Eighteen months after Eric Dolphy's untimely death, Jazz Monthly published a comprehensive Dolphy retrospective by Jack Cooke, an excellent writer who has several other featured pieces in the Blog. His very detailed extensive retrospective has encouraged me to review some of my own thinking on the Dolphy output I own.
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| Photo of Eric Dolphy by Bill Wagg |
Eric Dolphy
BY JACK COOKE
ONE
THE CURRENT exploratory scene in jazz-the new wave, the avant-garde or what one likes to call it-is notably different from the music that immediately preceded it in that it is essentially a group music. In the early 1960's Ornette Coleman, George Russell, Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Max Roach, Don Ellis were all essentially bandleaders as much as musicians; they didn't usually turn up on other leaders' dates. There were exceptions, of course, like the George Russell-Don Ellis partnership of 1961, and these days there is a great deal of polarised activity in areas where a definite leader doesn't stand out quite so strongly, around Archie Shepp or Albert Ayler, and in the Blue Note and ESP house teams. But whether led by one man or several, each group manifests the same basic tendencies : to maintain steady personnels and gather together a group of compatible musicians, who can interpret each other's ideas and contribute their own styles to the music. This music is not, as was the hard bop movement to a very great extent, the music of the individualist. Some groups, obviously, work more frequently than others, some have more success at keeping a constant personnel, but even when work is short several leaders have a definite group of musicians to whom they turn when work or record dates become available, in the way that Cecil Taylor used Buell Niedlinger and Dennis Charles for so long, and Ornette has used David Izenson and Charles Moffet consistently through so many lean periods. It can be safely said, I think, that in almost all the men who are currently involved in advancing and expanding the techniques of jazz improvisation there is this tendency towards organisation; their music is worked out in terms of group feeling and group reaction.
Eric Dolphy, of course, throws this whole group movement into high relief by being almost the only musician of real standing within the movement to have pursued his career on a personal basis. Though there are, as we shall see, certain partnerships within the bewildering variety of his recorded work that were basic to the progress of Dolphy's career, and which make his work far less erratic than it might seem at first glance at the discography, nevertheless there was a strong element of the lone wolf in his musical personality, and in his career he moved through a great variety of settings, working with pick-up groups and established bands, often as spirit or opportunity dictated, yet bringing to them all his own personal view of jazz improvisation. In this way, as in some other ways, he refers back to an earlier time of jazz; he was for much of his life a transitional figure between the hard bop movement, with its house rhythm section, its loose approach to improvising and its fairly mobile single personalities, and the new movement, with its more clearly defined schools and integrated group approach.
Dolphy was born in Los Angeles on June 20th, 1928; he began to play clarinet at the age of nine and by the time he was sixteen he had begun to study the saxophone. His music teacher was Lloyd Reese, for whom Dolphy on several occasions expressed great admiration, and during this period he was given help with his musical studies, again according to his own statements, by such men as Gerald Wilson, Lester Robinson and Buddy Collette. He began working in and around Los Angeles as a professional musician, and it was here that he began his association with Charles Mingus. In 1958 Buddy Collette recommended him to Chico Hamilton for the then vacant reed-player's job in that band, and Dolphy stayed with the group until the following year, In 1960 he renewed his musical association with Charles Mingus and settled in New York.
What Dolphy sounded like before he came to New York in 1960 is not very easy to establish with any accuracy; few of his records with Hamilton came out over here, and here he may also have had some outside factors imposed on his style. On some of Hamilton's records while he was with the group he was in fact replaced for the recordings by Paul Horn, though for what precise reasons is not easy to establish. However, there is one influence that shows through all Dolphy's work, recognisable even within the highly organised and original style that Dolphy created for himself, and this influence is that of Charlie Parker, so it seems reasonable to assume that the earlier one goes back into Dolphy's career the more prominent would be Bird's influence.
