Eric Dolphy

(Have you heard the one with the Latin Jazz Q[something]tet? I do still want to hear that one.)

Reviewer: Monty Hamilton - alto sax musician from Ft Lauderdale Fl.
This is some really challenging music, and it would be best if you were alone when you played it. I would never put something like this on in mixed company because only 1 person in maybe 100 is going to tolerate the awful note progression. This may be the worst jazz recording ever made. I like jazz because it relaxes me. Ornette Colman and Eric Dolphy make me nervous. I suspect they were both stoned much of the time. Charles Mingus also recorded some really unfriendly stuff, but this is just rude.

Reviewer: Neil from Northampton, Massachusetts
I'm a big Mingus fan and love Dolphy's work with him. I find this CD unlistenable. I'm not a fan of free jazz, but compared to this Ornette Coleman sounds like a Strauss waltz.

Reviewer: twocentsworth from nowhere really
Just another listener was shot out of the saddle once again. It seems he doesn't know a bra from a jock strap, and he doesn't know music from horse manure. My vote is for little old lady, the 19 year old chick from D-troit. Take a hike, tin eared, just another fruitcake Bruce. Nobody likes ya and nobody wants to listen to ya. Go pound yer worm.

Believe it or not, Jesus loves Eric Dolphy.
Reviewer: Karl A.D. Evangelista from
You will forgive my facetiousness… I simply find it regrettable that the defamation campaign against the so-called jazz “avant-garde” has dissolved into such extremes of vulgarity. Truthfully, it is a sensitive debate, and both factions can be faulted their fanatics, that air of ideological swagger that—in the best circumstances—is an indication of sheer, unadulterated love. But I have read it here… I have seen the institutions of civility, integrity and class ripped from their foundations and sent tumbling down a cliff to an uncertain, unfortunate demise. For shame. “Out to Lunch” is many things to many people—an intoxicating, thrilling experience to some, a disastrous, train wreck of an experiment to others. Regardless, it was conceived of pure intentions and is, if anything, a testament to the stubborn, reckless courage of a true jazz original. Thank you, Eric Dolphy, for attempting to tilt the scales, subvert the dominant paradigm… successful or not. Keep it civil, and keep it real. Hell, even the critics could fake it.

One of the best ever. Multi-instrumentalism. BASS CLARINET.

GOD BLESS THE CHILD.

COLTRANE QUINTET in EUROPE.

That covers most of it.

But yeah. A GOD.

"Why are they so sick and ridiculous, Dannie?!"

don't miss Outward Bound either.

For some reason my favorite Dolphy-related record this past year has been George Russell's Ezz-Thetics. There was a period where it seemed like every new record I bought turned out (to my surprise) to have Dolphy as a sideman. It put a big grin on my face every time.

Does anyone have the Dolphy boxset? It's been on my wantlist for a few years, but never quite get it together to buy that one. Incidentally, the same is true for Ellington's At Newport '56, which isn't remotely near as expensive; I'm just a sucker for buying a bunch of cheap CDs instead of single big collections.

Lots of people who come to jazz from rock seem to get hooked on Dolphy pretty early. It's like he and Roland Kirk has some odd hook on us (of course, Kirk has the big, familiar blues thing + the rock'n'roll wildness, while Dolphy has the energy, and rock-types seem to veer towards the free jazz stuff anyways)

Another one I like: Andrew Hill's Point Of Departure.

Another

I agree. This is the same with the Booker Little material as well. I understand how it can sound pretty tame ("hard bop with more hot sauce," I like it) but those records are amazing. Both Booker Little and Dolphy are such distinct voices. Dolphy may use the same tricks but they're good tricks, and he doesn't approach a song or a solo like anyone else.

When I was in college, I met a guy who had no jazz at all in his collection (he listened to Phish and stuff) except for the Eric Dolphy box set, which he wanted to talk about for days and days. So Oystein you are on to something. Also, Ellington Newport '56 you can find on vinyl for a few bucks pretty easily.

sun ra would be the king of this, no? people with 4000 rock CDs and 40 sun ra CDs. and pharoah sanders too, probably.

a little-known fun-fact about me: i listen to almost NO free jazz. maybe in my old age. i listen to jazz from the 20s to the 50s and then i mostly skip to the 70s.and not the atonal 70's. not to say that there aren't a ton of jazz records that i like from the 60's, but most of them wouldn't be considered free jazz. i'll get to it all eventually, but there is so much from the 40s/50s that i haven't heard yet. and that's the stuff that really dig. when i've heard every hampton hawes record then maybe i'll get to cecil taylor.

There's also a ridiculously lively Dolphy - Mingus duologue on Mingus in Europe ...whether on Vol.1 or Vol.2, tho, me donts remember any more, alas :/

good lord i love eric dolphy. "hat and beard"!

