Eric Dolphy

• Born: June 20, 1928
• Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
• Died: June 29, 1964
• Place of death: West Berlin, West Germany (now Berlin, Germany)

American jazz composer, flutist, clarinetist, and saxophonist

A jazz reedist, Dolphy was a major figure in the free jazz and Third Stream musical movements of the 1960’s.

The Life

Eric Allan Dolphy (DOHL-fee) was born in Los Angeles, California, to Sadie and Eric Dolphy, Sr., who were of West Indian descent. He took up clarinet while in elementary school, and he eventually started playing alto saxophone at local dances. Dolphy practiced avidly, starting in the hours before school and playing late into the night. He studied music at Los Angeles City College, and after serving two years in the Army, he resumed his studies at the U.S. Naval School of Music. He returned to Los Angeles in 1953, and he began his performing career in earnest, meeting jazz luminaries such as Max Roach and Ornette Coleman, with whom he would later perform and record. Dolphy’s first major break came as a member of the drummer Chico Hamilton’s band. The film Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960) captured the group’s performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, which was Dolphy’s first broad exposure. Shortly thereafter, he moved to New York City, where he recorded and performed with Coleman, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Gunther Schuller, and Oliver Nelson. After his initial successes in the early 1960’s, his increasingly experimental music began to lose face, and in 1964 he decided to settle in Europe where he found audiences less averse to his challenging music. He died in a Berlin hospital of diabetes-related heart failure.

The Music

Dolphy made major contributions to the emergent fields of free jazz and Third Stream music. His training in the swing and bebop traditions is reflected in all of his work, but his ability to move back and forth between tonally grounded harmonies and highly dissonant, nearly atonal frameworks distinguished his improvisational voice. Broadly speaking, his compositional approach begins with a stylistically idiomatic jazz melody, or “head,” which sets the parameters for the harmonies and rhythms of his solos. This avant-garde approach to jazz composition and performance set Dolphy on a course that often overlapped with the European art music tradition, as evident in his performance of Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5 (1936) for flute at the 1962 Ojai Music Festival and his collaborations with Gunther Schuller’s Third Stream projects, most notably the album Jazz Abstractions (1960).

Early Works. Dolphy’s first year in New York resulted in an unprecedented outpouring of creative activity from the artist. He was a notable sideman on a number of important recordings, including Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (1960), which features Dolphy’s technique of “conversational” improvisation. On the recording, Mingus and Dolphy use their instruments to emulate the inquiring inflections, stuttered pacing, and expressive intonations of human speech—in effect, holding a wordless yet still meaningful conversation. Another important early effort as a sideman came with Dolphy’s participation in Coleman’s groundbreaking 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, a recording that ostensibly coined the name for a whole genre. In this, Dolphy played the counterpart to the saxophonist Coleman in the double quartet comprising two saxophonists, two trumpeters, two bassists, and two drummers. Exhibiting his abilities in the mainstream jazz tradition, Dolphy also appeared on Nelson’s Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961), widely considered that artist’s best effort and a classic jazz album.

Out There.In addition to his considerable early body of creative work as a sideman, Dolphy recorded three albums as a bandleader in 1960: Outward Bound, Out There, and Far Cry! Of these, Out There remains one of his finest. His performances on the album establish his ability to work both in and outside the jazz tradition, hence the term “out” in the titles, with which various record labels sought to promote his music. The album, with Ron Carter on cello, George Duvivier on bass, and Roy Haynes on drums, featured Dolphy on clarinet, bass clarinet, and flute as well as on saxophone. On the title track, Dolphy on alto sax plays a frenetic bop-inspired head doubled by Carter on cello. The piece then moves into improvised solos that maintain traditional stylistic phrasing, although wandering in and out of tonal coherence. Dolphy’s alto saxophone solo on the track displays his technical mastery of the instrument, winding through three-octave scale figures in split seconds and creating spirals of sound that are so artistically attractive that their outright dissonance and their lack of clear tonality become secondary considerations. The recording of Mingus’s “Eclipse” on the album is representative of Dolphy’s interest in Third Stream music. The vocal piece is arranged for clarinet and cello moving through a highly chromatic two-voice melody. Eschewing the rhythmic pulse of much free jazz, Dolphy’s performance on this track moves at a halting rubato pace indicative of its avant-garde classical inspirations.

Out to Lunch.Out to Lunch is widely considered Dolphy’s masterwork. A number of tracks from the album have achieved the status of standards, forming part of an established musical repertory among free jazz musicians. Dolphy’s piece “Gazzellioni,” named after an Italian classical flutist, is one such tune—a bop-inspired composition that Dolphy performs on flute. “Hat and Beard” is another musical portrait of sorts—here a tribute to Thelonious Monk. Unlike “Gazzellioni,” the piece directly emulates the compositions and improvisatory style of the jazz pianist, albeit in an abstract fashion. The piece features a bass ostinato joined by sporadic and angular interjections on trumpet, alto saxophone (and bass clarinet), and vibraphone, which eventually all join the ostinato. Dolphy’s bass clarinet solo on the track is noteworthy for both its growling, squealing, and wailing timbres and its multiphonics—a technique of reed playing that produces two pitches simultaneously. Dolphy’s work on the bass clarinet here and elsewhere established the instrument commonly relegated to a supporting role as a viable jazz solo instrument.

Musical Legacy

Dolphy’s major historical contributions stem from his foundational involvement in the free jazz and the Third Stream movements. Though many musicians around New York’s improvised music scene in the early 1960’s performed in both jazz and classical settings, it was the work of Dolphy and a few others that established a space for this music between artistic genres and at the edges of popular taste. His interest in avant-garde classical music inspired Dolphy to perform on nontraditional jazz instruments, such as the bass clarinet, oboe, and flute. His experiments with alternative instrumentations and with crossing stylistic boundaries resulted in the many nontraditional instruments commonly found in jazz settings and the expansion of improvised music beyond the label of jazz.

Bibliography

Horricks, Raymond. The Importance of Being Eric Dolphy. Tunbridge Wells, England: DJ Costello, 1988. This is a loving tribute to the artist, with a few transcriptions and analyses of some performances.

Simosko, Vladimir, and Barry Tepperman. Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography and Discography. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 1996. This excellent overview of Dolphy’s life and work places him in context with other innovative jazz artists, including Coltrane, Mingus, and Coleman, and it describes the unique voice of his music, which could mimic speech.

Principal Recordings

albums:Hot and Cool Latin, 1959; Truth, 1959; Wherever I Go, 1959; Candid Dolphy, 1960; Dash One, 1960; Erich Dolphy, 1960; Far Cry, 1960 (with Booker Little); Fire Waltz, 1960; Here and There, 1960; Looking Ahead, 1960; Other Aspects, 1960; Out There, 1960; Outward Bound, 1960 (with the Eric Dolphy Quintet); Status, 1960; Latin Jazz Quintet, 1961; Quartet 1961, 1961; The Quest, 1961 (with others); Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise, 1961; Vintage Dolphy, 1962; Conversations, 1963; Iron Man, 1963; Last Date, 1964; Naima, 1964; Out to Lunch, 1964; Unrealized Tapes, 1964.