‘Music is a reflection of everything. And it’s universal. Like you can hear somebody from across the world, another country. You don’t even know them, but they’re in your own back yard, you know?’
Eric Dolphy’s public career in jazz was regrettably short. Having gained his early musical experience in the vicinity of Los Angeles, his birth-place, he first came to public notice when he joined the Chico Hamilton quintet in the late 1950’s. (He plays flute in Hamilton’s sequence in the film Jazz on A Summer’s Day.) With this group he arrived in New York where he allied himself enthusiastically with the jazz avant-garde. He had met Ornette Coleman earlier and admitted that Coleman had taught him ‘a direction’ while denying any more direct influence. Parenthetically one should note that the greater part of Dolphy’s playing seems to be related to a chordal base and that he rarely, if ever, makes use of Coleman’s ‘pantonal’ method. Like Cecil Taylor, however, Dolphy seemed intent upon extending jazz tonality to its farthest possible limits.
Dolphy was a freelance musician except during a period in 1961 when he led his own group which included the late Booker Little on trumpet. While freelancing, he had long and productive associations with Charles Mingus, Max Roach and John Coltrane, but often found himself playing in more conventional groups. Thus, his playing, perhaps more than any other musician’s, demonstrates the continuity between recent development and earlier formulations. Unlike other contemporary musicians of major importance, he did not develop a markedly personal approach to the problems of group organization; his mobility, however, made him very important as a disseminator of new ideas and in time his influence may well show itself to be more immanent than Ornette Coleman’s.