I'll raise my hand as another rock guy who fell head-over-heels for Dolphy the minute I heard him. (No homo.)

Still my favorite jazz soloist, especially in contexts like the Mingus stuff or Ole! where he has a strong foil.

booker little is a totally underrated trumpet player btw who died at the age of 23

Love the vol.1 and 2 Dolphy/Little 5 Spot albums! Little's playing is awesome on there. Have the vol.3 which is actually titled something like Booker Little Memorial Album, but haven't warmed to that one yet.

S: Charles Mingus, The Great concert of Charles Mingus

D: Fuckers who let him die without treatment cause they thought he was overdosing.

So glad I got Out to Lunch in the Tower implosion. Long overdue.

Yeah, Dolphy's circumstance of death is still teeth-grindingly maddening today.

I read somewhere recently that in his last days he was basically living on honey and weed. What a waste.

That doesn't sound like good fare for a diabetic. Well, the honey anyhow. Don't know about the weed.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B000000YNU/sr=8-1/qid=1202019095/ref=dp_image_0/103-3676940-5584655?ie=UTF8&n=5174&s=music&qid=1202019095&sr=8-1

Don't know if you guys can see that, but it was supposed to be the cover of Ron Carter's Where?, on which Dolphy plays real goodly.

I heard Out to Lunch for the first time last Spring and was disappointed to find it didn't really do anything for me, but I'm loving the shit out of his playing on this. Maybe I'll give it another shot.

Loving the sound of the bass clarinet!

one of my favorite pieces of music film. dolphy's gotta be, what, a few months from death there?

can't really fathom 'Out to Lunch' "not doing anything" to anyone predisposed to like Dolphy ... I mean that's just crazy, it's his masterpiece

well i guess maybe those solo "God Bless the Child" are his masterpiece, but in terms of ALBUMS ...

I know, right? I was surprised too. I need to run by it again.

ah .. it is what it is .. you also might wanna make your way toward that Coltrane 'Europe Tours' box set .. much of which had been bootlegged for a while but finally came out when that Pablo box was released a couple of years ago. Just a fucking insane pairing .. we all know the Village Vanguard LP, but the Europe tour was insanity in its niceness

Dingbod--that's insane!

Are we sure?

I've never heard of Dolphy with Little Richard, I can only find a blog entry mentioning it, and if memory serves, the Simosko bio/disco makes no mention. I even tooled around on Youtube, to no avail...

He's definitely on there, though.

I remember watching the film as a kid on Saturday afternoon BBC2 and my dad pointed him out (first on the left?) and it was definitely him. Dolphy's presence was confirmed in the NME about ten years later.

Neat!

Is the sound on the RVG edition of Out to Lunch significantly better than the original issue CD (which I have)? Some of those RVG's can be a bit hit and miss. I'm in Tokyo right now so perhaps I should consider picking up one of the Japanese edtions...

I think the sound might be why I was so turned off by it the first time!

It was my first RVG and I was horrified. Then I realized it was a trend, but I haven't gone back to OTL since.

yeah, we had the RVG discussion on one or two other threads. Short version: avoid them

thanks for the advice :)

fwiw it took me a while to realize. it was totally "doth my ears deceive me?" b/c I knew RVG had engineered so many originally great-sounding records. I think it was the Maiden Voyage that pushed me over the edge, but I only felt sure of my opinion once I realized that others were experiencing the same

some of the RVG's that i've heard have been a bit on the bright side. and an overly 'bright' sounding OTL would be too tiring for my ears.

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".

buy everything you see with his name on it.

― scott seward (scott seward), Thursday, July 14, 2005 6:34 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

DOLPHY PO5:

At the Five Spot vol. 1 w/Booker Little
Coltrane - Ole
Mingus Town Hall 1964
Out There
Coltrane - Village Vanguard

Dolphy was the first jazz musician whose soloing I instinctively responded to, and remains foremost for me...

Out To Lunch! was recorded 50 years ago today, the same day Ali beat Liston in Miami for the Heavyweight Championship.

Just picked up Out There over the weekend for my first ever dip into his solo work. I'm excited.

Out There is incredible - one of our house's most played LPs. The cello / bass combo is something more people should have done.

otm. Ron Carter's Where? has a similar lineup: Carter, Duvivier, Dolphy, but with Charlie Persip and Mal Waldron.

i'm still waiting for more cello/guitar recs!

http://ecmreviews.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/improvisations-for-cello-and-guitar1.jpg

I kinda don't like Eric's solo on the "Out There" title cut very much - he keeps playing that one dipsy-doodle lick over and over for several bars at a time, like he's killing time while thinking of what to play next. Maybe it wouldn't sound that way if Haynes/Duvivier weren't so committed to 4/4, I dunno...

