Pittsburgh Courier
H. Klein : 06/08/1963

Currently appearing at Pittsburgh’s Crawford Grill, the Eric Dolphy quintet is presenting an unusual array of sounds which have vaulted the group into the arena of controversials.

Dolphy’s attack on alto has been labelled “frenetic,” “inspired,” “crazy,” “nonsensical,” “classical,” “esoteric,” and “avant-garde.”

More fundamentally this new giant of jazz has provided his contemporaries in the idiom with many evenings of conversation on whether or not the music he plays is jazz or is something else.

His style is not to be confused with that of Ornette Coleman who relies upon a melange of distorted Parkerisms which are embossed on meterless improvisations which meet with howls of derision from practically everyone with the exceptions of Schuller and John Lewis.

Nor is Dolphy’s music akin to that of Charles Mingus, a winner of almost universal accolades as the “angry man” of jazzdom with his intrepid embellishments of the blues via his own stellar stylings.

Instead, Dolphy plays jazz, or plays at jazz in much the same manner as a Sun Ra by violating many of the accepted rules which most modernists feel keep the idiom in a “straight jacket.”

His newest unit includes Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone; Eddie Khan on bass; J.C. Moses on drums, and Eddie Armour on flugelhorn; plus himself on the alto.

He has already cut four albums on the New Jazz label entitled Outward Bound, Out There, Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot, and Far Cry.

His approach to jazz seems geared to the space gears and its concepts of elan and exploratory reasoning. One of the original pioneers of this type of music was Sun Ra of Chicago, a gentleman whose contributions to the latest in the field are many, and yet, one who has not received the credit due.

At any rate, Dolphy and crew are out to make it “big.” But many of their fellow musicians are questioning whether or not their style is built for the acceptance of the average jazz buff.

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Down Beat : 11/22/1962
Don DeMichael : 3.5 stars

There are notable points in this record, for example, the writing by Byard (Mrs. Parker and Ode) and Dolphy (Cry and Ann). There are some not-so-notable moments, however, such as the rushing of the rhythm section, particularly on Mrs. Parker.

There should be little doubt of Dolphy’s importance or talent by now, though he certainly has his detractors. He has musical problems too, as do al who are trying to escape Charlie Parker‘s ghost, but I feel he is steadily overcoming these problems – one of the more obvious being an occasional overdependence on fingers as a substitute for imagination, which still leads him to use what have become Dolphyisms. There is less of that on this record, however. Perhaps his greatest stumbling block now is how to make his point, how to bring a solo to a climax. Most of his solos here strike me as being questions instead of statements. This may be intentional, since Dolphy’s humor sometimes gets the upper hand. But the listener is left up in the air at such moments.

The method Dolphy uses to construct solos, so it seems to me, is not an easy one. He appears to depend on phrases instead of individual notes. A clarification: if it can be said that in the work of Ben Webster, for instance, each note means something in relation to the preceding and following notes and are the primary units of the total, then in Dolphy’s case each phrase, which generally stretches over several measures, has a relation to the phrases preceding and following, the notes within the phrases being secondary to the whole. That he generates excitement with this method is obvious; that he always makes sense is something else again.

His writing for this album is more together than most of his playing. Both his originals are similarly constructed: generally ascending or descending figures separated by focus points, either an accented dissonance or a rest, a pause.

Byard’s writing is well done also, and his two originals are quite contrasting. Mrs. Parker, named for Charlie Parker’s mother, is undulating, and the lines snarl and snap; Ode (to Charlie Parker) is almost pastoral, a lovely ballad, though the ending is a bit sticky. Byard, by the way, is the most consistently satisfying soloist; though he does not have the amount of blowing room given the horn men, he manages to get across strong, jagged statements, particularly on Miss Ann, during which he builds to a high tension with opposing lines.

Little‘s solos are lyrical for the most part, though there are several instances of his busily skittering up and down, a habit that marked much of his playing, though he seemed to be overcoming it. He is heard only on Mrs. Parker, Ode (his best work on the date), Cry, and Ann.

