The cello has a sparse history in jazz, but it does have a history, going back to W. C. Handy, who used a cellist in his ensemble. One of his cellists was William Grant Still, who went on to establish a reputation as America's first important African American classical composer. During the 1950s, probably the best known jazz cellist was Fred Katz, who worked with the Chico Hamilton Quintet--a group which included Eric Dolphy in 1958-59, just before Dolphy came to New York to move forward with his own career. Ron Carter had been trained
Still, it makes a striking debut for him, and this whole session is a striking musical outing. Dolphy is really coming into his own here, making a kind of music that was so thoroughly his own that it's still hard to describe. The three great innovators of this era were Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Dolphy, and sometimes they, and the others who pursued experimentation in the same era, like Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders and Cecil Taylor, are grouped together as free jazz, but they really were doing very different things. Dolphy is also sometimes labeled as "third stream," which is probably even more difficult to define than free jazz. His collaborations with John Colrane were also panned in Down Beat as "anti-jazz," but that's just shortsighted and not worth discussing.
Free jazz, more or less, is generally defined as jazz that is not structured around chord changes. It was a polarizing musical form in the early 1960s, as bebop was in the 1940s. Miles Davis, though he was to pioneer he his own revolt against the conventions of bebop, remarked that Ornette Coleman had just fucked up everybody; Roy Eldridge thought he was jiving everyone. Arthur Taylor was compiling his remarkable book of interviews during the years that free jazz (or "freedom music," as he calls it in the book) was in its ascendancy, and he asked a lot of musicians about it.
Dexter Gordon, when Taylor asked his opinion of free jazz, said "My manager told me there would be days like this!" and continued to evade Taylor's every attempt to pin him down on the subject. Randy Weston loved Ornette Coleman but hated the concept of free jazz--"It is completely built up by white writers...My objection is that I don't see how this music is more free than another," and others felt the same way. Philly Joe Jones said that "freedom music doesn't mean anything to me because I've been playing free my whole life." He admired Coltrane and Dolphy -- "These men were geniuses. They knew exactly what they were going to do," but he had little use for those for whom "John Coltrane opened the door...I call them bag carriers. The bags that they carry their instruments in...They...don't know anything about the horn and just make a bunch of noises...I think freedom music should be limited to those who can play it."
And Ron Carter, in Taylor's interview with him, made an excellent point: "If you hear some guy play freedom who does not know bebop and is not hip to swing, he is just playing off the top of his head. He's not really as free as someone with a musical background."
Third stream is even harder to pin down. This album could be third stream, because you have one guy playing the cello and another guy playing the bass clarinet, except that Gunther Schuller, who invented the term and mostly defined it in terms of what it was not, said that "it is not jazz played on 'classical' instruments. In fact, he said that there was no such thing as third stream jazz--third stream music was a third stream, neither classical nor jazz. Not to put down Schuller, whose contribution to modern music is immense, but neither classical nor jazz is a single stream.
Which brings me back to the contribution of Eric Dolphy, who died much too young, but in the space of a very few years created a voice which was one of the most original and expressive in jazz history. Call it third stream, free jazz, freedom music, anti-jazz or advanced bebop, it is some of the most arresting, nourishing, invigorating music anyone has ever made. The collaboration of cello and whatever instrument Dolphy is playing on any given track could not be richer and more satisfying.
"Out There" is the title track to the album, and one could say it continues the journey he started with Outward Bound. Now he's there...but of course, every new outing by Dolphy was a new stop on an outward bound journey. "Out There," a Dolphy composition, is probably as close as the album comes to a more familiar form of jazz, with a sort of beboppish structure, but Dolphy is taking it to unexpected places, and so is Carter. This is the first tune of the day, and the first cut on the record, so it was the group's introduction to what they'd be doing that day, and it's the listener's introduction to where Dolphy is now.
It's hard to look back in time and try to imagine yourself hearing 1960's music through 1960's ears. Or 1944's music, for that matter. Or any era. It's hard to imagine the waltz causing a scandal, but it did when it was first introduced. The author of the Wikipedia entry on the waltz found this shocked description of it:
In the 1771 German novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim by Sophie von La Roche, a high-minded character complains about the newly introduced waltz among aristocrats thus: "But when he put his arm around her, pressed her to his breast, cavorted with her in the shameless, indecent whirling-dance of the Germans and engaged in a familiarity that broke all the bounds of good breeding—then my silent misery turned into burning rage."
Of course, the history of jazz is so dynamic, and so compressed in time, that in 1960 there were still those who thought that bebop was just so much noise, and there were those who thought it was the soundtrack of their lives, and there were those who thought it was a straitjacket they had to burst out of. It's hard to imagine what it would be like to find the waltz scandalous, and it's hard to imagine what it would be like to find bebop cacophonous. I can't go back and try to imagine being flummoxed by Eric Dolphy, because in 1960, I was young enough and adventurous enough to embrace the avant garde with open arms. I had stood in front of Ornette Coleman's bandstand at the Five Spot, I had taken John Coltrane's Giant Steps to my heart, and I was ready for the next new thing. But even so, it's hard to recapture that feeling. Dolphy still sounds fresh and new, just as Charlie Parker still sounds fresh and new (Johann Strauss, not so much), but listening to him today, he sounds very much in the tradition. You can hear the progression of jazz history in his playing, which is what Philly Joe Jones was talking about.
"Feathers" was written by Hale Smith, and if there's a third stream, Smith was right in the middle of it. Trained in both classical and jazz piano from age seven, played in a band with Ernie Freeman and Howard Roberts as a Cleveland teenager (where he was also a protege of Duke Ellington), conservatory trained at the Cleveland Institute of Music (where was the winner of the first BMI Student Composer Award in 1952), composer of classical pieces for orchestra and chamber ensemble, often incorporating jazz concepts. "Feathers" was the second track recorded that day and is the last track on the album, and both placements are interesting. Dolphy let his musicians know, early on, the range they were going to be covering in this important, groundbreaking session. The jazz fan picking up the album had some time to get acclimated to all the possibilities in Dolphy's approach before getting to this.
Interestingly, and I'm sure by design, Dolphy chooses, for this most classically-influenced piece, his most jazz-acclimated instrument, the alto saxophone, and about halfway through the piece he moves into thoroughly jazz-oriented improvisation, wonderfully turning the direction of the piece while holding true to a unity. Again back to Philly Joe--Dolphy was a genius who knew exactly what he was going to do.
"The Baron," "Serene," and "17 West" are all by Dolphy. "The Baron" puts bass clarinet together with cello in some unison work, some trading and some solos. including some thrilling descents into the lower register of the bass clarinet. "Serene," which Dolphy would record again with Booker Little, is serene until it isn't, with bass clarinet and cello again. an extended pizzicato cello solo, and some wonderful drum solo work by Roy Haynes, rhythmically exciting while at the same time capturing the "out there" spirit of the date. "17 West finds him switching to flute, and giving you something you don't hear every day: one of the most distinctive, unique voices in jazz coming at you from four different instruments. The cello gets down below the flute here and is anchored by George Duvivier's bass. Duvivier and Haynes both get solid turns here.
Charles Mingus and Randy Weston are the other two composers to contribute to the session. Dolphy plays the standard B-flat clarinet on Mingus's "Eclipse," stately, melodic, atonal,and allowing Carter some very interesting choices. Weston is represented by "Sketches of Melba," with flute and cello again, first one then the other setting the improvisational direction.
Esmond Edwards produced, showing that he has some pretty serious range, too, even if it's only to know when to stand back and let Dolphy's genius take over. Out There was a New Jazz release.
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