Eric Dolphy
Eric Dolphy made all of his work as a leader in roughly four years. He died at thirty-six. The recordings that survive, on Prestige's New Jazz subsidiary, on Blue Note, and on European radio archives, contain some of the most harmonically advanced playing in jazz: angular, melodic, and human in a way the avant-garde of the same period often was not. Twenty-two albums across three eras. Browse below.
Browse by Era
Each era page covers a distinct period in Eric's career, with full reviews, personnel details, Apple Music audio previews, and album art for every record.
Six albums from Dolphy's first stretch as a leader on Prestige's New Jazz subsidiary. Outward Bound, Out There, Far Cry, and the Five Spot sessions with Booker Little. The bass clarinet and alto saxophone vocabulary fully formed in three short years.
Eight records covering Dolphy's final stretch. It runs up to the Blue Note masterpiece the Blue Note masterpiece Out to Lunch! and Last Date, recorded twenty-seven days before his death in Berlin in June 1964. Posthumous releases on Prestige and Douglas extended the catalog into the late 1960s.
Eight archival releases drawn from European radio broadcasts, private recordings, and previously unissued studio dates. From the 1965 Prestige Memorial Album with Booker Little through Resonance Records' 2018 Musical Prophet, the recordings that have kept the Dolphy catalog growing for fifty years after his death.
Eric Dolphy, 1928–1964
Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. was born June 20, 1928 in Los Angeles. He began lessons on clarinet and saxophone at six and later studied oboe, settling on alto saxophone, eventually adding bass clarinet and flute to his working setup. He was active on the LA scene through the 1950s, including a long stretch with Chico Hamilton's quintet (1958 to 1959) that brought him a wider audience and steady touring before he left the group and moved to New York.
Mingus, who had known him since their Los Angeles days, hired Dolphy in 1960 and the relationship became one of the central artistic partnerships of both musicians' careers. The early Prestige and New Jazz dates (Outward Bound, Out There, Far Cry) and the Five Spot live recordings with Booker Little in 1961 established the bass clarinet as a viable solo voice in jazz, a status it has not really lost since.
Out to Lunch! on Blue Note in February 1964, with Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Richard Davis, and Tony Williams, is the record on which most of Dolphy's posthumous reputation rests. He left the United States for Europe in April 1964 to tour with the Mingus band and stay on for solo dates. Last Date was cut in Hilversum on June 2 before an invited audience, and even that was not quite the end: he recorded in Paris in mid-June with Donald Byrd and Nathan Davis. He collapsed in Berlin on June 28 from undiagnosed diabetic shock, and died the next day. He was thirty-six.
The Dolphy catalog has continued to grow for sixty years through European radio archives and previously unissued studio dates. The Resonance Records release Musical Prophet in 2018 gathered the July 1963 New York sessions behind Conversations and Iron Man and added about 85 minutes of previously unissued music, a measure of how much of his recorded work remains a discovery.