© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all
rights reserved.
“The music of Eric Dolphy and
Booker Little (the latter died of uremia in October of 1961 at the age of
twenty-three, only several months after the engagement at the Five Spot which
this series of albums documents) is representative of the new energy, the new
dynamism, in jazz.
Revolutionary movements, such
as the one which is now taking place in Jazz, are the result of independent
artists who, having found themselves constructed within the conventional order
of the time, are coming to similar conclusion about the nature and the
possibilities of a new order. In Jazz, as Martin Williams has pointed out, this
would seem to happen every twenty years or so. inevitably the new order will
become the new convention and it will then be necessary for a new movement to
begin so that surprise may be rediscovered and the art revitalized.
Unfortunately change is
resisted because it frequently requires a painful revaluation of what reality
is. The innovator must deal not only with the hostility of the threatened
establishment and the unwillingness of the audience to abandon its
preconceptions of what music is supposed to sound tike, of what a painting must
look like, of what literature can, and cannot, say, but also with that part of
himself that would also resist liberation from the conventional, the sanctioned
and the safe, that would paralyze him at the moment at which he arrives at his
originality.
Dolphy and Little were coping
with these counter forces at the time these albums were recorded. These forces
resulted in ambivalences which were compounded in Little's case because he was
not quite free of his conservatory background — not free in the sense that he
was not yet completely able to make use of it without becoming restricted by
it, because so much of what he had learned in the conservatory was
antithetical to what he saw music could also be. For Dolphy, who had come East
from Los Angeles with Chico Hamilton some three years before, there was, it
would seem, still the problem of adapting to the fierce competitiveness of New
York scene where so much is always happening, alt at once — the problem, under
the uniquely difficult New York circumstances of getting his thing
together."
The ambivalences are also
made evident, to an extent, by the members of the rhythm section who with the
exception of Eddie Blackwell who worked with Ornette Coleman, illustrate both
the point of Dolphy's and Little's departure and (by their presence) the
necessity to control and make tentative that departure. Dolphy and Little were
couched in an orthodoxy by the rhythm section. Pianist Mai Waldron (whom critic
Joe Goldberg accurately referred to, as a "stabilizing influence")
and bassist Richard Davis, are exciting, exploratory and often brilliant
musicians and these remarks are not intended to derogate them, but only to say
that they were not taking their music to those areas where Dolphy, Little and
Blackwell were taking theirs.
Still, as the musk in this
album wilt witness, Dolphy and Little were surmounting both the outwardly
imposed obstacles and those that are developed within.”
- Robert Levin, LP liner notes
[On July
29, 1964 , Eric
Dolphy joined Booker Little in death, and Jazz sustained another tragic loss.
As time passes, the absence of such innovators only serves to enhance the
significance of recordings such as these].
When now fabled
recording engineer, Rudy van Gelder, took his portable equipment down to the Five
Spot in New York on July 16, 1961, he captured seven tunes by an
extraordinary quintet led by two young lions – flute, alto saxophone and bass
clarinet player, Eric Dolphy and trumpeter Booker Little.
Within three years
after these recordings were made, both men would be dead. Indeed, Booker Little
would be gone less than three months later.
What survives in
these seven tracks is a confluence of the many styles of modern Jazz of the
preceding fifteen years – Parker-Gillespie to Mingus to Coleman-Cherry – as
enshrined by two young musicians who loved it all, wanted to reflect it all in
their playing and make their own contributions to it.
While the critics
of the time raged in debate about the merits of “free Jazz,” Dolphy and Little
just embraced it along with everything else that had gone before it and tried
to make it their own.
They were joined
for the two-week gig by Mal Waldron on piano, Richard Davis on bass and Eddie
Blackwell on drums [who, Michael Cuscuna has commented, “…is definitely a candidate for the title of
most neglected drummer in jazz history”].
This would be the
only time that this group would play in public together. Joe Goldberg observed in his liner notes to
the first LP volume [Prestige/New Jazz 8260]: “In format, it was a standard quintet of the kind that the bop era had
made traditional – saxophone, trumpet and three rhythm – but the music hinted
at developments that were going far beyond that concept.”
One of the unique
things about Eric Dolphy’s music was his use of the bass clarinet, but most
particularly, the way he played it.
As Michael Ullman
explains in his essay “The Clarinet in
Jazz” [Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz, pp.
594-95]:
“The bass clarinet had been used in jazz
before, by Harry Carey in the Ellington band, for instance. In 1964 Buddy
DeFranco recorded Blues Bag on bass
clarinet. In the fifties and sixties, Eric Dolphy made it one of his
specialties. … Dolphy extended it into the mainstream with his angular,
post-bop phrasing, his odd choice of notes, [and] his habit of entering a solo
from an unexpected place harmonically. He was fluent without ever seeming
smooth. He featured the bass clarinet on a repeatedly recorded tour-de-force
solo version of ‘God Bless the Child,’ on which he alternates a swirling
arpeggiated patterns with fragments of Billie Holiday’s melody. The angularity
broke away from Parker; it also seem to fit the bass clarinet.”
In their review of
these recordings in the Sixth Edition of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, authors
Richard Cook and Brian Morton also emphasize Dolphy’s bass clarinet playing on God Bless the Child and go on the offer
additional insights about the music on these recordings:
“Interesting how often Dolphy albums are
defined by unaccompanied performances, and the Five Spot dates include a first
recorded outing for ‘God Bless the Child,’ which was to become Dolphy’s bass
clarinet feature, a sinuous, untranscribable harmonic exercise that leaves the
source material miles behind. … Dolphy takes the initiative, roughening the
texture of [Waldron’s] ‘Fire Waltz’ and suggesting a more joyous take on
Waldron’s typically dark writing. Little contributes ‘Aggression,” ‘Booker’s
Waltz’ and the splendid ‘Bee Vamp,’ a
tough, off-centre theme that was to fall rather uncomfortably under the
horn-player’s fingers.
Paul Berliner, in
the section on the “Collective Aspects of Improvisation: Arranging Pieces” [Thinking
in Jazz, pp. 300-301] offers these insights about the group’s rendition
of Like Someone in Love:
“In Eric Dolphy’s and Booker Little’s
distinctive version, after a brief introduction, Little’s trumpet, Dolphy’s
flute and Richard’s Davis’ bowed bass interpret the piece allusively, without
accompaniment. The improvise a tightly woven polyphony that proceeds through
the piece with an elastic sense of rhythm at almost dirge-like tempo. At the
head’s conclusion, Davis Davis
To call the music
on these recordings “Free Jazz” is a misnomer.
The rhythm section plays in a very straight-ahead manner on all of the
tracks and Dolphy and Little base their solos on strict musical conventions. At times, the phrasing employed by the horn
players during their solos can be a bit experimental and searching, but by and
large, these are young ears who are curious and interested about the prospects
of taking the music in a new direction.
They are trying to expand the music by exploring some new
boundaries. They are definitely not
interested participating in the frenzied rush to musical self-destruction that
would characterize much of the “Free Jazz” movement yet to come in the decade
of the 1960s and beyond.
Robert Levin
offered this advice about Eric Dolphy and his approach to Jazz:
“… if you can open yourself to this music
you will find that it can take you to corners of the mind and the emotions
where the substances of truth and beauty are waiting to be revealed and
experienced.”
These Five-Spot
in-performance recordings will take you there.
A sampling of
which is on hand in the following video tribute to Eric.
The tune is Mal
Waldron’s Fire Waltz.
