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Dolphy's experiments
By Adam Goldstein
goldstea@mscd.edu

Illustration by Adam Goldstein • goldstea@mscd.edu

Jazz has always been about reconciling opposites.

From its origins in the seedy juke joints of New Orleans, the smoky clubs and rent parties of Harlem and the sleek dance halls of Chicago, the idiom has always stressed the fusion of individual expression and group collaboration. In its ideal form, jazz is the musical marriage of free improvisation and exact orchestration, a mix of immediate creation and careful construction.

Musician and bandleader Eric Dolphy drew on this underlying duality to forge a new style of jazz improvisation and, more broadly, to develop a new direction for the genre itself.

On Feb. 25, 1964, Dolphy and his small cadre of A-list sidemen recorded Out to Lunch at the Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey. With its brash and spare sound, odd time signatures and extended atonal compositions, the album would serve as a milestone for Dolphy and the Blue Note record label. More importantly, the record would serve as a guidepost for an entire generation of jazz musicians seeking to push the limits of the art form.

Although Out to Lunch was Dolphy’s first and only recording for Blue Note as a bandleader, he had built a considerable reputation with his albums for the Prestige label and his historic musical partnerships.

In the early 1950s, Dolphy honed a raw style on the classical flute, bass clarinet and B-flat soprano clarinet. When he moved to New York from Los Angeles in 1958, he wasted no time in establishing himself in the nascent avant-garde scene. He collaborated with legends Charles Mingus and John Coltrane, both of whom considered Dolphy to be one of their peers.

By the time he signed with Blue Note in 1964, Dolphy had established himself as one of the undisputed elders of a budding movement. He championed a sound that relied on eruptive solos, dissonant forms and a free approach to both harmony and melody. At the same time, his music was sternly structured in many aspects – an underlying logic marked the format of his compositions.

Out to Lunch would prove to be Dolphy’s most succinct and successful musical manifesto before his untimely death from diabetes.

His backup band included players who would go on to legendary careers of their own: Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Tony Williams on drums, Bobby Hutcherson on vibes and Richard Davis on bass. The ensemble maintained a sound that drew on all of their separate skills as soloists, even as its odd rhythms and sonic textures demanded an almost preternatural degree of collaborative skill.

The album’s opening track, “Hat and Beard,” veers from a 5/4 time signature to 9/4 as the band comes together, while “Something Sweet, Something Tender” mixes Dolphy’s explosive, atonal bass clarinet with the minimal ringing of Hutcherson’s vibes. Though “Gazzelloni” stands as the album’s most traditional bop tune, its sudden explosion of improvisational freedom toward the end turns its deceptively familiar structure on its ear. The record was a controversial voyage into the unknown, a bold venture into uncharted territory. Despite the fact that it would serve as an inspiration for subsequent legends such as Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, Out to Lunch earned the ire of many traditionalists who labeled it “anti-jazz.”

Seeking a freer atmosphere to explore his musical ideas, Dolphy traveled to Germany, where he would die less than a year later.

“I’m on my way to Europe to live for awhile,” he said in the album’s liner notes. “Why? Because I can get more work there playing my own music, and because if you try to do anything different in this country, people put you down for it.”