ellington Suite (Pacific Jazz, 1958 [2000])
- The Chico Hamilton Quintet with Strings Attached (Warner Bros., 1958)
- Gongs East! (Warner Bros., 1958)
- The Three Faces of Chico (Warner Bros., 1959)
- That Hamilton Man (SESAC, 1959)
- Where? (New Jazz, 1961)
- Plenty of Horn (Old Town, 1961)
- The Individualism of Gil Evans (Verve, 1964)
- Point of Departure (Blue Note, 1964)
- The Body & the Soul (Impulse!, 1963)
- Caribe (Prestige, 1960)
- Jazz Abstractions (Atlantic, 1960)
- Straight Ahead (Candid, 1961)
- Out Front (Candid, 1960)
- Looking Ahead (New Jazz, 1960)
- Mingus Revisited (aka Pre-Bird) (Mercury, 1960)
- Mingus at Antibes (Atlantic, 1960 [1976])
- Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (Candid, 1960)
- Mingus (Candid, 1960)
- The Complete Town Hall Concert (Blue Note, 1962 [1994])
- Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (Impulse!, 1963)
- Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy: Cornell 1964 (Blue Note, 1964 [2007])
- Town Hall Concert (Jazz Workshop, 1964)
- Revenge! (Revenge, 1964 [1996])
- The Great Concert of Charles Mingus (America, 1964)
- Mingus in Europe Volume I (Enja, 1964 [1980])
- Mingus in Europe Volume II (Enja, 1964 [1988])
- Screamin' the Blues (New Jazz, 1960)
- The Blues and the Abstract Truth (Impulse!, 1961)
- Straight Ahead (New Jazz, 1961)
- Debut (Colpix, 1963)
- Mack the Knife and Other Berlin Theatre Songs of Kurt Weill (RCA Victor, 1964)
- Pony's Express (Epic, 1962)
- Percussion Bitter Sweet (Impulse!, 1961)
- Ezz-thetics (Riverside, 1961)
- The Quest (New Jazz, 1961)
References
- Feather, Leonard. 3rd "Blindfold Test" Miles Davis. accessed 7 January 2010.
Further reading
- Vladimir Simosko & Barry Tepperman: Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography and Discography, Da Capo Press, New York, 1979, ISBN 0-306-80107-8
- Guillaume Belhomme: Eric Dolphy, Le mot et le reste, Marseille, 2008, ISBN 978-2-915378-53-5
- Raymond Horricks: The Importance of Being Eric Dolphy, D J Costello Publishers Ltd., Great Britain, 1989. ISBN 0-7104-3048-5
External links
 |
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Eric Dolphy |
A
definitive jazz multi-instrumentalist, Eric Dolphy established deeply
original voices on his three primary instruments– the bass clarinet,
alto saxophone, and flute. Dolphy pioneered the use of the bass
clarinet as a solo improvising instrument, and, with Coleman Hawkins and
Sonny Rollins, he is one of the earliest saxophonists to record solo
improvisations. Beloved by his peers for his compassion and enthusiasm,
Dolphy's unique musical perspective helped shape the emerging
avant-garde of the 1960s, though he remained firmly rooted in jazz
tradition until his premature death.
Eric Allan Dolphy was born in Los Angeles in 1928, the only child of Sadie and Eric Dolphy Sr.–both of West-Indian descent. After demonstrating promise on his elementary school-issued harmonica, Dolphy picked up the clarinet, and while still in junior high school he received a scholarship to study at the University of Southern California School of Music. Encouraging his talents, Dolphy's parents built him a shed behind their home in which he could rehearse with his various ensembles. After graduating from high school, Dolphy studied music at Los Angeles City College, and he made his first known recorded appearances with the Roy Porter band in 1949. In 1950, Dolphy entered the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington.