Dolphy, of course, is no mere Bird imitator; when he began to attract attention early in 1960 he had already a cohesive and definitely established style, working from a different logical position from Bird and differing also in its basic structure. However, there are traces of Bird's work in his playing, mainly in detail similarities. Often the shape of a single phrase will recall Parker's work, even though Dolphy's harmonic outlook makes the line more jagged and the logic of his style virtually guarantees that the development of the phrase will be different. This echo of Parker persists throughout Dolphy's work, but it is no more than an echo, within the disciplines of Dolphy's style for most of the time, even though it shows a long familiarity with and deep assimilation of Bird's work. Dolphy didn't copy from Bird, he learned from him.
Chronologically, the first point at which we can begin to have any real idea of Dolphy's music is from the flow of records that started when Dolphy settled in New York and began working with the Mingus group and on other gigs in that city. On April 1st, 1960, he recorded for New Jazz under his own name, and from that point on we need have no more doubts about Dolphy's abilities or stylistic commitments. It becomes obvious that here is a musician of immense talent and originality, and his work from here on can be seen to be in all essentials his own.
Outward bound, the album recorded on that date, features a fairly complete demonstration of Dolphy's powers. Supported by an efficient, reasonably sympathetic rhythm section and a highly compatible front-line partner in Freddie Hubbard, he produces some fierce alto work on GW and Les, leavening this aggressiveness with some superbly moving moments in his solo on 245, and introducing the rest of his instrumental armoury in his flute feature Glad to be unhappy and the two tunes on which he plays bass clarinet, Miss Toni and the cheerful floating Green Dolphin Street.
What immediately struck many listeners when Dolphy's first records were released was his affinity with the movement that was at that time getting under way around Ornette Coleman, rather than any affinity with Charlie Parker or any earlier jazz style. Indeed, at this stage Dolphy and Coleman seemed constantly to have their names linked together in magazines and critical writing. With the benefit of a few years of hindsight it becomes much easier to see that this was largely wrong; Coleman's complete harmonic freedom and the highly developed formal values of his solos have little part in the basics of Dolphy's work. Dolphy, at least at this stage of his development, was essentially involved in a more conventional harmonic approach. He works outwards from this into the territory in which Coleman moves and works, but his starting point is more often than not a more conventional harmonic base. He makes his points of harmonic freedom not by presenting them as a unified conception, but by contrasting them with the relatively conventional base from which he starts.
That Ornette Coleman's work did make some impression on Dolphy obviously cannot be denied, and it could also be pointed out that the only time they ever worked together, as far as we know, stimulated Dolphy to one of his finest solos, but on the whole I think too much has been made of Coleman's influence on Dolphy. Dolphy, essentially, followed his own path and reached his own conclusions; they are his own conclusions, and they make his style entirely valid, with or without reference to the work of any other jazz innovator. It is likely too that he started from a somewhat different point, despite the all-pervading influence of Charlie Parker on musicians in the 'fifties; no change ever stems entirely from the work of one man, even though one man might personify a whole movement of change, as Armstrong and Parker have done, and as Ornette Coleman has come to do. All changes are the result of years of experiment, trail and error, by different people in different places, and it seems fair to assume that Dolphy was one of the people involved in this mass of experiment and that he was already reaching towards some of his conclusions when he was exposed to Coleman's influence.
The best demonstration of the strength of Dolphy's style at this time is on the records that he made with Charles Mingus for the Candid label. Dolphy here is not merely exposing his abilities, he is being made to push his style to its limits under the forceful and direct emotionalism of Mingus's Jazz Workshops set-up. Subsequently of course, these limits expanded and altered, and some of Dolphy's later work reveals an even deeper maturity and greater cohesion of style, but it can be said that the Mingus recordings are the first really definitive ones from Dolphy's early period. They presenta highly organised style of immense power and extraordinary detailed accomplishment, and they serve well as source material in any search for the essentials of his style.
