Jazz Articles about Eric Dolphy

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Andrew Hill: Point Of Departure

by Greg Simmons
January 8, 2012

The folks at Music Matters have been reissuing classic Blue Note albums of the 1950s and 1960s at an aggressive clip, and have been careful to include virtually every style of music the label recorded, including some of its more challenging material. Pianist Andrew Hill's Point of Departure (1964) will never be mistaken for light cocktail jazz, but it's inclusion in this reissue series displays Music Matters' commitment to more adventurous material. In 1964, the term avant-garde could ...

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Free Jazz

by C. Michael Bailey
September 30, 2011

Ornette Coleman Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet Atlantic 1961 Alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman's masterpiece, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet, is one of the hinges of jazz evolution. As a musical hinge, Free Jazz, heard from this side of its development, is a bit of an anticlimax compared with the two-label, five album prelude to this point: Something Else!!!! (Contemporary, ...

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Eric Dolphy: Out To Lunch! - 45 rpm Reissue

by Matt Marshall
October 2, 2009

Eric Dolphy Out To Lunch! Blue Note / Music Matters 2009 (1964)

Few jazz fans still need an introduction to reed player Eric Dolphy's 1964 masterpiece, Out to Lunch!. It's an album people tend to come to fairly early on in their love affair with the music (assuming, that is, the affair started after the early 1960s), and serves as a meeting ground for a wide scope of fans, be they stalwarts of bop, ...

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Impressions of Eric Dolphy

by Clifford Allen
March 12, 2008

Note: The title refers to a composition by Prince Lasha, recorded on his 1966 UK CBS album Insight.

The history of jazz is a recorded history, one that exists on commercially-issued albums (many of which, thankfully, are in print or have been reissued) as well as a vast amount of concert recordings passed around among the cognoscenti and the intrepid researchers/musicians. For every historian who bemoans the lack of a Buddy Bolden cylinder, there are countless acetates, ...

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Eric Dolphy Quintet: Outward Bound

by J Hunter
November 14, 2006

Unlike Ornette Coleman--who wanted to blow orthodox jazz form out of the water--John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy initially worked to change the system from within, making music that fit the jazz standards of the time while injecting their own unique spin. This is why Outward Bound, Dolphy's first recording as a leader, is a not-so-distant relative of Coltrane's My Favorite Things (Atlantic, 1960).

On balance, both discs have a conventional base. While Coltrane stuck to the Great American ...

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Eric Dolphy: Last Date

by A. Henkin
December 11, 2005

Eric Dolphy Last DateInterakt 2005 Though jazz has its fair share of premature deaths, few were as tragic as that of Eric Dolphy, both because it was avoidable and that it cut off a monumental player in his prime. The DVD issue of Last Date, a loving documentary from 1991, is an opportunity to celebrate Dolphy's significant, if sadly too short, legacy. Centered around his last month alive ...

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Eric Dolphy: The Complete Uppsala Concert

by A. Henkin
November 2, 2005

One of my pet theories is that one of the kickstarts for creative indigenous jazz in Europe was the tours undertaken there by Eric Dolphy as a leader (late summer 1961, summer 1964) and with John Coltrane (winter 1961) and Charles Mingus (summer 1964). The passage through the region of such an iconoclastic figure as Dolphy, particularly at these two hypercreative moments for him, must have had some effect on the local musicians who heard or, in some cases, played ...