Following his discharge Dolphy worked in Los Angeles in relative obscurity for several years until, in 1959, he earned a position in drummer Chico Hamilton's quintet. After touring extensively, Dolphy left Hamilton and moved to New York City, where he re-established his relationship with fellow Californian Charles Mingus, a personal and musical relationship which would grow until Dolphy's death. Early recordings with Mingus highlight Dolphy's highly developed and original musical interpretations. Dolphy's style employed wide intervallic leaps, inimitable harmonies, and speech and animal-like inflections (Dolphy supposedly regularly rehearsed among flocks of birds). The exposure Dolphy received as part of Mingus' Jazz Workshop led to numerous opportunities as both a sideman and a leader, including Dolphy's own 1960 debut, Outward Bound. Highlights of Eric Dolphy's recording career as a leader include several studio albums for Prestige, one for Blue Note (the remarkable Out to Lunch), and three albums worth of live material from his and trumpeter Booker Little's two-week residency at the Five Spot in New York. As a sideman Dolphy also made significant contributions to such albums as Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Oliver Nelson's The Blues and The Abstract Truth, Max Roach's Percussion Bitter Sweet, Booker Little's Out Front, and Ornette Coleman's seminal double quartet album Free Jazz.
From 1961 to 1963 Eric Dolphy also regularly performed with John Coltrane's classic quartet where he generated much of his most acclaimed work. With Coltrane and pianist McCoy Tyner, Dolphy arranged the orchestrations of Coltrane's 1961 album, Africa/Brass, and he was a major contributor to Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard recordings of the same year. Improved musical documentation of this period has shown just how integral Dolphy was to the ensemble, a point which was minimized by the initial records. In many respects Coltrane regarded Dolphy as uniquely suited to explore his musical ideas, and as with Mingus, the influence was clearly reciprocal.
Following the final performances of Charles Mingus' 1964 European tour, Dolphy remained abroad, seeking improved work opportunities and greater individual recognition before his forthcoming marriage. Eric Dolphy died of undiagnosed diabetes in Berlin on 21 June, 1964, at the age of 36.
- See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/dolphy-eric-1928-1964#sthash.vV8uM38i.dpufEric Allan Dolphy was born in Los Angeles in 1928, the only child of Sadie and Eric Dolphy Sr.–both of West-Indian descent. After demonstrating promise on his elementary school-issued harmonica, Dolphy picked up the clarinet, and while still in junior high school he received a scholarship to study at the University of Southern California School of Music. Encouraging his talents, Dolphy's parents built him a shed behind their home in which he could rehearse with his various ensembles. After graduating from high school, Dolphy studied music at Los Angeles City College, and he made his first known recorded appearances with the Roy Porter band in 1949. In 1950, Dolphy entered the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington.
Following his discharge Dolphy worked in Los Angeles in relative obscurity for several years until, in 1959, he earned a position in drummer Chico Hamilton's quintet. After touring extensively, Dolphy left Hamilton and moved to New York City, where he re-established his relationship with fellow Californian Charles Mingus, a personal and musical relationship which would grow until Dolphy's death. Early recordings with Mingus highlight Dolphy's highly developed and original musical interpretations. Dolphy's style employed wide intervallic leaps, inimitable harmonies, and speech and animal-like inflections (Dolphy supposedly regularly rehearsed among flocks of birds). The exposure Dolphy received as part of Mingus' Jazz Workshop led to numerous opportunities as both a sideman and a leader, including Dolphy's own 1960 debut, Outward Bound. Highlights of Eric Dolphy's recording career as a leader include several studio albums for Prestige, one for Blue Note (the remarkable Out to Lunch), and three albums worth of live material from his and trumpeter Booker Little's two-week residency at the Five Spot in New York. As a sideman Dolphy also made significant contributions to such albums as Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Oliver Nelson's The Blues and The Abstract Truth, Max Roach's Percussion Bitter Sweet, Booker Little's Out Front, and Ornette Coleman's seminal double quartet album Free Jazz.