The basic elements of this style, as we can get them from the Candids, can be defined as fragmentation, decoration, and a very direct emotionalism. His music uses decoration as an essential, more soperhaps than any other major jazz figure of recent times; his music is full of little elegances, complex note patterns used in a line to embellish the central statement rather than to advance it at all. This concern with the ornamental extends to his solos as a whole; the random selection of phrases, the use of fragmented melody and what is often a shifting emotional foundation have given to his best solos a highly ornate quality that both complements and offsets the direct and powerful impact of the central ideas. Dolphy at his best can reconcile these two opposing qualities of direct and often deep emotional involvement and elegant decoration into a truly personal statement of great strength and immense vitality, and this makes his work often very easy to listen to, once one has got rid of the idea that a jazz solo, or any solo, has to follow a direct and logical pattern of development from beginning to end. There is no need for a solo to do this of necessity, as Tadd Dameron tried to point out so long ago with his simile of the straight road and the pretty road, and Dolphy's solos hardly ever do it. Rather,they follow a kind of collage technique, a random selection of phrases and a style of development that utilises a free association of ideas rather than a more obvious step by step unfolding. It is possible also to see some similarity between Dolphy and Sonny Rollins at this point: Rollins was one of the first jazz musicians to explore the use of contrasted shapes within a coherent overall form, and some of these patterns are reminiscent of the jagged free associations which Dolphy has brought to such a high standard of expressiveness.
As if a high degree of individuality and originality was not enough to ensure him a position as one of the most impressive musicians of his time, Dolphy had the ability to project his work on a variety of instruments. The bulk of his work is to be found on either alto, flute or bass clarinet, but he has also made records playing clarinet and piccolo; he may at times have featured other instruments in his work around New York, and of course there is no guarantee that during his lifetime his multi-instrumental abilities or ambitions ended there. However, since all that now is no more than speculation, we must concern ourselves here with Dolphy's main means of expression. It is some measure of his technical ability, and some measure also of the basic strength of his style, that he could produce such a similarity of expression throughout the widely different ranges and sounds of these instruments and the different techniques they demand. Maybe the most spectacular achievement of this period was his bass clarinet work, largely because the initial impact was made by the sound of the instrument itself, due to its rarity in jazz and the remarkable noises Dolphy could make on it, and this, taken with his ability to devise spectacular introductory patterns in his solos presented a combination which immediately grasped the listener's attention.
One of the aspects of Dolphy's emotional approach to his music that has from time to time come in for some ill-informed abuse is his use of vocalisation techniques, of which the best and most sustained example from this early period is his long duet with Mingus on What love. He uses them on all his instruments, and has frankly admitted to making bird-song imitations at times in his flute work. All this, when seen in perspective, is of course no more than standard jazz practice, and if anything serves to place Dolphy more than ever within the mainstream of jazz. As far back as the New Orleans pioneers there was a high degree of vocalisation in jazz instrumental techniques, and since then it has been one of the most consistent factors in the development of jazz. Ellington's music has always been rich in it, and the work of Bubber Miley, Cootie Williams and Joe Nanton brought theuseofvocalisedbrasstoan unprecedented pitch of artistry. Since the bop movement and the work of Charlie Parker there has been an increasing use of this technique in saxophone styles and Dolphy, in extending the technique to bass clarinet and flute, has only taken what is entirely valid and normal practice and extended its range slightly, which is the only way to keep a practice such as this alive. Vocalisation is essentially a personalised technique; no rules can be set down about how it can be used and who can use it and on what instrument. The only criterion is the end result, and in Dolphy's case, as in the case of so many of the younger jazz musicians, the results more than amply justify the use.
