Eric Dolphy Remembered

The first time I heard Eric Dolphy I was fourteen years old. The year was 1965. I had purchased a recording from Moe’s Record Nook, which was the one place in St. Louis where obscure jazz labels were available. I was alive at a time when jazz was refining itself. The people who played this music strove so gallantly that nothing like it has since existed. It was a special moment in the history of Western Art. It was like being a painter in Paris in the 1880s. As the twentieth century progressed a cast of enormous personalities emerged in the world of Jazz. Eric Dolphy’s reed music was blazing its way through his own recordings and those by Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Benny Golson and John Coltrane.

The tone is instantly identifiable. No matter which of the reed instruments Dolphy is playing, it’s as if electricity races through the convoluted lines of his musical logic. He is creating a vivid and original method of playing. He’s donating his vocabulary to the world and suggesting that wild interval leaps are just fine, provided one has the technique to pull them off. When I listen to a Charles Mingus piece featuring an Eric Dolphy solo, I hear a twisting sound -serpent wriggling from the jungle of brass and reeds. It sings and wails: hey this is it! virtuosity, passion, originality.

The number and quality of the tones Dolphy evokes are strange and hypnotic. The singing quality of his bass clarinet, with it’s goose-like ululations is…is just gorgeous. The word Gorgeous doesn’t cut it. It would take too many words and I can’t find them. I react physically to these tones. They get me in the viscera. They change my insides.

The first Eric Dolphy album I purchased was “Far Cry”. This is the quartet with Booker Little on trumpet. The title is apt because when I listen, I call out, I scream and I cry.

Dolphy is so loaded with technique that it’s ridiculous. His chops are thorough, they surpass the “ten thousand hour” work load that’s supposed to define Excellence. When that amount of skill lands inside a musician with courage, the results are incredible. This sounds more like fifty thousand hours of dedication . Fifty thousand hours of repetition, practice. Hard work. Yes, yes..I don’t exaggerate.

Dolphy died heartbreakingly young. What would he be? What could he have done? That isn’t truly relevant. He DID IT! The music is still here. That’s why I write about jazz musicians as if they are still among the living.

Thanks to the technology of audio recording, we have libraries of material from the musicians of the 20th century. We have a plethora of Dolphy music. Some decades ago I had a collection of almost a thousand vinyl records. They vanished in my wake when I left school. If I want to listen to something today, I use the internet. An hour ago I went to Youtube and listened to “Tenderly”, from the Far Cry album. What kind of magic does this man have? He’s so brilliant on his reed instruments that I want to cringe. I think this is where the adjective of praise, “sick”, comes from. A work of art takes you outside the gates of the ordinary into something that can’t be described. It’s so huge that it’s just “Sick” and it kicks your ass. Eric Dolphy’s music is so rich that it will refuse to go away. The number of clicks from Youtube? Forty six. That doesn’t matter. The wider world fails to esteem its greatest geniuses. It happens all the time.

Eric Dolphy is still with me. If you’re reading this, he’s still with you.