The Book Cooks Jazz Revolutionary: The Life & Music Of Eric Dolphy
From Chapter 3: 1958-1960: The Chico Hamilton Quintet, First Months in New York Touring and recording with Hamilton’s quintet, the Newport Jazz Festival Two months before his thirtieth birthday, Eric headed to the East Coast with a newly configured Chico Hamilton Quintet consisting of guitarist John Pisano, bassist Hal Gaylor, and former Cleveland Symphony Orchestra cellist Nate Gershman, playing Chicago’s Butterfield Firehouse before landing for Eric’s New York debut at Birdland sometime in May. Gigs along the way included Cleveland, the home of Hale and Juanita Smith, close friends of Hamilton and former quintet member and guitarist Jim Hall. After that show, Eric was invited, with Hall, to the Smith residence and became instant friends with the couple. On May 23, the group played Rochester’s East High School, and in mid-June New Jersey’s new Palisades Park amphitheater series of free family concerts, held every Monday and Friday, working up to Fourth Of July’s Newport Jazz Festival, where on the 4th and 6th they performed “Chrissie,” “Nice Day,” “I’m Gonna Wash That Guy Right Out Of My Hair,” and Collette’s “Blue Sands” in front of an appreciative audience. It was the group’s first widely exposed appearance with Eric, who turned in a convincing alto solo on “Pottsville USA” and blistering flute on “I’m In Love With A Wonderful Guy.” Bert Stern’s and Aram Avakian’s documentary Jazz On A Summer’s Day captures the quintet’s July 6 performance of “Blue Sands” along with intimate house rehearsals. The film premiered in August 1959 at the Venice Film Festival, with its theatrical release following in 1960. East Coast audiences were getting their first taste of a Parker-esque multi-instrumentalist with a whole new vocabulary of never-before-heard hard-bop chops on bass clarinet. Dolphy knew Ornette, Coltrane, and Mingus, but no one knew Eric, and decades would pass before the Newport recordings were issued.(1) At the festival, the newcomer reunited briefly with Coltrane and Max Roach, whose post–Clifford Brown group +4 debuted twenty-year-old wunderkind and future Dolphy collaborator Booker Little on trumpet. Following Newport and a New York sojourn lasting through July, the five musicians recorded the ill-fated Ellington Suite in Los Angeles on August 22. The recording was Dolphy’s first high-profile jazz session, his brilliant musicianship outshining the session’s less-than-stellar arrangements. His flute solo on “In A Mellow Tone” adds a pleasant edginess to the upbeat swing classic, and he owns “In A Sentimental Mood,” conquering the opening theme with a warm, romantic alto, his solo ranging from pointy hard bop to a whimsical landscape of leaps and rhythmic iterations. “I’m Just A Lucky So And So” finds him sitting out the plodding arrangement’s opening statement only to jump in with a scored, bluesy swing flute line, played with flair. The good-time feel of “Just A-Sittin’ And A-Rockin’” runs the same profile as the previous track: a lackluster arrangement improved by a gutsy alto solo, brimming with blues, idiosyncratic rhythmic gestures, and distinct twists and turns. Flute caps off “Everything But You,” featuring short improvisations scattered about this scored piece’s grooves, with Hamilton building up polymetric escapades against Hal Gaylor’s walking bass. On “Day Dream,” Eric’s gracious and milky B-flat clarinet tone renders simple scored lines behind Gershman’s cello in a drummer-less chamber quartet, and he returns with the same instrument on “Azure.” On “I’m Beginning To See The Light,” Dolphy takes off with signature oddities, pushing a bebop line into an easygoing, fun number on which playful and Monkish weird blues riffs mix with gasps and leaps, while his cocky solo on “It Don’t Mean A Thing” delivers unpredictable electric energy. Ellington Suite was the first of what might have been a total of six studio albums the combo made with Dolphy; Ron Carter insisted that Warner Bros passed on a 1959 Chico Hamilton Quintet album that the label deemed too “far out.” This was certainly true of the Ellington Suite recordings, which World Pacific Jazz rejected, in part due to Dolphy’s adventurous playing. Label founder Richard Bock and producer George Avakian were the likely sources for this decision. However, “I’m Beginning To See The Light” and a heavily edited “In A Sentimental Mood” were included on the label’s 1966 anthology Chico Hamilton: Jazz Milestones Series, and