The History of Jazz (63 page)

These adventures, however, were merely a preamble to the full experimental zeal of Coltrane’s final evolution. Coltrane was increasingly drawn to the liberating possibilities of free jazz—a quest that resulted in uninhibited performances invariably dubbed with names drawn from mystical and religious literature. But even here the range of styles was impressive, with the ethereal “Offerings” from the final quartet with Alice Coltrane and Rashied Ali standing in contrast to the fire and brimstone of “Om,” “Ascension,” or “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” from
Meditations
. A whole career’s worth of music was crammed into these final six years, studio work for Impulse complemented by various live recordings (at the Village Vanguard, Birdland, the Newport Festival, on the road in Europe, Japan, and other locales). “We couldn’t possibly put out all the records we were making,” later recalled producer Thiele, who persisted in preserving the saxophonist’s growing oeuvre, even in the face of opposition from the label’s senior management. “I believe his contract called for two albums a year to be recorded and released. Well, hell, I recorded six albums a year. … It reached a point where I would record late at night, so at least we’d have peace then, and no one in the company would know where I was.” The total extent of these recordings was so great that new material was still being released many years after the saxophonist’s death.

These constant changes in Coltrane’s music were highly representative of the man, a restless seeker and obsessive autodidact. Continual striving marked virtually all aspects of his life. A voracious reader, Coltrane’s interests ranged widely, with everything from Aristotle to Edgar Cayce finding its way to his bookshelves, as well as
The Autobiography of a Yogi
(suggested by Sonny Rollins) and Krishnamurti’s
Commentaries on Living
(recommended by Bill Evans). This insatiable appetite for the new and different was equally evident in Coltrane’s music. Years before world music was in fashion, Coltrane delved into the aural cultures of India, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the globe. Classical composers, especially contemporary ones, were studied with similar enthusiasm. For his practice sessions, Coltrane favored Nicolas Slonimsky’s
Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns
. This too was a fitting choice, since both Coltrane and Slonimsky shared the same obsession: to know all the scale patterns possible within the well-tempered tonal system. (Before long, numerous jazz players were “digging” Slonimsky in emulation of Trane, and the publisher of the
Thesaurus
puzzled over the sudden surge in orders for this previously unheralded volume.) At other times Coltrane would use music written for piano or violin or harp as practice-room fodder for his sax technique, knowing that this too would force him to expand his musical horizons. He delighted in new instruments, new mouthpieces, new collections of sheet music—indeed in anything that might add to his arsenal of sounds. He, along with fellow progressive Steve Lacy, played a key role in restoring the soprano sax to prominence as a legitimate jazz horn after years of neglect. In private, Coltrane tried his hand at other instruments, including koto and sitar (both brought back from his Japanese tour), even snubbing the purists with his interest in the electric Varitone sax. Perhaps one could not have predicted that the polished “inside” player of
Giant Step
s would eventually evolve into the daring “outside” exponent of
Ascension
, yet anyone who had experienced Coltrane’s unquenchable thirst for personal development lived with the expectation of dramatic changes to come from this restless giant of the jazz world.

Eric Dolphy was Coltrane’s sometime partner in these explorations. This too was fitting. Like Coltrane, Dolphy had mastered the jazz art through diligence, an openness to new sounds, and assiduous practice. Both saxophonists came to adopt the most radical techniques of improvisation, but—and this was the marvel—did so in careful, almost methodical steps. What a fancy: that a revolution could be pursued in tiny increments! Yet such was the foundation of their success. Unlike most other practitioners of free jazz, Dolphy (like Coltrane) had first established his prowess in more structured formats. Although he came of age in the heated jazz environment of postwar Southern California, Dolphy had only the most peripheral involvement in the Central Avenue scene of that day. Instead, his early musical tastes tended toward Debussy, Ravel, and Webern. He aspired to study music at the University of Southern California and eventually become a symphony oboe player. Music teacher Lloyd Reese fueled the youngster’s interest in jazz—and infuriated Eric’s parents—when he suggested that a college degree was not necessary to pursue a career in music.