TWO
At this time another pattern was beginning to appear in Dolphy's career, this time a partnership with the young trumpeter Booker Little. This started on record, as far as we know, on the same day that Dolphy made the Free jazz session, when Little appeared on Dolphy's own Far cry album for New Jazz, and can be further traced through Abbey Lincoln's Straight ahead album, on which Dolphy appears playing Booker Little's arrangements, to Little's Out front album, which defined and solidified the musical partnership between the two men. In July 1961 Dolphy and Little appeared together at the Five Spot in New York with a quintet; the group was recorded by Prestige during its stay at the club, and three albums have been issued so far from the tapes made then. They make fascinating listening, as much for what isn't there as for what is, for this is an almost archetypal transitional group, growing out of one era and looking to the next. The line-up of saxophone, trumpet and rhythm provided by Dolphy, Little, Mal Waldron, Richard Davis and Ed Blackwell is that of the Parker quintet and most of the hard bop groups that followed it, and quite often the music is not too much different from the established hard bop style. On the best performances, however, there is a freedom of movement and musical choice that the hard boppers never had, even though the rhythm section maintains a fairly conventional approach throughout. Above all, on the best tracks there is some of the most fluent and imaginative work Dolphy ever produced.
Two tracks are outstanding, both of them on the first volume, Fire Waltz is a gem of free association and tonal variation, the ideas flashing here there and everywhere, sometimes developed, sometimes thrown away in a prodigal way that only the most gifted and imaginative improviser could afford. But this performance, good though it is, is eclipsed by Dolphy's tremendous alto solo on The prophet. This long statement is in many ways the finest single recorded solo to come from this post-Mingus pre-European period. The strong line of the slow tempo theme, with its possibilities of doubled and even quadrupled tempo over a still slow moving harmonic base is ideal for Dolphy, allowing him to work extremely freely and employ all the unique power and inventiveness latent within his style. It is a beatuifully ordered solo, changing direction and mood constantly, humorous and emotional, elegant and raw, reflecting a variety of emotional and technical approaches, and suggesting strongly the mercurial personality of the man himself.
The length of this solo, a full seven minutes, invited some consideration of this expansiveness on Dolphy's part, for as a general rule Dolphy's best solos are all long ones. There is no need for any justification of this here, for the solos justify themselves; Dolphy sustains them well, his imagination rarely flags, and his ability to maintain tension and avoid anti-climax is most impressive. Given the choice, Dolphy would almost always stretch out on a solo, and I think this space is necessary if his technique of random selection and free association of ideas is to work really well. Here, of course, he differs from his early mentor, Charlie Parker. Bird rarely took more than two or three choruses, we are constantly being told, and this is true enough, but Bird grew up in an environment of big bands and 78 rpm records, and largely because of these restrictions his music developed naturally into a relatively brief solo length. Two or three choruses, anyway, was a reasonably long statement by 78 rpm standards, and by the time LP techniques had arrived it was too late for Bird to change, and since he had perfected his brief manner there was really no need for him to do so. The few records we have on which Bird stretches out for any real length show fairly clearly that he had trouble sustaining an extended solo: given six choruses he tended to link two or three entirely different short solos rather than construct any kind of single long statement. It is, I think, very wrong merely to hold up Bird as a model of rectitude to other musicians; the logic that governed his solos is not the logic that governs Dolphy's solos, or Archie Shepp's solos, or Coltrane's or Cecil Taylor's solos. In some musicians there is a genuine need of solo space, and Eric Dolphy was one of these cases; quite often the longer he went on the better he got, and the more easily he could bring his style fully to life.
There are many other fine things on the Five Spot records besides the two solos mentioned, both from Dolphy and the other men involved. Some rather odd moments occur on Like someone in love, however, and these are worth discussion because they bring up a subject so far not discussed, and that is Dolphy's flute playing.
On most of his early records Dolphy's flute work, though often good and always efficient, seemed somehow a bit out of focus; it hadn't the urgency and the flashing vitality of his work on his other instruments. All the bold melodic lines discernible in his work on alto and bass clarinet could be seen inhis flute playing, but there was not the endless tonal variety and the biting attack, things which are in any case hard to produce on this instrument, and it seems not without significance that he never used it with Mingus's group, not even in such a formless rave-up as MDM, nor did it figure in any other of his really great performances from this period. However, there were straws in the wind. There is a sharply memorable flute passage in the Monk variations on Jazz abstractions, and with Like someone in love we get another solid reminder of the quietly growing importance of his work on this instrument with the wild, slashing phrases that follow the theme statement. Unfortunately ,this expansive mood, once established, is very quickly broken by Ed Blackwell, who sets up a disastrous square four on high-hat worthy of the worst kind of dance-band drumming, a surprising error of judgement in one normally so reliable. However, the signs are there, and in Dolphy's later work on flute this potential becomes more and more fully realised until in the last year of his life his flute playing finally came to full flower.
