Eric Dolphy

His debut album as a leader and he comes out fully formed. There is no apprenticeship period on Outward Bound, no fumbling toward a voice. The voice is already there, startling and complete. The alto saxophone playing announces a new way of moving through a chord sequence: wide intervallic leaps, microtonal inflections at the ends of phrases, a tone that sits somewhere between raw and sweetly singing, often within the same phrase and sometimes in the same note.

Freddie Hubbard was twenty-one years old at the session and already a phenomenal player, his hard bop lines a sharp contrast to Dolphy's looser syntax. They play together like two people who have decided to speak the same language differently and find this produces more interesting conversation than speaking identically would. Jaki Byard comps with dense, percussive intelligence. Roy Haynes drives everything forward without crowding.

There is no title track, and nothing here runs twelve minutes; the opener, "G.W.," written for Gerald Wilson, is the longest at just under eight. Start here if you are starting with Dolphy at all.

A session with The Latin Jazz Quintet that finds Dolphy playing guest soloist over Afro-Cuban rhythms. The format constrains him in ways the Prestige sessions do not. His alto playing is still unmistakably his: the intervals still wide, the tone still searching. But the mambo and cha-cha structures do not give him the harmonic room he needs to fully develop an idea before the rhythm demands he circle back.

The flute work is better suited to the context: lighter and more ornamental, complementing the percussion without having to fight the arrangements for space. There are moments when Dolphy finds a pocket in the rhythm and plays something genuinely exciting before the section reasserts itself. He is impossible to entirely contain. But the format tries.

Worth a listen for completists. Not a document of his best thinking or most characteristic music.

No piano. No guitar. The harmonic center comes from Ron Carter on cello, an unusual choice that produces an unusual sound: darker, more austere, with an open quality that gives Dolphy maximum freedom to range without a chordal instrument filling the space he needs to move through. It was a structural decision that said something about what kind of musician he was. He did not want harmonic scaffolding. He wanted open air.

The bass clarinet gets its defining early showcase here. Dolphy's approach to the instrument was entirely his own: a low, dark tone extended by bending notes at the extremes of its range, producing sounds the instrument had never quite made before. He also moves to flute here, its lighter voice a contrast to the bass clarinet's weight. The compositions are more personal and more complex than those on Outward Bound. This is Dolphy deciding what kind of artist he wants to be.

The most structurally radical of the early Prestige sessions. One of the most important jazz albums of 1960.

July 16, 1961 at the Five Spot Cafe in New York. The two front line voices are Eric Dolphy and Booker Little, and this recording is one of the primary documents of their partnership. Little was twenty-three years old. He would be dead of uremia three months after this recording. His trumpet playing has a quality that sets it apart from the hard bop mainstream: lyrical but never soft, searching but never lost, with a harmonic sophistication that complemented Dolphy's own approach without imitating it.

Mal Waldron provides a grounded, slightly severe piano voice. Richard Davis is authoritative on bass, his lines choosing the structural notes with care. Ed Blackwell swings with the controlled freedom he had learned in New Orleans and refined with Ornette Coleman. The five of them constitute one of the most fully realized small groups of the period, and this is the best surviving document of how they sounded in a room.

Irreplaceable. One of the handful of jazz live recordings that earns that word without qualification.

Recorded in December 1960 and released two years later, Far Cry is the studio counterpart to the Five Spot live recordings: Dolphy and Little in a formal setting, with Jaki Byard in the piano chair. Byard's playing here is among the best in his discography, his right hand slashing through the changes with a combination of bebop vocabulary and complete harmonic freedom. He is not merely accompanying; he is arguing.

"Left Alone," the album's Mal Waldron and Billie Holiday ballad, is its quieter revelation, with Little sitting out and Dolphy given room to breathe. Dolphy's bass clarinet playing on this album is among the most beautiful in his discography, the instrument's low register explored with a tenderness that the more angular up-tempo playing tends to obscure. Two great players at the peak of their partnership, with a rhythm section that knew exactly what they needed.

As essential as the Five Spot records. The studio setting gives everything a clarity the live documents trade for immediacy.

Recorded in Copenhagen in September 1961, this is Dolphy with a Scandinavian rhythm section who follow him with a quality of attentiveness that is different from what the New York sessions provided. The European rhythm section players of this period often gave visiting American musicians something harder to find at home: time to breathe, space to develop ideas without the competitive pressure of the home scene, a willingness to follow wherever the soloist was going rather than holding the center while the soloist moves around it.

Axen, Moseholm, and Elniff give Dolphy exactly this, and he responds by playing with a particular expansiveness. His solos stretch out. His transitions between instruments, from flute to bass clarinet and back, are unhurried. The unaccompanied bass clarinet performance on "God Bless the Child" is one of the definitive recordings of what the instrument could do in his hands.

One of the great Dolphy records. The European setting produced something the New York sessions never quite replicated.