MetalJazz

An Eric Dolphy solo could not inspire indifference. Although generated from the musical family tree of Charlie "Bird" Parker, Dolphy often sounded like an actual bird, his octave leaps and throat shapings comparable to nothing that had ever before been emitted from an alto sax, a bass clarinet or a flute. His lines, though difficult and strange, usually bore a strict relationship to the harmonic context in which he was playing, which made him hard to challenge, although many tried. More important, he thrilled the ears of a significant few who felt and understood his message.
When Jonathan Grasse uses the word "revolutionary," the UC Dominguez Hills prof does not shrink from both its musical and political implications in connection with 1960s jazz. His thorough biography of woodwind master Dolphy, the first since a 1996 expanded edition of a Simosko-Tepperman book originally published in 1974, shows a kind, quiet genius who was aware of the cracks he had made in the status quo and suffered for his outsider status, dying an exile at 36.
The most revealing nexus of Dolphy's life was his relationship with the great saxophonist John Coltrane. Friends since the mid-'50s, when Coltrane visited Dolphy's Los Angeles home on tour, the two partnered in a quintet Coltrane formed in 1961. Although they played on bandstands together night after night for years as near equals, and Dolphy's name appeared on several contemporary Coltrane recordings for Atlantic and primarily Impulse, Dolphy solos on those releases were virtually absent.
Later bootlegs and official releases from the period find Dolphy on alto sax, bass clarinet and flute next to Coltrane, performing the kind of gymnastic leaps, unusual scale runs and tonal manipulations that booted the quintet leader to new heights; many reports attest to the long hours Coltrane spent talking to Dolphy about what his L.A. pal had learned from college studies and from conversations with Ravi Shankar. But Coltrane's managers clearly offered Dolphy a nice place in the shade, their plans for Coltrane settling along the lines of the inviting "My Favorite Things," which had smashed big for Atlantic early in '61. Coltrane's first album for Impulse with Dolphy was "Africa/Brass," which followed the example of "Favorite" with "Greensleeves" and nudged civil-rights associations aside by eliminating "Song of the Underground Railroad" (recorded at the same time) in favor of the less urgent "Blues Minor."
Dolphy had recently shocked the scene with his ear-opening first albums as a leader; these and several appearances as a sideman had established him, along with Ornette Coleman, as a controversial figure, and some were dubbing his music "anti-jazz" and (gasp) "angry," while whining that he was "spoiling" Coltrane. The dish didn't ruffle Trane, who thrived on the Dolphy jolt and whose music, in fact, grew more and more extreme almost up until his death in 1967, three years after Dolphy's.
"My Favorite Things" serves as a prime example of Coltrane's evolution and Dolphy's influence on him. Although Grasse writes that the 1961 version "transforms the upbeat, fairytale children's song and its themes of whiteness as purity into an introspective epic journey beyond the boundaries of the Western canon," Trane and Impulse surely saw this relaxed, upbeat take on a show tune as candy for the masses; only live with Dolphy and later in the '60s did the saxist load it with crank and acid and explode it for an hour, leveraging it to pry open the doors to perception. Nearly all Dolphy's Impulse contributions to Coltrane's band would languish in the vaults for decades. In the early '60s, blasted in the press and dropped by Prestige Records, he was commercial poison.
Dolphy's other main source of employment was a more overt revolutionary, Charles Mingus. Dolphy's solos ripped out of the churn of Mingus' arrangements with enough bite to justify the title "Meditations for a Pair of Wire Cutters," the epic suite that appeared in a 1964 Mingus Town Hall concert. The composition's titular reference to a method of prisoner release was posthumously changed to "Praying With Eric" or sometimes "Meditations on Integration" or just "Meditations," for reasons one can easily guess. No musician of that time ever fattened his wallet by making an issue of racial inequality.
When it came to fighting the fight, Dolphy's life in music told a story of courage. In spite of racism at Los Angeles Community College, he learned everything he could, and he carried that attitude to other colleges and to his stint in Army ensembles, as well as woodshedding with every traveling jazz performer who took advantage of the little practice room behind his parents' L.A. house -- a list that included everyone from Charlie Parker to Ornette Coleman. (Some, such as trumpeter Booker Little and bassist Ron Carter, became close friends and bandmates.)
Initially eyeing a classical-music career, Dolphy quickly discovered that color restrictions would strangle his opportunities. But his impressive chops and easygoing demeanor allowed him to sleuth out niches in Hollywood soundstages through old friend Buddy Collette, who had helped bust the color barrier of the Musicians' Union, and through the emerging Third Stream (classical-jazz meld) movement pioneered by Gunther Schuller, George Russell and George Lewis. Via these and his jazz gigs, Dolphy scraped by.
Always the innovator, though, Dolphy remained an outsider. Grasse does a topnotch job of showing what made him different: He describes over 100 solos in poetic detail, with a musician's knowledge; lays out the distinctive structures of Dolphy's compositions; and even discusses the minutiae of Dolphy's bass-clarinet mouthpiece and brands of alto sax. The windman's record labels, actually exaggerating Dolphy's rank of outsider-among-outsiders, titled three of his albums "Outward Bound," "Out There" and "Out to Lunch," an angle that, along with spacy cover art, encouraged him to be stuffed by some along with Sun Ra into the Afro-sci-fi pigeonhole.
Although Grasse regularly contextualizes Dolphy's music activities within the tumultuous civil-rights headlines of the early 1960s, we hear nothing from Dolphy's mouth on the subject. We are left with the second-hand report about wire cutters from the always unreliable Charles Mingus, and the fact that Dolphy was a member of the Mingus quintet that participated in an alternative staging outside the 1961 Newport Jazz Festival in protest of unequal pay and unfavorable time slots for African-Americans.
In the face of Dolphy's music, however, no words about the strength of his commitment are necessary, though we might consider some of his song titles: "Iron Man," "Burning Spear," "Red Planet," "Far Cry." We hear a man who was born into a structure and remade it to suit his own needs. Not only that, but he continued to remake it -- to improvise -- every day, and every minute. We hear some anger in the necessary process of destruction/reconstruction, but we hear a lot more jubilation, beauty and thankfulness. Especially, we hear freedom.
Grasse offers a virtual diary of Dolphy's short life, the author's greatest contribution being many authoritative corrections of session dates, personnel and song titles. He enlightens us about the unusual bump on Dolphy's forehead, and presents every viewpoint he can unearth in his narrative of the windman's Berlin demise. He also chronicles Dolphy's diet, which may have consisted largely of white beans and honey, though just before he went into a coma, he ate a lot of ice cream. Because Dolphy had no money, he never sought out a doctor until the end, and probably never knew he was a diabetic. This jewel of an artist died of the then often fatal condition known as being a black musician.