The final album in which Little and Dolphy were concerned is Max Roach's Percussion bitter sweet, perhaps the most complete and unified of all Roach's records, and certainly the most highly organised and completely satisfying session all round in which Dolphy had been concerned since his break with Mingus. It would be impossible to go into detail about the album here, there are so many interesting angles from which it can be approached and so much wonderful music on it, but for the purposes of this article, it is only necessary to relate it to Dolphy's overall development. There is a brilliantly paced alto solo on Mendacity that sustains so well the bitter, aggressive spirit of Abbey Lincoln's vocal, a turbulent, disturbing bass clarinet solo on Tender Warriors, and an alto solo on Man from South Africa, not a totally successful performance, but one with some significance since it underlines the rhythmic upheavals taking place in jazz at that time and the way in which they were to affect Dolphy's style.
This year, 1961, seems central to any understanding of Dolphy's later development; it not only produced two rewarding musical relationships, the first with Booker Little, the second with John Coltrane, but beneath the surface of these there is an undercurrent of rhythmic development that contributed greatly to the final brilliance of Dolphy's later performances. 1961, in retrospect, can be seen as something of a climactic year for jazz rhythms altogether. A lot of things that until then were separate currents seemed to fuse that year into a real tide of discovery, culminating of course with the breakthrough of John Coltrane's quartet, and Dolphy's personal development at this time must be seen against this larger background of fundamental rhythmic changes as in turn they come to affect him personally.
All this can be seen to begin with Booker Little's Out front album, where Dolphy is involved with Max Roach and his infinite command of time, and continues on Roach's Percussion bitter sweet where, on Man from South Africa, Dolphy's headlong solo constantly swerves into the 7/4 metre of the piece laid down so vigorously in Roach's drumming; the result is a clash of thoughts that makes Dolphy's solo less than perfect but nonetheless intriguing. Around this time Dolphy was also becoming involved with John Coltrane's group, orchestrating Trane's Africa brass album, and in the last months of 1961 he began working with Coltrane's group on a semi-permanent basis. This was the first time since his stay with Mingus that Dolphy had worked for any length of time with another leader, and the most important aspect of this association was that during this period he was exposed to the work of the most important percussive thinker for twenty years, since Max Roach and Kenny Clarke in fact, Elvin Jones.
The best of Dolphy's recorded work from this period is probably his solo on Spiritual, which comes from the three day live recording session for Impulse at the Village Vanguard. On this there is a looseness, an ability to relax against the rhythm section and construct his solo within their conception of time that is not very evident elsewhere in his work with Coltrane. All the characteristics essential to Dolphy's style are here, the ornate phrases and leaps of logic, but his timing is slightly different, and nowhere else on his records with Trane does Dolphy's work produce such a feeling of deep involvement with the group. On India Dolphy never gets to the heart of the rhythmic idea of the piece, and though there are good things in his solo he remains on this something of an outsider within the highly organised framework of Trane's music.
On the earlier Ole album his playing is good but not spectacular by his own best standards, except on Aisha, where he produces one of the unexpected oddities that are such a recurring feature of his work and make any study of his playing so full of unexpected felicities and surprises, in this case a short, perfectly timed and sustained paraphrase of Charlie Parker that catches all the essentials of Bird's style, revealing one of the sources of Dolphy's style as it evolves and showing a deep and thoughtful study of Parker's work and a complete assimilation of the principles of his music.
Within a few days of the Village Vanguard session Dolphy came to Europe as a member of Trane's somewhat elastic quartet, and audiences in this country had their first chance to study his work first hand. Due largely, I think, to the circumstances outlined above, Dolphy's work was not as striking as one might have expected,though the tremendous impact of the Coltrane group was enough in itself at the time. I can remember, however, some excellent bass clarinet playing on the several performances of Naima that the group did on their concerts.
