Last recordings eric dolphy biography

A couple of years ago, the French publisher Lenka Lente published a slim biography on the ever influential and somewhat enigmatic Eric Dolphy, and at the end of 2023, an English version appeared from the German Wolke Press. At 112 pages, the book is like an energy bar of biographies, packing all of the calories in an easily accessible packet. Rich with information, Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography And Discography provides a thorough and concise overview of the musicians life and development, but this also comes with a gentle warning: the translation could use a little more work.

Sentence structure aside for the moment, what Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography And Discography does really well, and with an absolute economy of words, is present well developed sketch of a gentle musical giant. Dolphy (at least to me) was always a bit of a mystery because the avant-garde aspect of his playing was so well integrated into whatever structure or setting he was in. My first recording of his was the oft published Conversations, recorded in 1963, and as I found out from the book, a part of a session organized by Alan Douglas that also yielded the title Iron Man. However, as I also learned through the book, Dolphy's ability to color so well inside and outside the lines was both his USP, as well what perhaps has kept him a bit mysterious. Further revealed throughout the book is how this approach was very much tied to his reserved and rather adaptable personality. So, along with requisite recording dates and personnel listings, the book makes gentle connections between Dolphy the person and Dolphy the musician, suggesting that with his untimely and avoidable early death from diabetes, that the artist had not yet achieved the music that he was likely capable of creating - obvious when someone passes away in their mid-30s, but poignant nevertheless to read and ponder anew. Additionally, Dolphy's work and connection with Coltrane and Mingus are equally expl

American jazz musician (1928–1964)

Musical artist

Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. (June 20, 1928 – June 29, 1964) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer, and bandleader. Primarily an alto saxophonist, bass clarinetist, and flautist, Dolphy was one of several multi-instrumentalists to gain prominence during the same era. His use of the bass clarinet helped to establish the unconventional instrument within jazz. Dolphy 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 employing an array of extended techniques to emulate the sounds of human voices and animals. He used melodic lines that were "angular, zigzagging from interval to interval, taking hairpin turns at unexpected junctures, making dramatic leaps from the lower to the upper register." 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.

Early life, family and education

Eric Dolphy was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. His parents were Sadie and Eric Dolphy, Sr., who immigrated to the United States from Panama. He began music lessons at the age of six, studying clarinet and saxophone privately. While still in junior high, he began to study the oboe, aspiring to a professional symphonic career, and received a two-year scholarship to study at the music school of the University of Southern California. When aged 13, he received a "Superior" award on clarinet from the California School Band and Orchestra festival. He attended Dorsey High School

Along with Coltrane and Coleman, Eric Dolphy played a significant role in influencing the development of the avant-garde in jazz in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He featured on Coleman’s seminal Free Jazz from 1960, and toured and recorded extensively with both Mingus and Coltrane. He developed a style of playing that was wholly his own, characterised by wide interval leaps and unorthodox note-to-chord relationships and played a leading role in extending the range of the alto saxophone by at least an octave. He released the potential of the bass clarinet as a convincing solo instrument in jazz and with Coltrane explored the possibilities of extended improvisation. In 1960 he was among the very first to experiment with an Indo-jazz fusion and was an innovator in the use of raw sounds for their emotional impact, rather than for their melodic or harmonic effect. Though not the first (an honour that belongs to Coleman Hawkins and Picasso in the late 1940s), Dolphy’s unaccompanied solo recordings on alto sax, bass clarinet and flute proved to be influential in paving a path for other saxophonists – such as Anthony Braxton – and flautists to follow. A thoroughly schooled musician, able to read the most complex music at sight, he was, in short, a true jazz original.

Dolphy’s impact on his fellow musicians during the 1960s was related in a memorable moment during Tom Surgal’s new film Fire Music, that debuted at the New York Film Festival in September 2018. In it, the late reed player and flautist Prince Lasha and alto saxophonist Sonny Simmons explained what drew them to the New York scene of the early 1960s. The two were then based in California and recounted how they were in a record store marvelling at an LP by Eric Dolphy. “Where is he?” Lasha recalled asking Simmons. “He’s in New York”, said Simmons, “gonna be ready to leave in two weeks? I want to see this motherfucker; you know what I mean?” Even today, Dol

ERIC DOLPHY

Out to Lunch! in detail
Book excerpt by Jonathon Grasse
(October 2024)

Jazz Revolutionary is available from Jawbone Press.

There is always something new to hear in Out To Lunch! Dolphy's pinnacle work simultaneously points to a reimagined Afro-descendant lineage, a neo African past seen through the progressive glasses of early 1960s modernism and Civil Rights-era awareness. In these tracks, a universalist avant-garde laced with submerged grooves is punctuated with Bartokian swing, squared by motoric pulsations, a funky modernist soundscape propelled by communal improvisation. The album's brittle sheen is balanced by warm timbres, its structured regularity vexed by asymmetry and guttural convulsions straight out of early blues and twentieth-century chamber music. Out To Lunch! is folk music from the future filtered by African American sensibilities found in good-time music, in the non pitch-derived palette of human sounds, in profound group expression. The improvisations throughout the album often seem to grow from compositional themes, and rather than being a free-for-all jam, Dolphy's atmospheric tunes retain a magical spell over the entire session's proceedings.

Of drummer Tony Williams, Dolphy said he 'doesn't play time, he plays pulse,' preemptively dismissing concerns that the drummer doesn't swing much on these tracks. Williams was barely eighteen when on Tuesday, February 25 [1964],