Eric Dolphy

A privately recorded studio session from 1963, later released on FM Records and also issued under the title Music Matador. The sound quality is rougher than the major-label recordings, which gives the performances an immediacy that suits the exploratory nature of the material. These feel less like polished studio sessions and more like documents of musicians thinking out loud in real time, which is what they essentially were.

Music Matador as a title is actually more evocative of what happens here: the bull is the conventional jazz form, and Dolphy is the matador finding unlikely angles through it. Garvin Bushell's contrabass clarinet extends the low-register harmonic world that Dolphy's own bass clarinet occupied, creating depths that the standard jazz instrumentation never approaches. Woody Shaw plays with focused authority. Clifford Jordan provides a center of gravity. The full sessions would be documented comprehensively in the 2018 Resonance Records release.

Important as documentation of the 1963 sessions, though the expanded 2018 Resonance edition supersedes it as the definitive version.

The second volume from the July 1961 Five Spot recordings, and a strong case can be made that this is the stronger of the two. The group had been playing together long enough by this point in the week's engagement that the conversations are deeper and more settled. The interplay between Dolphy and Little has the quality of musicians who have learned each other's language well enough to finish each other's sentences. They do not always agree. The disagreements are productive.

"Aggression" is the essential track: Dolphy building a solo of sustained emotional force over Blackwell's insistent rhythmic patterns, the intensity rising across chorus after chorus without the kind of release that conventional jazz solos provide. It ends not with resolution but with exhaustion, which is the right ending. The knowledge that Little had only months to live hangs over the listening experience. Both men play like they mean every note. They did.

Essential alongside Vol. 1. Own both.

The masterpiece. Recorded for Blue Note in February 1964, four months before Dolphy died. The instrumentation is unusual: no piano, with Bobby Hutcherson's vibraphone providing harmonic color that is fundamentally different from what a piano provides. The vibraphone sustains differently, blends differently, leaves more space. Dolphy needed that space.

Tony Williams was eighteen years old. He was playing at a level that would permanently redefine what jazz drumming could be, and his work here is not accompaniment but co-composition. His patterns interact with the soloist constantly rather than providing a neutral rhythmic background. He does not keep time so much as shape time, and the soloists play differently because of it. Hubbard is brilliant. Richard Davis plays bass lines of architectural complexity and emotional weight. The compositions are through-composed in ways the Prestige records only approached. This is what Dolphy had been building toward.

One of the most important jazz albums of the 1960s. No qualification needed.

Recorded June 2, 1964 in Hilversum, Netherlands. Eric Dolphy died twenty-seven days later, of a diabetic coma, in Berlin. He was thirty-five years old. The album exists with the knowledge of its title burning through every track, and there is no way to listen to it without that knowledge. Misha Mengelberg, Jacques Schols, and Han Bennink were young Dutch players at the beginning of what would be remarkable careers. Their willingness to follow Dolphy into open harmonic territory gives this recording a freedom that some of the major-label sessions constrained.

His bass clarinet on "You Don't Know What Love Is" is among the most complete recorded statements the instrument has in jazz, the low register explored with a tenderness and depth that is impossible to assign purely to technique. At the close of the session, Dolphy speaks to the audience. "When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again." He was right. The music was already in the air. Twenty-seven days later, he was too.

The last thing he recorded. Essential. Bring what you need to bring to it.

The second volume from the Copenhagen sessions, released four years after the recordings were made. The material continues directly from where Vol. 1 left off: Dolphy with the same Scandinavian trio, in the same room, on the same night. The interplay has the settled quality of musicians who have been playing together long enough to stop being surprised by each other and start building something instead.

The standards interpretations are extraordinary. Dolphy's reading of "Oleo" is so far removed from the Rollins original, harmonically and melodically, that it functions as a new composition that shares a chord sequence with the original rather than a reinterpretation of it. He is not playing the song so much as using the song's structure as a set of instructions for a different journey. The destination he reaches has nothing to do with the destination the original had in mind.

Essential alongside Vol. 1. The Copenhagen sessions reward complete attention across all three volumes.

The third and final Copenhagen volume. By this point in the residency the rhythm section has fully internalized what Dolphy is doing: they have stopped anticipating and started listening, which produces a different and in some ways more valuable kind of accompaniment. The playing has a settled confidence that the first volume's exploratory energy does not have. Both qualities are worth hearing. They document different phases of the same discovery.

The flute work here reaches a completeness that justifies the three-volume release in itself. Dolphy's flute playing was the least discussed of his three voices but not the least developed; what he did with the instrument was as singular as what he did with the alto and the bass clarinet. The closing performances across the three volumes make as strong a case for the Copenhagen sessions as any single track in the set.

A worthy conclusion to the Copenhagen trilogy. Hear all three together.

A compilation assembling material from multiple sessions and locations across 1960-1961. The patchwork nature means the listening experience is less coherent than the focused albums: the rhythm sections change, the contexts shift, the sound quality varies. But this is also the record's particular value. It gives you Dolphy in the widest variety of settings available in the Prestige catalog in one place, and the consistency across all of them is instructive.

The live Antibes Jazz Festival recording included here captures an outdoor concert performance with a looseness that studio recordings rarely achieve. The applause between pieces is part of the documentation: this is what it sounded like when he played in a crowd, in daylight, with the reverb of open air around the sound. Different from a club, different from a studio. Worth hearing as a different kind of context.

Supplementary material to the essential records, assembled with care. Worth owning after you have the primary discography in hand.

Recorded in 1963 and not released until 1968, Iron Man documents the same sessions that produced Conversations, with the full personnel on display. The instrumentation is the most unusual in Dolphy's discography: Garvin Bushell's bassoon creates low-frequency harmonic depths that no other jazz record of the period approached, while Bobby Hutcherson's vibraphone outlines dissonant harmonies that hang spectrally behind the rest of the ensemble.

Woody Shaw was twenty years old and already a mature improviser, his lines finding paths through the harmonic density that are their own rather than derivative of anyone else's. Clifford Jordan's soprano saxophone is the most fluid element, weaving between Dolphy's own alto and Sonny Simmons's second alto voice. Prince Lasha's flute doubles Dolphy's own flute work, creating a layered texture unlike anything else in the period. "Iron Man" itself is one of the most harmonically advanced pieces Dolphy committed to tape. The 2018 Resonance Records release presents the complete sessions; this original release is partial but essential.

A late masterwork alongside Out to Lunch. Different in texture, equal in seriousness.