Eric Dolphy

I first heard Eric Dolphy while I was going through my Tony Williams stage. The album was Point of Departure, by Andrew Hill. The first song, “Refuge,” has an entrancingly subtle complexity of harmony. All of the instruments weave around and through each other. Williams is astounding, mostly laying out at the head to keep the melody suspended, and then pushing and pulling the tempo like a mad scientist as Hill takes a piano solo. Hill stays close to the melody line for awhile before breaking free, but then seemingly has nowhere to go until an alto sax screams through the speakers like an F-14 Tomcat and blasts the song back into action.

After the alto sax solo, I just kept hitting rewind for awhile. That was my introduction to Eric Dolphy, quite possibly the greatest musician who ever lived, equally adept at the alto sax, the bass clarinet and the flute.

All of the songs on Point of Departure are brilliantly composed by Hill, but whereas the other musicians seem to struggle to live up to the limitless possibilities provided by the imaginative heads, Williams and Dolphy thrive. During his first solo on the third song, “Spectrum,” Dolphy plays the bass clarinet, bending and twisting the notes as if he’s tying the instrument in knots. Although I first heard it around 1994, Point of Departure was recorded on March 31, 1964, when Dolphy was 35. Almost exactly 3 months later, Dolphy would be dead, leaving us with only 4 years worth of recordings.

The next day after hearing Point of Departure, I went out and bought a Dolphy album, Outward Bound (1960). This album proved very frustrating, as apparently they forgot to plug in the microphone Dolphy was using except for on the ballad where he plays flute, and I’ve never been into ballads. I momentarily forgot about Dolphy in my rush to find out what other amazing musicians were out there (and “out there”) that I’d never heard. Inevitably, I discovered John Coltrane. I believe I was a freshman in college when I bought the 4 CD set of Coltrane’s Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings. I began contentedly listening along to Coltrane’s now familiar Impulse-era style; simultaneously melodic, ferocious, technical and emotional, when all of a sudden this bass clarinetist interjects, playing a completely different style; more blatant, more tortured. Half annoyed, half intrigued by this player, I grab the album booklet and am surprised to be once again confronted by Eric Dolphy.

Dolphy was a huge influence on Coltrane. Like Coltrane, Dolphy’s playing always dripped with a unique personality. Dolphy was an absolute master of his instrument, able to play seemingly any note, at any time, interval and tempo, including those above and below the normal registers of his instrument, with ease or with pain, depending on the mood of the moment. Coltrane redefined the term “technical mastery,” and his prowess is to this day unparalleled, but while Coltrane thrilled us by continually searching and grasping into new territory, Dolphy was already there, calmly performing technical feats while expressing bone-chilling tones with a confidence Coltrane (perhaps thankfully) never had. Also unlike Coltrane, whose work as a sideman with great composers such as Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis often sounded like soulless technical exercises, Dolphy as a sideman could always inject music written by others with his personality and make it work.

In the early 1960’s seemingly every great American composer lived in New York City, with the exception of the AACM crew, who stayed in Chicago. I believe John Cage was still there; George Maciunas’ Fluxus community was being born; Duke Ellington was still there supporting the younger generation; Sun Ra moved there from Chicago in ’61; Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter, Gil Evans, Andrew Hill, Dizzy Gillespie and countless others were all in New York City. Eric Dolphy, originally from LA, moved to New York City in 1959, and his talent was immediately recognized. It is no coincidence then that Dolphy played with the greatest composers of his era. Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (1963) and Mingus at Antibes (1960) both contain Dolphy with Mingus playing some of the greatest music you will ever hear. Dolphy was also part of Ornette Coleman’s world-changing and genre-naming album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1960), Oliver Nelson’s admittedly overrated classic Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961), George Russell’s opus Ezz-thetics (1961) and Max Roach’s Percussion Bitter Sweet (1961).

As a leader, Dolphy thankfully recorded a lot of albums between 1960 and 1964, although many of them are out of print. His best known is the mind-numbingly good Out To Lunch (1964), but my favorites are both live performances: The Illinois Concert (1963) and Live! At The Five Spot Vols. 1-2 (1961). I feel a very personal connection to the latter because it was through listening to it that I first truly understood the concept of group dynamics. Everyone supports everyone else in such a profound way- not by playing timidly or humbly but by playing confidently and respectfully. Everyone is playing at the top of their game without trying to imitate, compete with or outplay any of the others. How rare it is when the main motivation of a group of musicians is not to play better than the others in the group. Unfortunately the trumpet player of the group, Booker Little, Jr., died of kidney failure at age 23 shortly after the Five Spot sessions.

Eric Dolphy went on a European tour with Charles Mingus in early 1964, and when Mingus returned to America, Dolphy stayed behind. Apparently, Dolphy forgot to tell anybody in Europe he was diabetic, and when he fell into a diabetic coma on June 28, 1964, doctors assumed he had overdosed on heroin (after all, he was a jazz musician with needles) and shut him in a room to recover. He never came out of the coma and died the next day. At the time of his death, Dolphy had scheduled an album with an up-and-coming tenor sax player and Cecil Taylor alum named Albert Ayler, who would prove to be another genius and would also hugely influence Coltrane. We are left to ponder the possibilities….