Eric Dolphy
Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. (June 20, 1928 – June 29, 1964) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist and bandleader. Primarily an alto saxophonist, bass clarinetist, and flautist,[1] Dolphy was one of several multi-instrumentalists to gain prominence during the same era. His use of the bass clarinet helped to establish the unconventional instrument within jazz.[2][3] Dolphy extended the vocabulary and boundaries of the alto saxophone, and was among the earliest significant jazz flute soloists.[4][3]
Eric Dolphy
Eric Allan Dolphy Jr.
June 20, 1928
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
June 29, 1964 (aged 36)
West Berlin, West Germany
1949–1964
His improvisational style was characterized by the use of wide intervals, in addition to employing an array of extended techniques to emulate the sounds of human voices and animals.[5][6][7] He used melodic lines that were "angular, zigzagging from interval to interval, taking hairpin turns at unexpected junctures, making dramatic leaps from the lower to the upper register."[6] Although Dolphy's work is sometimes classified as free jazz, his compositions and solos were often rooted in conventional (if highly abstracted) tonal bebop harmony.[8][9][10]
Early life, family and education[edit]
Dolphy was born and raised in Los Angeles.[11][12] His parents were Sadie and Eric Dolphy, Sr.,[13] who immigrated to the United States from Panama.[1] He began music lessons at age six, studying clarinet and saxophone privately.[14] While still in junior high, he began to study the oboe, aspiring to a professional symphonic career,[14] and received a two-year scholarship to study at the music school of the University of Southern California.[12] Aged thirteen, he received a "Superior" award on clarinet from the California School Band and Orchestra festival.[14] He attended Dorsey High School, where he continued his musical studies and learned additional instruments.[14] By 1946, he was co-director of the Youth Choir at the Westminster Presbyterian Church run by Reverend Hampton B. Hawes, father of the jazz pianist of the same name.[14] He graduated in 1947, then attended Los Angeles City College, during which time he played contemporary classical works such as Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat and, along with Jimmy Knepper and Art Farmer, performed with Roy Porter's 17 Beboppers,[14] He went on to make eight recordings with Porter by 1949.[1] On these early sessions, he occasionally played baritone saxophone, as well as alto saxophone, flute and soprano clarinet.
Dolphy entered the U.S. Army in 1950 and was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington.[15] Beginning in 1952, he attended the Navy School of Music.[7] Following his discharge in 1953, he returned to L.A., where he worked with many musicians, including Buddy Collette, Eddie Beal, and Gerald Wilson,[7] to whom he later dedicated the tune "G.W.", recorded on Outward Bound.[16] Dolphy often had friends come by to jam, enabled by the fact that his father had built a studio for him in the family's backyard.[12] Recordings made in 1954 with Clifford Brown document this early period.[17]
Personal life and death[edit]
Dolphy was engaged to marry Joyce Mordecai, a classically trained dancer who resided in Paris.[12]
Before he left for Europe in 1964, Dolphy left papers and other effects with his friends Hale Smith and Juanita Smith. Eventually much of this material was passed on to the musician James Newton.[12] It was announced in May 2014 that six boxes of music papers had been donated to the Library of Congress.[12][58]
On June 27, 1964, Dolphy traveled to Berlin to play with a trio led by Karl Berger at the opening of a jazz club called The Tangent.[59] He was apparently seriously ill when he arrived, and during the first concert was barely able to play. He was hospitalized that night, but his condition worsened.[60] On June 29, Dolphy died after falling into a diabetic coma. While certain details of his death are still disputed, it is largely accepted that he fell into a coma caused by undiagnosed diabetes. The liner notes to the Complete Prestige Recordings box set say that Dolphy "collapsed in his hotel room in Berlin and when brought to the hospital he was diagnosed as being in a diabetic coma. After being administered a shot of insulin he lapsed into insulin shock and died".
A later documentary and liner notes dispute this, saying Dolphy collapsed on stage in Berlin and was brought to a hospital. Allegedly, the attending hospital physicians did not know Dolphy was a diabetic and teetotaler who did not smoke cigarettes or take drugs, deciding, based on a stereotype of jazz musicians, that he had overdosed on drugs.[11] In this account, he was left in a hospital bed for the drugs to run their course.[61]
Ted Curson recalled the following: "That really broke me up. When Eric got sick on that date [in Berlin], and him being black and a jazz musician, they thought he was a junkie. Eric didn't use any drugs. He was a diabetic—all they had to do was take a blood test and they would have found that out. So he died for nothing. They gave him some detox stuff and he died, and nobody ever went into that club in Berlin again. That was the end of that club".[62] Shortly after Dolphy's death, Curson recorded and released Tears for Dolphy, featuring a title track that served as an elegy for his friend.