a truncated version of “In A Mellow Tone” found its way onto a World Pacific Jazz promotional sampler shipped to radio stations. The quintet’s former line-up was then hired to record the same Ellington Suite material the following January, using as introductions the original transitional bridge material connecting contiguous tracks. The story of the album’s eventual rediscovery is the stuff of legend. The only test pressing of that original recording with Dolphy was placed in an album jacket made for the follow-up session. The original tapes were subsequently lost. That one-of-a-kind, erroneously packaged Ellington Suite test pressing found its way into the world. Almost forty years later, the one-off disc somehow landed in a used record shop in England, purchased in near-mint condition in 1995 by jazz collector John Cobley. With the assistance of producer Michael Cuscuna, the 2000 Pacific Jazz CD Chico Hamilton Quintet With Eric Dolphy: The Original Ellington Suite was transferred into twenty-four-bit form from that singular test pressing. Immediately following the Ellington Suite session, the group traveled to New York’s Randall’s Island Jazz Festival, appearing the next day with, among others, Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey’s Messengers, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and the Miles Davis Sextet with Coltrane. Hamilton’s September tour took the group to Minneapolis’s New Lakeview Club for ten days, and to venues such as Kansas City’s Orchid Room. Back in Los Angeles in early October, Eric was called by Gerald Wilson to do sessions for vocalist Ernie Andrews’s album Travelin’ Light (GNP, 1958), on which Wilson plays trumpet and arranged four songs. On this day he played no solos, reading his part for scored arrangements on an unidentified instrument. The Hamilton Quintet again returned from the road to Los Angeles later that month, entering Hollywood’s Radio Recorders studio to record Chico Hamilton With Strings Attached (Warner Bros, 1959), for which Fred Katz conducted his string arrangements. Dolphy’s short Strings Attached solos reveal a mature voice with a new vocabulary of ornaments, leaps, pyrotechnic runs, and individualistic expression. In light of the Ellington Suite fiasco, the album would be the first on which he was heard by a broad, worldwide jazz audience. One can only imagine listeners putting this record on their turntable in 1959 and hearing his convincing work: flute solos on Ellington/Strayhorn’s “Something To Live For,” the Hamilton/Howard McGhee collaboration “Don’s Delight,” Benny Golson’s “Fair Weather,” and Hart/Rodgers’s “By Jupiter” and “Ev’rything I’ve Got,” plus alto sax solos on “Pottsville, USA,” “Modes,” and “Close Your Eyes.” He is asked to lay almost completely out of “Andante,” for which he read a simple alto line. It is likely that the group also recorded “Under Paris Skies” that same day (released on the 1959 Warner Bros compilation/sampler album Jazz Festival In Stereo: Hear In And Far Out). The Weill/Nash classic “Speak Low” showcases Dolphy’s first recorded bass clarinet performance, a whirlwind solo obeying none of the instrument’s traditional registral limitations and partially obscured by the muddy guitar and cello arrangement. Where typical parts for bass clarinet avoid the uppermost clarino register, let alone the highest octave, Dolphy had already developed various solo contexts for virtuosic, wide-interval leaps to many of those high pitches, and sustained, post-bop runs throughout the instrument’s full range, despite the challenges of tone production and timbral variety; and he routinely mined the instrument’s characteristic middle clarino down to lower extremes of the harmonically rich chalumeau register. From his liberating “Speak Low” essay emerged a new vocabulary of reedy attacks and articulations – a sound world augmented by joyous squawks, squeaks, smacks, micro-tonal inflections, cries, and noises. No one had ever recorded the bass clarinet in this manner.
Notes: 1.They were eventually issued as Chico Hamilton & Eric Dolphy: Complete Studio Recordings (Phono Records, 2016). Performances of “Chrissy” and “Nice Day” were released on the Swedish CD Mulligan In The Main (Phontastic, 1992). They were also made available as bonus tracks on Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy Quintet/Sextet: The Salle Wagram Concert Complete Edition (Domino Records, 2015).
© 2024 Jonathon Grasse
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