The New Jazz Musings

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. 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'...

THE MAN WHO WALKED IN BALANCE  An Article By KALAMU YA SALAAM Poet Kalamu Ya Salaam wrote a piece in the Sep/Oct 1992 issue of Coda Magazine, which combined his reviews of the current reissue of a bunch of Coltrane works on CD (box-sets), some other histories and his personal Trane journey. It's the first time I've seen the Major Works on CD and Live in Japan on CD critiqued in a major publication. Live in Japan rates highly with Kalamu.  He also theorises that Coltrane was a Black revolutionary musician. If you compare with Bob Thiele from another article in the same magazine, Thiele believed that people were reading too much into his music, and he wasn't an anti-establishment guy like LeRoi Jones. Certainly, contemporaries like Archie Shepp and Max Roach were more active, and vocal in their actions and beliefs. Trane was a revolutionary musician, and Black. For sure Coltrane felt aggrieved at the injustices of the time, but it's still debatable the scale of its influe...