Dolphy is most lyrical when playing flute (Ode and Alone) and at his most involved on alto (Cry, Ann, and Tenderly). It is on bass clarinet that he performs best, I feel. His Mrs. Parker solo is very good; he achieves the illusion of playing a duet with himself on this track by switching registers, his upper register resembling the sound of an alto. The sound of his bass clarinet and his phrasing of the melody of Magic is a high point; it’s interesting to listen to his first Magic chorus with Johnny Dodds in mind – the similarity between the two in this instance is striking; both use a rough, almost primitive approach and a dark, throbbing tone.

Dolphy plays Tenderly without accompaniment. He begins promisingly – sometimes, surprisingly, sounds like Benny Carter – but he soon falls into a series of arpeggios, which show how well he can get over his horn, but there are no sustained ideas; it sounds like someone practicing.

Still, this is an interesting album, though not a wholly successful one.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

A friend once asked Eric Dolphy during a period when work was exceptionally scarce whether Eric would ever consider another way of living outside the jazz life. Eric looked at his questioner in amazement. “I’ll never leave jazz,” Eric Finally answered. “I’ve put too much of myself into jazz already, and I’m still trying to dig in deeper. Besides, in what other field could I get so complete a scope for self-expression? To me, jazz is like part of living, like walking down the street and reacting to what you see and hear. And whatever I do react to, I can say immediately in my music. The other thing that keeps me in jazz is that jazz continues to move on. There are so many possibilities for growth inside jazz because it changes as you change.”

In recent years, Eric Dolphy has become more and more of an important shaper of influential changes in jazz. He is part of the nucleus of such relentless self-searchers as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, and others who are trying to expand the scope and depth of jazz improvisation. Oddly, some critics have called one or more of these musicians representatives of anti-jazz. Yet what Dolphy and the others are working toward are ways to reveal even more of the fundamental emotions that have always been at the core of the “cry” of jazz. Among other areas, for example, in which Eric Dolphy is particularly involved is making the horn an increasing extension of the human voice in terms of cadences, rhythms, and pitch. “This human thing in instrumental playing,” Dolphy emphasizes, “has to do with trying to get as much human warmth and feeling into my work as I can. I want to say more on my horn than I ever could in ordinary speech.” And that goal, after all, was the same one that spurred the “singing horns” of the first jazzmen in the South.

Because of the flexibility of his conception and the intense daring of his execution, Dolphy requires on his dates musicians with comparable eagerness to surprise themselves. His company in this album was particularly congenial. The late Booker Little, who died on October 5, 1961, at the age of twenty-three, had formed a strong mutual appreciation entente with Eric Dolphy in the last year of his life. (One recorded result of their association is Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot, Prestige/New Jazz 8260.) Like Dolphy, Little was absorbed in composition as well as in stretching out in terms of improvisation. Also like Dolphy’s, Little’s harmonic thinking was thoughtfully unconventional. Little once answered an interviewer who asked about wrong notes: ”I can’t think in terms of wrong notes. It’s a matter of knowing how to integrate the notes and, if you must, how to resolve them. Because it you insist that this note or that note is wrong, I think you’re thinking completely conventionally – technically – and forgetting about emotion. And I don’t think anyone would deny that more emotion can be reached and expressed outside of the conventional diatonic way of playing, which consists of whole steps and half steps.”

Jaki Byard as composer and pianist is also a nonconformist, but he too is a cohesive experimenter. Jaki can be heard on Eric’s Outward Bound (Prestige/ New Jazz 8236) as well as on his own album, Here’s Jaki (Prestige/New Jazz 8256). “More than any other pianist,” Dolphy says of Byard, ”Jaki has the knowledge and the enthusiasm to really play my music the way I intended it to be played.” Ron Carter, one of the most original of the younger bassists and a uniquely imaginative jazz cellist, has recorded with Dolphy on Out There (Prestige/New Jazz 8252). On both Out There and Outward Bound, Dolphy’s drummer has been the astonishingly underestimated Roy Haynes. “The thing about Roy,” says Dolphy, ”is that he’s a superb technician, first of all. He can do everything other drummers can, but in addition, he thinks quickly and can adapt himself to any situation. And the third element in Roy’s work is taste – he never goofs in that area.”

