Mar 4, 2025 1:29 PM
Changing of the Guard at Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra
On October 23, Ted Nash – having toured the world playing alto, soprano and tenor saxophone, clarinet and bass…
Recordings that make up Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions sat in a Long Island home, untouched, for decades.
(Photo: Jean-Pierre Leloir)In 2014, pianists Aki Takase from Japan and Alexander von Schlippenbach from Germany released So Long, Eric! (Intakt), featuring European interpreters of Dolphy’s music. Among them was drummer Han Bennink, who joined Dolphy in his quartet on Last Date, recorded in concert at a radio studio in Hilversum, the Netherlands, just 27 days before the multi-instrumentalist died.
If he were alive, Dolphy might very well be surprised at all the attention being lavished on him, given the difficulty parts of the jazz establishment had in understanding him during his lifetime. That failure reveals itself in the elementary nature of the questions the late critic Leonard Feather asked of Dolphy in an undated interview, an audio excerpt of which appears at adale.org, a website operated by neuroscientist Alan Saul.
Feather’s questions largely revolve around the move away from improvisation based strictly on harmonic progressions. Feather, with his mellifluous British intonation, asks: “If your foundation is not a chord sequence, which is what the traditional basis of jazz was, then what is the foundation?”
Dolphy, in earthier tones, replies: “Some things you play are not based on chords, they’re based on freedom of sound. You start with one line and you keep inventing as you go along.”
The gap in perspective remains wide throughout the excerpt, with little apparent prospect for a narrowing. Though Dolphy always showed great respect for all jazz traditions—the anthropomorphic cries he wrung from his horns consciously harked back to the early days of jazz in New Orleans—those who knew him said he was too iconoclastic to operate within the straight and narrow strictures of jazz convention.
“He was constantly bending,” Smith said. “That’s what got him into so much difficulty. You upset the natural thing, people get upset.”
These days, when so much of Dolphy’s vocabulary has been absorbed into the jazz lexicon, it seems hard to grasp what the upset was all about. While no one knows how he would have evolved, Davis said that, at the time of his death, Dolphy was working on music for string quartets. He would have been well prepared for such a task: The vivid intimations of Third Stream stylings on Dolphy’s 1960 album Out There, with Ron Carter on cello and George Duvivier on bass, suggest that the string quartet would have become another in the varied box of tools with which he reached out to new groups of listeners in fresh ways.
“He certainly knew how to put the music across,” Davis said. DB
As Ted Nash, left, departs the alto saxophone chair for LCJO, Alexa Tarantino steps in as the band’s first female full-time member.
Mar 4, 2025 1:29 PM
On October 23, Ted Nash – having toured the world playing alto, soprano and tenor saxophone, clarinet and bass…
“This is one of the great gifts that Coltrane gave us — he gave us a key to the cosmos in this recording,” says John McLaughlin.
Mar 18, 2025 3:00 PM
In his original liner notes to A Love Supreme, John Coltrane wrote: “Yes, it is true — ‘seek and ye shall…
The Blue Note Jazz Festival New York kicks off May 27 with a James Moody 100th Birthday Celebration at Sony Hall.
Apr 8, 2025 1:23 PM
Blue Note Entertainment Group has unveiled the lineup for the 14th annual Blue Note Jazz Festival New York, featuring…
“I’m certainly influenced by Geri Allen,” said Iverson, during a live Blindfold Test at the 31st Umbria Jazz Winter festival.
Apr 15, 2025 11:44 AM
Between last Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Ethan Iverson performed as part of the 31st Umbria Jazz Winter festival in…
“At the end of the day, once you’ve run out of differences, we’re left with similarities,” Collier says. “Cultural differences are mitigated through 12 notes.”
Apr 15, 2025 11:55 AM
DownBeat has a long association with the Midwest Clinic International Band and Orchestra Conference, the premiere…