Though it didn't produce as many satisfying records as Dolphy's other important musical associations, and though the wonderfully satisfying contrast between his and Trane's styles, both working in their improvising from roots in a conventional harmonic approach towards areas of great if not total freedom in such vastly contrasting ways, was not completely exploited in their work together, due mainly to the differences in rhythmic approach and the greater stress on Trane's rhythmic manner that inevitably his own group would produce, nonetheless the months that Dolphy spent with Trane were, I think, vastly important to his music, and his reactions to Elvin Jones vital in the construction of the immensely free concept of time that marked Dolphy's later and greatest work. Throughout his career he was always critically sensitive to his accompanists, and I feel that without the sometimes awkward clashes of time that we can hear on things like Man from South Africa and India there could never have been the brilliant rhythmic displacements of Out to lunch.
THREE
When Coltrane's group returned to the USA after their European tour Dolphy stayed on in Europe to work once again as a freelance artist. He had been in Denmark before briefly, in September, 1961, and it was there he made his base, working odd gigs around Europe during most of 1962. The most immediate, and for us, important result of this decision was that the number of new Dolphy recordings dropped to nearly nothing. The one recorded example of Dolphy's music available to us that is in any way representative of his life in Europe at this time comes from a concert recording made in Copenhagen in September, 1961, during his first short visit and before his European tour with John Coltrane.
The music on these recordings is patchy, and often not good, but interesting and relevant to any long view of Dolphy's development as a musician and any understanding of his personality. One of the most successful tracks is Hi-fly, a duet between Dolphy and Chuck Israels, which shows in two lengthy solos Dolphy's ever increasing command of flute techniques and his growing ability to express his style on this instrument. Best of all, though, is his unaccompanied performance of God bless the child, where the decorative qualities of his work show very strongly. In this truly solo setting Dolphy loads effect on effect, producing a degree of ornamentation under which the tune as such almost disappears, though he uses very little harmonic improvisation; the basis of the performance is in fact this ornamentation, and the remarkable final unity ofit all is a key to how necessary this decoration is as a basic principle of Dolphy's style.
Dolphy is joined by a Danish rhythm section on The way you look tonight, the rather banal choice of tune indicating perhaps how few points of contact there are between him and his accompanists, and soon abandons any attempt at coherence; here he crashes along wildly in a series of phrases of real hard bop quality, here and there more adventurous harmonically than the norm applying in the hard bop heyday perhaps but still owing much more to this style than any that came after it. The coda to this performance is a small masterpiece of shifting values, moving in a matter of a few bars from the battering hard bop of the main part of the performance to a brief solo interlude in which Dolphy transports us straight into a more highly organised and musically sophisticated world and then, when the rhythm section joins in again, moving on to a wryly comic Monk medley in half-time that closes the piece. This performance, poor though it is in essential, does serve to point up once again the lone wolf in Dolphy's personality, the willingness to go where the work is and play with local rhythm sections if necessary and expose himself The hiatus to the in widest Dolphy's variety recording of working career experience.
The hiatus in Dolphy's recording career that came with his life in Europe tends to separate his records into early and late periods. It is easy to see that during the time he spent in Europe his style must have continued to develop in detail from its well-established essentials, however, for when he did begin to appear on record again there was evident in his work an even greater degree of maturity than hitherto. Unfortunately, throughout this later period we have far fewer records to work from, and several of these are difficult to obtain generally. The jazz recording industry in the USA had been cut back fairly heavily from the flush days of 1960 and 1961, when a fantastic amount of jazz recording seemed to be going on, and inevitably Dolphy suffered along with the rest. Another factor, rather more personal, was his sojourn in Europe and his consequent unavailability for casual gigs during this time, which resulted to a large extent in his permanent exclusion from this scene. Out of sight, out of mind is an A-and-R manager's doctrine which, however aesthetically unsound it might be, has contributed much to the overall shape and state of the jazz scene since recording began.