But yeah, still a very cool-sounding lineup in total.

thissss
https://vimeo.com/105420482

Woah.

did any other jazz musicians ever get into the bass clarinet? or did they just stay away from it because dolphy was so amazing.

that's the track that got me into him, love it

did any other jazz musicians ever get into the bass clarinet?

Byard Lancaster has some stunning moments on Bill Dixon's Intents and Purposes. And Harry Carney, John Gilmore, and Peter Brötzmann have all used it at one time or another, but none as their primary instrument.

cool, will have to seek those out... i really like the sound dolphy gets out of it! was listening to "spiritual" from coltrane's village vanguard box yesterday too, so good.

Bennie Maupin on Bitches Brew!

oh yeah that's right! guess maupin breaks it out w/ hancocka bit too.

hancocka!

David Murray on a buncha stuff, but especially Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4m9RsRucuM

jfc I only today learned how the man died. Now I'm fucking angry.

In 1964, Dolphy fell into a coma due to undiagnosed/untreated diabetes in Berlin. He was a teetotaler who didn't smoke, but docs, hearing he played jazz, assumed he'd OD'd and didn't even take a blood test. He died at 36 for absolutely no reason https://t.co/CiAlZYeTzA

— jo livingstone (@Jo_Livingstone) June 29, 2020

jeez

Shocking waste of a life. Monk and Powell also had some very rough treatment by cops and doctors who decided a few rounds of electroconvulsive therapy might make them better!

I forgot to add the clubs to head therapy from the cops as well.

cops & their psychiatric equivalents basically destroyed monk’s career and life, it’s amazing he got anything done

on dolphy, he gets respect but still feels underrated somehow, maybe bc he didn’t start an obvious “movement”, falls somewhere between bop and “free” with most of playing, recorded lots of his best stuff as sideman. had he lived he would have certainly gone to wilder places, was planning collaboration with ayler, would have done ascension etc. I would also have liked to hear him with/against mid-60s sonny rollins, maybe in the band with don cherry. and an anthony braxton style solo album with all his instruments would have been amazing

dolphy solo recordings: inner flight 1 & 2 (flute), tenderly (alto), various god bless the childs (bass clarinet)- any more?

also did he play regular clarinet anywhere except for that one track on “out there”?

I dunno about solos, but i'll always rep for Where and The Quest which are others albums with a lot of Dolphy greatness on them

not had a good Dolphy listening spree for years now, sounds like a plan!

also did he play regular clarinet anywhere except for that one track on “out there”?

He plays clarinet on "Warm Canto" on "The Quest". There's a Dolphy docu on YouTube called "Last Date".

on dolphy, he gets respect but still feels underrated somehow, maybe bc he didn’t start an obvious “movement”, falls somewhere between bop and “free” with most of playing, recorded lots of his best stuff as sideman. had he lived he would have certainly gone to wilder places, was planning collaboration with ayler, would have done ascension etc. I would also have liked to hear him with/against mid-60s sonny rollins, maybe in the band with don cherry. and an anthony braxton style solo album with all his instruments would have been amazing

― If you choose too long a name, your new display name will be truncated in (Left), Tuesday, 30 June 2020 11:04 (eight hours ago) link

I don't usually get too hung up on artists who passed early & wondering what could have been but Dolphy does feel like for all of the greatness he produced in his lifetime he was only getting started and he that he set a template for so many horn players who followed him (playing multiple different instruments for inst) and that he already had formed a relationship with the early Euro free scene (Mengelberg & Bennink on Last Date), who knows he could've been making records with Derek Bailey & Brotzmann as well.

so damned sad

"Jazz on a Summer's Day," a concert film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, has a couple of brief scenes of Dolphy playing with the Chico Hamilton Quintet ... it was on TCM recently

He has always been my favorite jazz soloist.

another great album with some prime Dolphy is Max Roach's Percussion Bitter Sweet.

the lyrics to the vocal track Mendacity (with nice Dolphy solo) still ring true (politicians are a bunch of cunts).

Eric Dolphy is definitely one of the great tragedies in an art form that's had far too any. It's very possible he hadn't reached his full potential which is simply astonishing when we have a masterpiece like Out to Lunch. With the loss of Coltrane and Dolphy and what they were beginning to explore with the possibilities opened up by free jazz, the loss is pretty immense. It would've been fascinating to see how things would've played out in the coming decade.

TIL Eric Dolphy recorded Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” and his own “Far Cry” on the same day. And at two studios separated by a ~30 min drive, no less. Just incredible!

— Ezra Brooks (@ezbrooks) November 25, 2020

two of the best purchases I've made this year were two double LP reissues from the early 70's, one just called Dolphy which includes Out There and Outward Bound, and another called Copenhagen Concert which is vols 1 and 3 of Live in Europe. On Prestige, they sound amazing and can be found for bargain prices (I paid $10 a piece). You don't get the cool original artwork but you do get some liner notes.

i have that same Copenhagen Concert 2xLP. it's awesome and sounds so good