From 1961 to 1963 Eric Dolphy also regularly performed with John Coltrane's classic quartet where he generated much of his most acclaimed work. With Coltrane and pianist McCoy Tyner, Dolphy arranged the orchestrations of Coltrane's 1961 album, Africa/Brass, and he was a major contributor to Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard recordings of the same year. Improved musical documentation of this period has shown just how integral Dolphy was to the ensemble, a point which was minimized by the initial records. In many respects Coltrane regarded Dolphy as uniquely suited to explore his musical ideas, and as with Mingus, the influence was clearly reciprocal.
Following the final performances of Charles Mingus' 1964 European tour, Dolphy remained abroad, seeking improved work opportunities and greater individual recognition before his forthcoming marriage. Eric Dolphy died of undiagnosed diabetes in Berlin on 21 June, 1964, at the age of 36.
Sources:
Vladimir Simosko and Barry Tepperman, Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography and Discography (Washington, D.C.: De Capo Press, 1996); Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (Eighth Edition) (London: Penguin Books, 2006); David A. Wild, liner notes to John Coltrane, The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (Impulse! Records, IMPCD 054232-2); Raymond Horricks, The Importance of Being Eric Dolphy (Tunbridge Wells, Great Britain: Costello Publishers, 1989).
Vladimir Simosko and Barry Tepperman, Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography and Discography (Washington, D.C.: De Capo Press, 1996); Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (Eighth Edition) (London: Penguin Books, 2006); David A. Wild, liner notes to John Coltrane, The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (Impulse! Records, IMPCD 054232-2); Raymond Horricks, The Importance of Being Eric Dolphy (Tunbridge Wells, Great Britain: Costello Publishers, 1989).
Contributor:
University of Washington
University of Washington
Entry Categories:
A
definitive jazz multi-instrumentalist, Eric Dolphy established deeply
original voices on his three primary instruments– the bass clarinet,
alto saxophone, and flute. Dolphy pioneered the use of the bass
clarinet as a solo improvising instrument, and, with Coleman Hawkins and
Sonny Rollins, he is one of the earliest saxophonists to record solo
improvisations. Beloved by his peers for his compassion and enthusiasm,
Dolphy's unique musical perspective helped shape the emerging
avant-garde of the 1960s, though he remained firmly rooted in jazz
tradition until his premature death.
Eric Allan Dolphy was born in Los Angeles in 1928, the only child of Sadie and Eric Dolphy Sr.–both of West-Indian descent. After demonstrating promise on his elementary school-issued harmonica, Dolphy picked up the clarinet, and while still in junior high school he received a scholarship to study at the University of Southern California School of Music. Encouraging his talents, Dolphy's parents built him a shed behind their home in which he could rehearse with his various ensembles. After graduating from high school, Dolphy studied music at Los Angeles City College, and he made his first known recorded appearances with the Roy Porter band in 1949. In 1950, Dolphy entered the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington.
Following his discharge Dolphy worked in Los Angeles in relative obscurity for several years until, in 1959, he earned a position in drummer Chico Hamilton's quintet. After touring extensively, Dolphy left Hamilton and moved to New York City, where he re-established his relationship with fellow Californian Charles Mingus, a personal and musical relationship which would grow until Dolphy's death. Early recordings with Mingus highlight Dolphy's highly developed and original musical interpretations. Dolphy's style employed wide intervallic leaps, inimitable harmonies, and speech and animal-like inflections (Dolphy supposedly regularly rehearsed among flocks of birds). The exposure Dolphy received as part of Mingus' Jazz Workshop led to numerous opportunities as both a sideman and a leader, including Dolphy's own 1960 debut, Outward Bound. Highlights of Eric Dolphy's recording career as a leader include several studio albums for Prestige, one for Blue Note (the remarkable Out to Lunch), and three albums worth of live material from his and trumpeter Booker Little's two-week residency at the Five Spot in New York. As a sideman Dolphy also made significant contributions to such albums as Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Oliver Nelson's The Blues and The Abstract Truth, Max Roach's Percussion Bitter Sweet, Booker Little's Out Front, and Ornette Coleman's seminal double quartet album Free Jazz.