Charles Mingus said, "Usually, when a man dies, you remember—or you say you remember—only the good things about him. With Eric, that's all you could remember. I don't remember any drags he did to anybody. The man was absolutely without a need to hurt."[22]
Dolphy was buried in Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles. His headstone bears the inscription "He Lives In His Music."[63]
Legacy[edit]
John Coltrane acknowledged Dolphy's influence in a 1962 DownBeat interview, stating: "After he sat in... We began to play some of the things we had only talked about before. Since he's been in the band, he's had a broadening effect on us. There are a lot of things we try now that we never tried before. This helped me... We're playing things that are freer than before."[64] Coltrane biographer Eric Nisenson stated: "Dolphy's effect on Coltrane ran deep. Coltrane's solos became far more adventurous, using musical concepts that without the chemistry of Dolphy's advanced style he might have kept away from the ears of his public."[65] In his book Free Jazz, Ekkehard Jost provided specific examples of how Coltrane's playing began to change during the time he spent with Dolphy, noting that Coltrane started using wider melodic intervals like sixths and sevenths, and began focusing on integrating sound coloration and multiphonics into his solos.[66] Jost contrasted Coltrane's solo on "India", recorded in November 1961 while Dolphy was with the group, and released on Impressions, with his solo on "My Favorite Things", recorded roughly a year earlier, and released on the Atlantic album,[67] and observed that on "My Favorite Things", Coltrane "accepted the mode as more or less binding, occasionally aiming away from it... at tones foreign to the scale,"[68] whereas on "India", Coltrane, like Dolphy, played "around the mode more than in it."[68]
Dolphy's musical presence was also influential to many young jazz musicians who would later become prominent. Dolphy worked intermittently with Ron Carter and Freddie Hubbard throughout his career, and in later years he hired Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson and Woody Shaw to work in his live and studio bands. Out to Lunch! featured yet another young performer, drummer Tony Williams, and Dolphy's participation on Hill's Point of Departure session brought him into contact with the tenor player Joe Henderson.
There is a celebration held at Le Moyne College based on a Frank Zappa song, "The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue," inspired by him.
Carter, Hancock and Williams would go on to become one of the quintessential rhythm sections of the decade, both together on their own albums and as the backbone of Miles Davis's second great quintet. This aspect of the second great quintet is an ironic footnote for Davis, who was critical of Dolphy's music: in a 1964 DownBeat "Blindfold Test", Miles quipped: "The next time I see [Dolphy] I'm going to step on his foot."[69] However, Davis new quintet's rhythm section had all worked under Dolphy, thus creating a band whose brand of "out" was strongly influenced by Dolphy.
Dolphy's virtuoso instrumental abilities and unique style of jazz, deeply emotional and free but strongly rooted in tradition and structured composition, heavily influenced such musicians as Anthony Braxton,[70] members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago,[71] Oliver Lake,[72] Arthur Blythe,[73] Don Byron,[74] and Evan Parker.[75]
Awards, honors, and tributes[edit]
Dolphy was posthumously inducted into the DownBeat magazine Hall of Fame in 1964.[76] John Coltrane paid tribute to Dolphy in an interview: "Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician."[77] After Dolphy died, his mother gave Coltrane his flute and bass clarinet, and Coltrane, who traveled with Dolphy's photograph, hanging it on his hotel room walls,[26] proceeded to play the instruments on several subsequent recordings.[78]
Frank Zappa acknowledged Dolphy as a musical influence in the liner notes to the 1966 album Freak Out![79] and included a Dolphy tribute entitled "The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue" on his 1970 album Weasels Ripped My Flesh.
Pianist Geri Allen analyzed Dolphy's music for her master's thesis at the University of Pittsburgh,[80] and paid tribute to Dolphy in tunes like "Dolphy's Dance," recorded and released on her 1992 album Maroons.[81]
In 1989, Po Torch Records released an album titled "The Ericle of Dolphi," featuring Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford, Dave Holland, and Paul Lovens.[82]
In 1997, the Vienna Art Orchestra released Powerful Ways: Nine Immortal Non-evergreens for Eric Dolphy as part of its 20th anniversary box-set.[83]
In 2003, to mark what would have been Dolphy's 75th birthday, a performance was made in his honor of an original composition by Phil Ranelin at the William Grant Still Arts Center in Dolphy's hometown Los Angeles.[84] Additionally, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors designated June 20 as Eric Dolphy Day.[84]
In 2014, marking 50 years since Dolphy's death, Berlin-based pianists Alexander von Schlippenbach and Aki Takase led a project, So Long, Eric!, celebrating Dolphy's music and featuring musicians such as Han Bennink, Karl Berger, Tobias Delius, Axel Dörner, and Rudi Mahall. That year also saw a Dolphy tribute by a Berlin-based group led by Gebhard Ullmann, who had previously founded a quartet named Out to Lunch in 1983.[81] In the United States, the arts group Seed Artists presented a two-day festival entitled Eric Dolphy: Freedom of Sound in Montclair, NJ that year.[12][85]
Dolphy's compositions are the inspiration for many tribute albums, such as Oliver Lake's Prophet and Dedicated to Dolphy, Jerome Harris' Hidden In Plain View,[86] Otomo Yoshihide's re-imagining of Out to Lunch!,[87] Silke Eberhard's Potsa Lotsa: The Complete Works of Eric Dolphy,[88] and Aki Takase and Rudi Mahall's duo album Duet For Eric Dolphy.[89]
The ballad "Poor Eric", composed by pianist Larry Willis and appearing on Jackie McLean's 1966 Right Now! album, is dedicated to Dolphy.
Dolphy was the subject of a 1991 documentary titled Last Date, directed by Hans Hylkema, written by Hylkema and Thierry Bruneau, and produced by Akka Volta.[90][91] The film includes video clips from Dolphy's TV appearances, along with interviews with the members of the Misha Mengelberg trio, with whom Dolphy recorded in June 1964, as well as commentary from Buddy Collette, Ted Curson, Jaki Byard, Gunther Schuller, and Richard Davis.