The result of all this was that during 1963 Dolphy was mainly heard on record only when he got a date of his own, as on Conversations, for the rather obscure FM label,or when a group with which he worked got a date, as on the Mingus sessions and the Gunther Schuller Orchestra album. Also, at this time he had no permanent recording contract with which to follow up his alliance with Prestige, and at one point towards the end of 1963 it seemed as though his recording career was becalmed. Some records made had not then been released, and some that had were difficult to obtain. When news began to filter through of a Dolphy session for Blue Note it seemed as though it could be the start of a new upward trend in Dolphy's recording career. Blue Note at that time had begun to record some of the new generation of jazz musicians; some of them had become contract artists with the label, and now it looked as though Dolphy might begin again to record fairly frequently in an interesting and musically compatible setting, and it seemed likely also that his first Blue Note would be a good record. I seriously doubt, however, that anyone was prepared for how good it really was.
Out to lunch is arguably Dolphy's greatest single achievement. Here he reaches the heights of his powers as a musician, and the album towers over everything else in this late period, as well as casting a long perspective back to justify and fulfil all the great promise of his early work. At first glance, however, there seems no reason why the album should be so far out of the ordinary. Dolphy had worked with Freddie Hubbard before often enough, ever since he first recorded for Prestige in fact, and they had pursued this casual, on and off partnership ever since. Richard Davis too had appeared with Dolphy on record before, but Bobby Hutcherson and Anthony Williams, two of Blue Note's contract artists and the foundation of their house rhythm section were, if not total strangers, at least less familiar with Dolphy's work. There could be added to this the fact that in the past Dolphy had been thrown off balance by drummers with an extremely personal idea of time, and there could be no doubt from his existing work that Anthony Williams was as intransigently original as any drummer Dolphy had so far encountered. Also there was the fact that this was not in any way a specially big production on Blue Note's part; probably no more expense than normal was put into it, and rehearsal time was very likely also no more than is usual for a session like this. Dolphy's continuing career as a free agent, however, must have brought him vast experience at getting the best out of a group in the minimum of time and this, coupled with his own musical accomplishments, must have been a great factor in the success of the date.
The continuing principles that can be observed in Dolphy's best work throughout his career, the fragmentation of ideas and the free association of phrases, the elegance and the violent emotionalism, the vocalisation techniques and the consistent use of decorative effects, are all here in his work on this album, but they are now all used with an even greater facility and conviction than before. Harmonically, Dolphy is not now anywhere near as closely tied to conventionally harmonic forms than he used to be, and on this album it is patiently foolish to regard him any longer as any kind of transitional figure. Dolphy was a transitional figure only during the transitional times of the music itself; with the spread and acceptance of the basic ideas of harmonic freedom Dolphy began to work more and more constantly in the ares he could previoulsy only reach by working through a conventional approach. On his two alto solos here particularly Out to lunch and Straight up and own, this can clearly be seen. Rhythmically also Dolphy's style has developed, and here he responds to Anthony Williams's allusive, shifting kind of time wholeheartedly, playing against the drumming with immense verve, and sailing through the kind of rhythmic displacements unknown in the jazz language even three years ago. All this, of course, has brightened even further the colours of his style;the shifts of mood and ideas are even more dramatic, and all his work can be seen with a new clarity, the subtle variations of colour and texture made even more a necessary part of the whole.