From 1961 to 1963 Eric Dolphy also regularly performed with John Coltrane's classic quartet where he generated much of his most acclaimed work. With Coltrane and pianist McCoy Tyner, Dolphy arranged the orchestrations of Coltrane's 1961 album, Africa/Brass, and he was a major contributor to Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard recordings of the same year. Improved musical documentation of this period has shown just how integral Dolphy was to the ensemble, a point which was minimized by the initial records. In many respects Coltrane regarded Dolphy as uniquely suited to explore his musical ideas, and as with Mingus, the influence was clearly reciprocal.
Following the final performances of Charles Mingus' 1964 European tour, Dolphy remained abroad, seeking improved work opportunities and greater individual recognition before his forthcoming marriage. Eric Dolphy died of undiagnosed diabetes in Berlin on 21 June, 1964, at the age of 36.
- See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/dolphy-eric-1928-1964#sthash.vV8uM38i.dpufEric Allan Dolphy was born in Los Angeles in 1928, the only child of Sadie and Eric Dolphy Sr.–both of West-Indian descent. After demonstrating promise on his elementary school-issued harmonica, Dolphy picked up the clarinet, and while still in junior high school he received a scholarship to study at the University of Southern California School of Music. Encouraging his talents, Dolphy's parents built him a shed behind their home in which he could rehearse with his various ensembles. After graduating from high school, Dolphy studied music at Los Angeles City College, and he made his first known recorded appearances with the Roy Porter band in 1949. In 1950, Dolphy entered the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington.
Following his discharge Dolphy worked in Los Angeles in relative obscurity for several years until, in 1959, he earned a position in drummer Chico Hamilton's quintet. After touring extensively, Dolphy left Hamilton and moved to New York City, where he re-established his relationship with fellow Californian Charles Mingus, a personal and musical relationship which would grow until Dolphy's death. Early recordings with Mingus highlight Dolphy's highly developed and original musical interpretations. Dolphy's style employed wide intervallic leaps, inimitable harmonies, and speech and animal-like inflections (Dolphy supposedly regularly rehearsed among flocks of birds). The exposure Dolphy received as part of Mingus' Jazz Workshop led to numerous opportunities as both a sideman and a leader, including Dolphy's own 1960 debut, Outward Bound. Highlights of Eric Dolphy's recording career as a leader include several studio albums for Prestige, one for Blue Note (the remarkable Out to Lunch), and three albums worth of live material from his and trumpeter Booker Little's two-week residency at the Five Spot in New York. As a sideman Dolphy also made significant contributions to such albums as Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Oliver Nelson's The Blues and The Abstract Truth, Max Roach's Percussion Bitter Sweet, Booker Little's Out Front, and Ornette Coleman's seminal double quartet album Free Jazz.
From 1961 to 1963 Eric Dolphy also regularly performed with John Coltrane's classic quartet where he generated much of his most acclaimed work. With Coltrane and pianist McCoy Tyner, Dolphy arranged the orchestrations of Coltrane's 1961 album, Africa/Brass, and he was a major contributor to Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard recordings of the same year. Improved musical documentation of this period has shown just how integral Dolphy was to the ensemble, a point which was minimized by the initial records. In many respects Coltrane regarded Dolphy as uniquely suited to explore his musical ideas, and as with Mingus, the influence was clearly reciprocal.
Following the final performances of Charles Mingus' 1964 European tour, Dolphy remained abroad, seeking improved work opportunities and greater individual recognition before his forthcoming marriage. Eric Dolphy died of undiagnosed diabetes in Berlin on 21 June, 1964, at the age of 36.
Sources:
Vladimir Simosko and Barry Tepperman, Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography and Discography (Washington, D.C.: De Capo Press, 1996); Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (Eighth Edition) (London: Penguin Books, 2006); David A. Wild, liner notes to John Coltrane, The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (Impulse! Records, IMPCD 054232-2); Raymond Horricks, The Importance of Being Eric Dolphy (Tunbridge Wells, Great Britain: Costello Publishers, 1989).
