Listening to Prestige 483: Eric Dolphy - Booker Little

In the 1940s, a revolution in American music took place in New York City, in the nightclubs along 52nd Street and the great after-hours clubs, Minton's and Monroe's, in Harlem. New York was the place, to such an extent that when people were looking for a name for the music that came to be known as bebop, one of the names that was used for a while was New York music. By the end of the 1950s, a new revolution was taking place in American music, and New York was still the white-hot epicenter, but the locus had shifted. Now it was downtown, along the edge of Greenwich Village, in a neighborhood that was then called the Bowery or the Lower East Side but would later be rebranded as the East Village, and specifically in one club: the Five Spot.

The Five Spot had begun its move toward the cutting edge in 1957-58, when Thelonious Monk, newly reinstated to legal status with a cabaret card, took residence with a group featuring John Coltrane. Then in 1959, it opened its stage to Ornette Coleman's quartet, a group no one wanted to book, and not everyone wanted to hear, but no one could stop talking about.

Probably the three most important figures of the new jazz, or "free jazz" as it came to be called, were Coleman, Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, and in July of 1961, Eric Dolphy brought a quintet to the Five Spot.

The quintet included drummer Ed Blackwell, who had played with Coleman. Bassist Richard Davis had most recently been working with Sarah Vaughan, but he understood what Dolphy was doing. Mal Waldron was on piano, and anyone who's followed this history of Prestige knows what I think of him, both as a player and as a composer. He has one piece here, the fire-breathing "Fire Waltz," which they had played on a Prestige session led by Waldron just a couple of weeks earlier, and which has been recorded a number of times in succeeding years by different artists.

Finally, Booker Little, the brilliant young trumpeter who had played on Dolphy's last studio album, and would be dead within three months of the Five Spot dates. Little was ten years younger than Dolphy, eight years younger than Coleman. He had grown up under the spell of Clifford Brown, and he had played for a few years and made several albums with Max Roach, but he was ready for the new sound, and ready to spread his wings with the new music Dolphy was making.

Dolphy was an interesting musician in so many ways. He was so much in the vanguard of the new music, and one of its most important innovators, but he was able to play in such a wide variety of contexts. He was very often the most advanced musician in whatever ensemble he was playing with--the Prestige albums with the Latin Jazz Quintet are a perfect example--but he left no musician behind.

This club date with Little is not master and student--Dolphy was never like that. But it is Dolphy leading the way. Little has come a long way in the six months since his studio album with Dolphy, and we can only imagine what more he would have had to offer.

The two albums, Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot Vol. 1 (New Jazz) and  Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot Vol. 2 (Prestige) were both from the same night at the club, and were recorded by Rudy Van Gelder. "Fire Waltz," "Bee Vamp" and "The Prophet" were on Volume 1, with the alternate take of "Bee Vamp" included on the CD reissue. "Aggression" and "Like Someone in Love" were Volume two, with "Nunber Eight" and "Booker's Waltz" added to the CD reissues. A couple of numbers, "Status Seeking" and Dolphy's unaccompanied "God Bless the Child," were on another album, Here and There.

Esmond Edwards produced.

Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle!
Volumes 1-3 are also available from Amazon.
The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.
– Terry Gibbs