Out to lunch, however, is more than a final affirmation of Dolphy's work as a jazz instrumentalist.There are explicit signs here of his growing abilities as a writer and bandleader, two areas in which he had not so far become very deeply involved. Previously, Dolphy's writing had not been so much an extension of his playing as a simplification of it; pieces like The prophet, with its strong, simple lyrical line, or the spiky Miss Ann, each reflected a facet of Dolphy's instrumental style without going any further than that. Here, however, there is a greater sophistication in the writing, a tendency to make it lead rather than let it follow Dolphy's playing, and provide a real platform for his improvisations. He would probably never have become one of the really important composers of jazz, but in this field also his work was by no means finished. Allied to this, on Out to lunch, is a growing ability to involve the men on the date in his compositions, notably on Gazzeloni, where Dolphy's melody line is carried on flute and given force by the intelligent use of Hutcherson's and Williams's shimmering percussive sounds in support. Something sweet, something tender is virtually all written, apart from Dolphy's short bass clarinet solo, and uses all the men present intelligently and often subtly in support of Freddie Hubbard's lead, finishing with a remarkable unison passage between Dolphy and Richard Davis; it is the most highly organised performance to be found under Dolphy's name, I think, and it comes off remarkably well.
Finally, the album raises the question of Dolphy's further development. This I know must now be a purely academic point, but it is maybe worth raising, for Dolphy had by no means finished developing his work at the time of his death. His success as a leader, and the way in which he reacted to, and got reactions from, some of the most advanced rhythmic players in jazz today does tend to lead to the supposition that Dolphy could not go on much longer fronting local rhythm sections of varying quality and still develop as a musician, writer and leader. Williams, Hutcherson and Davis represent some kind of pinnacle among the casual rhythm teams with which Dolphy was involved throughout his career, and such rhythm sections don't happen every day. Any further development, I think, would necessarily involve him as a leader, in much the same way that John Coltrane, after years as a sideman and casual leader began fully to explore his style on his early Atlantic albums and from there inevitably needed to have his own group. Some idea of the range of development possible with this step can be gauged from Trane's astonishing work after he organised his group. This maybe could have happened to Dolphy too, but of course now we shall never know about this.
Early in 1964 Dolphy rejoined Mingus, and he was in the group that Mingus took to Europe later in the year. After the tour Dolphy stayed on in Europe again, beginning another round of freelance work in clubs and at concerts. He worked in Paris for a while, and on June 2 he appeared at a concert in Hilversum with a local rhythm section. The concert was recorded for future release. On June 28 he arrived in Berlin, to work there before going on to Copenhagen for a season at the Jazzhus Montmartre. On June 29 he was suddenly taken ill and was dead a few hours later.
The Hilversum concert album, released by Limelight under the title Last date, presents for his last record a typical situation from his career, with Dolphy fronting a local rhythm section and running through a variety of jazz standards, originals and ballads on his three main instruments. The rhythm section is good, but not as good as the best American teams, but it shows pretty clearly how the standards of European rhythm section standards has improved over the last three or four years, and Dolphy himself is on good occasionally brilliant form. The long ballad feature You don't know what love is is used as a vehicle for Dolphy's flute playing, and it is rather just that it should be this instrument, on which his earlier work never quite seemed entirely satisfying, that features in this last great recorded performance. Apart from sixteen bars from pianist Mischa Mengelberg, all eleven minutes is devoted to Dolphy's flute. The theme statement is an ornate line of fluttering decoration and bent notes, the rest of the piece a complete display of virtuosity and imagination within Dolphy's style, and once and for all testifies to Dolphy's final mastery of this instrument.
Even now, a year and a half later, it is still not easy to adjust to the fact of Eric Dolphy's death. During his lifetime he did much for jazz, and I believe he was on the point of doing much more. In every area of his work he seemed poised for further achievement: he could have become a regular bandleader or, perhaps the most exciting possibility of all, and one perfectly justifiable on Dolphy's past record, he might have become the first truly solo hornman in jazz. On the other hand, artistic development doesn't depend entirely on artistic factors, and economic circumstances might have forced Dolphy to keep to his freelance life for many more years, and might even have prevented him from ever doing very much more than he did in his too brief lifetime.
That's all speculation now, however, What there is of Dolphy's work is all we'll get, barring a few possible posthumous releases. He was a man of immense talent and imagination, and perhaps even more than that. The best of his music will, I think, rank with the greatest recorded jazz, and will remain as a permanent memorial to this most gifted musician.
Ref : Jazz Monthly Jan '66
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