Vladimir Simosko and Barry Tepperman, Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography and Discography (Washington, D.C.: De Capo Press, 1996); Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (Eighth Edition) (London: Penguin Books, 2006); David A. Wild, liner notes to John Coltrane, The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (Impulse! Records, IMPCD 054232-2); Raymond Horricks, The Importance of Being Eric Dolphy (Tunbridge Wells, Great Britain: Costello Publishers, 1989).
Contributor:
University of Washington
University of Washington
Entry Categories:
A
definitive jazz multi-instrumentalist, Eric Dolphy established deeply
original voices on his three primary instruments– the bass clarinet,
alto saxophone, and flute. Dolphy pioneered the use of the bass
clarinet as a solo improvising instrument, and, with Coleman Hawkins and
Sonny Rollins, he is one of the earliest saxophonists to record solo
improvisations. Beloved by his peers for his compassion and enthusiasm,
Dolphy's unique musical perspective helped shape the emerging
avant-garde of the 1960s, though he remained firmly rooted in jazz
tradition until his premature death.
Eric Allan Dolphy was born in Los Angeles in 1928, the only child of Sadie and Eric Dolphy Sr.–both of West-Indian descent. After demonstrating promise on his elementary school-issued harmonica, Dolphy picked up the clarinet, and while still in junior high school he received a scholarship to study at the University of Southern California School of Music. Encouraging his talents, Dolphy's parents built him a shed behind their home in which he could rehearse with his various ensembles. After graduating from high school, Dolphy studied music at Los Angeles City College, and he made his first known recorded appearances with the Roy Porter band in 1949. In 1950, Dolphy entered the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington.
Following his discharge Dolphy worked in Los Angeles in relative obscurity for several years until, in 1959, he earned a position in drummer Chico Hamilton's quintet. After touring extensively, Dolphy left Hamilton and moved to New York City, where he re-established his relationship with fellow Californian Charles Mingus, a personal and musical relationship which would grow until Dolphy's death. Early recordings with Mingus highlight Dolphy's highly developed and original musical interpretations. Dolphy's style employed wide intervallic leaps, inimitable harmonies, and speech and animal-like inflections (Dolphy supposedly regularly rehearsed among flocks of birds). The exposure Dolphy received as part of Mingus' Jazz Workshop led to numerous opportunities as both a sideman and a leader, including Dolphy's own 1960 debut, Outward Bound. Highlights of Eric Dolphy's recording career as a leader include several studio albums for Prestige, one for Blue Note (the remarkable Out to Lunch), and three albums worth of live material from his and trumpeter Booker Little's two-week residency at the Five Spot in New York. As a sideman Dolphy also made significant contributions to such albums as Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Oliver Nelson's The Blues and The Abstract Truth, Max Roach's Percussion Bitter Sweet, Booker Little's Out Front, and Ornette Coleman's seminal double quartet album Free Jazz.
From 1961 to 1963 Eric Dolphy also regularly performed with John Coltrane's classic quartet where he generated much of his most acclaimed work. With Coltrane and pianist McCoy Tyner, Dolphy arranged the orchestrations of Coltrane's 1961 album, Africa/Brass, and he was a major contributor to Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard recordings of the same year. Improved musical documentation of this period has shown just how integral Dolphy was to the ensemble, a point which was minimized by the initial records. In many respects Coltrane regarded Dolphy as uniquely suited to explore his musical ideas, and as with Mingus, the influence was clearly reciprocal.
Following the final performances of Charles Mingus' 1964 European tour, Dolphy remained abroad, seeking improved work opportunities and greater individual recognition before his forthcoming marriage. Eric Dolphy died of undiagnosed diabetes in Berlin on 21 June, 1964, at the age of 36.
Eric Allan Dolphy was born in Los Angeles in 1928, the only child of Sadie and Eric Dolphy Sr.–both of West-Indian descent. After demonstrating promise on his elementary school-issued harmonica, Dolphy picked up the clarinet, and while still in junior high school he received a scholarship to study at the University of Southern California School of Music. Encouraging his talents, Dolphy's parents built him a shed behind their home in which he could rehearse with his various ensembles. After graduating from high school, Dolphy studied music at Los Angeles City College, and he made his first known recorded appearances with the Roy Porter band in 1949. In 1950, Dolphy entered the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington.