The first two tracks were written by Jaki Byard. Mrs. Parker of K.C. is Addie, the mother of Charlie Parker. ”The song,” says Byard, “came out of my meeting her once. She’s a very pleasant woman, and l began to think about how differently Bird turned out from the way she must have expected and hoped for when he was a boy. When I was writing it l also thought of her and of all the previous generations in Bird’s family. Where did he get that genius? Who handed it on, if that quality can be handed on that way? I guess you could call the piece a groping for Bird’s family background, and also a reflection of his own groping for a center of gravity after he left Kansas City. The tune has a typical bop feeling, because that was his feeling and what he brought to jazz. It’s like a bouncing feeling, a music that’s always bouncing around, looking for a place to light.”

Booker Little’s solo underlines what Dolphy terms his definiteness and his strong sense of personal identity. Booker was never afraid to stretch out. Byard’s solo is characteristically springy. More than most of the new searchers, Byard is able to make dissonance buoyant rather than agonized. Dolphy on bass clarinet is continually absorbing in the unexpected turns of his imagination and, as previously noted, in the speech-like exclamations that burst from his horn.

The reflective Ode to Charlie Parker is also by Byard. ”I guess,” says Byard, ”the song expresses a mixture of affection and regret. Bird, after all, was one of my inspirations, and I’d long wondered why nobody had written a song in his memory when he died. And that’s what this – a tribute to Bird, but it also has a question mark. I tried to ask in it why he ended up as he did, why there was so much self-destruction in him. He accomplished so much, but there was also so much waste.” After each chorus, Byard inserted a vamp-like section so that “the musicians could meditate, in a sense, on what they wanted to say next.” Dolphy is heard on flute, and Booker Little, who was particularly fond of this piece, follows in one of his most lyrically affecting solos on record. “Booker,” says Jaki, ”had an extraordinary melodic imagination. I think that if Booker had lived he would have developed in the way Clifford Brown wanted to. Booker had both ingredients – technique and lyricism.”

Far Cry is by Eric Dolphy, and it to grew from Eric’s thoughts about Charlie Parker. “One of the title’s meanings is that it’s a far cry from the direct impact Bird had when he was alive and his position now. Oh, people still talk about him, but how many people still really listen to his records? I wrote this to show that I haven’t forgotten him or what he’s meant to me. But the song also says that as great as he was, he was a far cry from what he could have been. And finally, it says that I’m a far cry from being to say all I want to in jazz.” The melody is structured in an opening 12 bars, a nine-bar bridge, and a final 6-bar section. The solo choruses are in 15-bar units. The bridge is entirely 4/4, but in the rest of the tune, Dolphy explains, “while the rhythm section keeps a regular pulse, the harmonic pattern is so arranged that it leads the horns into changing meters over that pulse.”

“It’s an interesting thing,” said Jaki Byard on hearing the track, “that although he’s got so much of his own going, Eric is the only one of all the cats who’s captured Bird’s true tone.”

Miss Ann is a sketch by Eric of a girl he knows “She’s happy and joyful,” Eric adds, “and that’s how the song is.” Jaki Byard, an admirer of Dolphy’s writing, points out that in Eric’s fast tunes, such as Miss Ann, “that particular flavor he gets in his originals comes from the fact that he uses the upper structure of the chords, raised notes, flatted thirteenths, etc. And he plays like that too, thereby getting away from the usual bop feeling of sevenths and flatted fifths. Another thing is that Eric’s freedom in playing and writing is never chaos. He always makes sense, and those critics who call him disorganized should first have the chords and the overall forms at his tunes written out for them before they make that kind of accusation. Eric is very well organized, but it’s not the kind of organization that is immediately apparent to people who are accustomed to more conventional ideas of form.”

Eric’s growth as a flutist is impressively evident in Left Alone, Mal Waldron‘s poignant but not at all mawkish evocation of Billie Holiday, for whom the composer was accompanist during the last years of her life. In his unaccompanied alto solo in Tenderly, Eric may finally convince even the most resistant ears of how strongly developed a sense of form he does indeed possess. He returns to bass clarinet on It’s Magic, re-establishing his jazz pre-eminence on that exceedingly challenging instrument.

There’s so much to learn,” Eric shook his head at the end of a conversation shortly after leaving John Coltrane in March, 1962, to form a group of his own. “And so much to try to get out. I keep hearing something else beyond what I’ve done. There’s always been something else to strive for. The more I grow in my music, the more possibilities of new things I hear. It’s like I’ll never stop finding sounds I hadn’t thought existed – until just now.”