Eric Dolphy spent the most prominent part of his brief career on the cutting edge of jazz innovation. He was one of the first jazz soloists to bring the flute and the bass clarinet to the fore, and enjoyed the opportunity, shared by very few others, of working with two of the most dynamic pioneers of the 1960s, Ornette COLEMAN and John COLTRANE. He was also in demand as an exciting multi-instrumentalist with some of jazz’s most demanding ensembles.
Dolphy was born on June 20, 1928, in Los Angeles. At age six, the young Dolphy took up clarinet, and later alto saxophone. He studied with Buddy Collette at Los Angeles City College, where he also learned flute and the bass clarinet—an instrument that is rarely heard as a jazz solo vehicle. While perfecting his technique in a studio built for him by his parents at their homestead in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles, he earned his living playing for Roy Porter’s Orchestra. Dolphy first met John Coltrane, the great tenor saxophonist, when the latter passed through town with the Johnny HODGES band. Coltrane would remain a loyal champion of Dolphy’s music.
Dolphy’s career began to take off in 1958, when he played clarinet in drummer Chico Hamilton’s quintet. The next year he moved to New York and joined the Charles MINGUS Quartet. However, regular employment was difficult to find. Dolphy devotees say this was because he was far ahead of his time, playing outside the accepted boundaries of bop and swing.
Dolphy’s playing on alto and bass clarinet sounded closer to human speech than to conventional methods of playing melodies over chords, and he used much wider intervals than was normal in jazz at that time. He had an abstract approach to harmony, and some of his flute playing resembled an agitated bird.
These unusual aspects of Dolphy’s playing were greatly influenced by his love of Indian music and birdsong. “Birds have notes between our [Western] notes,” Dolphy pointed out in Down Beat magazine, “and so does Indian music, with different scales and quarter tones.” Although startling, Dolphy’s music began to attract a growing band of supporters. The Prestige label was willing to record him as a leader, and, in the early 1960s, he was featured on Ornette Coleman’s revolutionary album Free Jazz (1960), John Coltrane’s Olé Coltrane (1961) and Africa/Brass (1961), for which Dolphy wrote the arrangements, and with bassist Charles Mingus on “What Love Is” (1964) and “Epitaph” (1962). Dolphy’s imagination and virtuosity on unusual instruments also made him an ideal recruit for the Orchestra U.S.A., led by Gunther Schuller, one of the best-known exponents of the classically influenced jazz genre known as “third stream.”
As a bandleader, Dolphy played and recorded at the legendary Five Spot in New York’s Greenwich Village, and also toured Europe. His album for the Blue Note label, Out to Lunch (1964), featured original compositions performed in the company of such emerging jazz stars as Freddie HUBBARD, Bobby Hutcherson, and Tony WILLIAMS. On the two albums that Dolphy recorded for the West Wind label while he was in Europe, he included a special tribute to saxophonist Charlie PARKER, and performed a typically lengthy take of Coltrane’s ballad “Naima.” These were recorded less than three weeks before Dolphy’s sudden death in Berlin, from what was said to be a coma related to undiagnosed diabetes.
Dolphy’s legacy to jazz was not simply the expanded use of flute and bass clarinet that he pioneered, but was also a belief in the possibilities that lay beyond standard song and chord structures.
Jeff Kaliss
SEE ALSO:
BEBOP; FREE JAZZ; HARD BOP; JAZZ.
Horricks, Raymond. The Importance of Being Eric
Dolphy (Tunbridge Wells: Costello, 1988);
Somosko, V., and B. Teppeman. Eric Dolphy:
A Musical Biography and Discography
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1996).
Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot;
Iron Man; Out to Lunch;
Ornette Coleman: Free Jazz;
Charles Mingus: Charles Mingus Plays Charles Mingus;
Gunther Schuller: Jazz Abstractions.