Following his discharge Dolphy worked in Los Angeles in relative obscurity for several years until, in 1959, he earned a position in drummer Chico Hamilton's quintet. After touring extensively, Dolphy left Hamilton and moved to New York City, where he re-established his relationship with fellow Californian Charles Mingus, a personal and musical relationship which would grow until Dolphy's death. Early recordings with Mingus highlight Dolphy's highly developed and original musical interpretations. Dolphy's style employed wide intervallic leaps, inimitable harmonies, and speech and animal-like inflections (Dolphy supposedly regularly rehearsed among flocks of birds). The exposure Dolphy received as part of Mingus' Jazz Workshop led to numerous opportunities as both a sideman and a leader, including Dolphy's own 1960 debut, Outward Bound. Highlights of Eric Dolphy's recording career as a leader include several studio albums for Prestige, one for Blue Note (the remarkable Out to Lunch), and three albums worth of live material from his and trumpeter Booker Little's two-week residency at the Five Spot in New York. As a sideman Dolphy also made significant contributions to such albums as Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Oliver Nelson's The Blues and The Abstract Truth, Max Roach's Percussion Bitter Sweet, Booker Little's Out Front, and Ornette Coleman's seminal double quartet album Free Jazz.
From 1961 to 1963 Eric Dolphy also regularly performed with John Coltrane's classic quartet where he generated much of his most acclaimed work. With Coltrane and pianist McCoy Tyner, Dolphy arranged the orchestrations of Coltrane's 1961 album, Africa/Brass, and he was a major contributor to Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard recordings of the same year. Improved musical documentation of this period has shown just how integral Dolphy was to the ensemble, a point which was minimized by the initial records. In many respects Coltrane regarded Dolphy as uniquely suited to explore his musical ideas, and as with Mingus, the influence was clearly reciprocal.
Following the final performances of Charles Mingus' 1964 European tour, Dolphy remained abroad, seeking improved work opportunities and greater individual recognition before his forthcoming marriage. Eric Dolphy died of undiagnosed diabetes in Berlin on 21 June, 1964, at the age of 36.
Sources:
Vladimir Simosko and Barry Tepperman, Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography and Discography (Washington, D.C.: De Capo Press, 1996); Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (Eighth Edition) (London: Penguin Books, 2006); David A. Wild, liner notes to John Coltrane, The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (Impulse! Records, IMPCD 054232-2); Raymond Horricks, The Importance of Being Eric Dolphy (Tunbridge Wells, Great Britain: Costello Publishers, 1989).
Vladimir Simosko and Barry Tepperman, Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography and Discography (Washington, D.C.: De Capo Press, 1996); Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (Eighth Edition) (London: Penguin Books, 2006); David A. Wild, liner notes to John Coltrane, The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (Impulse! Records, IMPCD 054232-2); Raymond Horricks, The Importance of Being Eric Dolphy (Tunbridge Wells, Great Britain: Costello Publishers, 1989).
Contributor:
- See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/dolphy-eric-1928-1964#sthash.vV8uM38i.dpuf
A
definitive jazz multi-instrumentalist, Eric Dolphy established deeply
original voices on his three primary instruments– the bass clarinet,
alto saxophone, and flute. Dolphy pioneered the use of the bass
clarinet as a solo improvising instrument, and, with Coleman Hawkins and
Sonny Rollins, he is one of the earliest saxophonists to record solo
improvisations. Beloved by his peers for his compassion and enthusiasm,
Dolphy's unique musical perspective helped shape the emerging
avant-garde of the 1960s, though he remained firmly rooted in jazz
tradition until his premature death.
- See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/dolphy-eric-1928-1964#sthash.vV8uM38i.dpuf
- See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/dolphy-eric-1928-1964#sthash.vV8uM38i.dpuf
http://www.allmusic.com/album/complete-recordings-eric-dolphy-quintet-featuring-herbie-hancock-mw0000140442/credits]