A precocious talent, Dolphy was nonetheless a late bloomer in the jazz world. His first major gig, with Roy Porter’s big band, did not take place until he was twenty, but even then almost a decade would pass before Dolphy began drawing attention through his work with Chico Hamilton. Most of the intervening years were consumed by private study, supplemented by occasional low-profile gigs in the LA area. By the close of the 1950s, Dolphy had developed into a virtuoso saxophonist, in many ways the most fitting heir among his generation to the Parker mantle, not due to any slavish imitation of the master—that Dolphy emphatically did
not
do—but through his insistence on following the implications of Bird to the logical next level. Like Parker, his music was played with urgency, at times explosiveness, daring to linger at the tenuous juncture where the human cry and musical scale meet. But the differences between the two were equally notable. Dolphy’s solos were more angular, zigzagging from interval to interval, taking hairpin turns at unexpected junctures, making dramatic leaps from the lower to the upper register, and belting out insistent flurries of notes. And, in time, Dolphy would push his music to an even more pronounced modernism than Parker’s, ultimately breaching the conventional limits of tonality and structure.

After moving to New York in 1959, Dolphy soon found himself in the midst of a vortex of radical changes sweeping the jazz landscape. He would only live another five years, but for Dolphy this would be a teeming half-decade of musical achievements. His sideman work with Coltrane found him writing arrangements for an enlarged combo in addition to matching up with the leader as a frontline soloist. Taking on Coltrane nightly on the bandstand was a task few saxophonists would have relished at the time, but Dolphy flourished in such charged settings. His sideman work with Charles Mingus was equally productive, as documented on a handful of projects, including the Candid release
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
and a memorable concert recording made at Antibes. Dolphy’s presence also contributed to a number of high-profile sessions with other leaders, including Ornette Coleman’s
Free Jazz
, Andrew Hill’s
Point of Departure
, Oliver Nelson’s
The Blues and the Abstract Truth
, and George Russell’s
Ezz-thetics
—four milestone recordings from the early 1960s, each demanding a different facet of Dolphy’s musical personality. He also graced important larger ensembles led by John Lewis, Gil Evans, and Gunther Schuller, as well as performed classical composer Edgard Varèse’s challenging solo flute work
Density 21.5
at the 1962 Ojai Festival in California. In many ways, Eric Dolphy was the perfect sideman, boasting exceptional technique, outstanding reading skills, mastery of several instruments, and a flexibility that allowed him to work with equal comfort in a variety of genres, from the most structured to the most free-form, whether inside the chord changes or outside their sway. And these many talents were married to a soft-spoken, sweet disposition that added to his skill in adapting to new bands and different situations. Dolphy would be well known and admired today if only for these sideman stints. But his work as a leader has also left a large mark on the jazz world. His studio projects produced a number of estimable efforts, including
Far Cry
for Prestige and
Out to Lunch
for Blue Note, as well as a compelling set of live performances recorded with the brilliant young trumpeter Booker Little at the Five Spot on July 16, 1961.

The latter collaboration succeeded despite many obstacles: this was the band’s first and only extended club engagement, the piano was badly out of tune, the audience noisy and seemingly indifferent, the repertoire a hodgepodge of ballads and disparate originals from group members. Yet the ensemble rises far above these constraints, pushing each number to its limits, and maintaining a fierce energy on pieces such as “The Prophet,” “Aggression,” and “Fire Waltz.” The obvious point of comparison here is with Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. But while Coleman and Cherry used free tonality as a starting point, with Dolphy and Little it is the opposite: the pieces are tonal and highly structured, with the horn players adopting quarter tones, cries, and dissonance as a way of expanding and stretching the jazz vocabulary from within, rather than reinventing it
de novo
. In comments that are equally representative of Dolphy, Little explained his aesthetic principles: “I have more conventional ideas [than Ornette]. … But I can’t think in terms of wrong notes—in fact I don’t hear any notes as being wrong. It’s a matter of knowing how to integrate the notes and, if you must, how to resolve them.”
¹⁴
These precepts are very much evident in the Five Spot recordings. This was music at the edge. Perhaps these musicians could have taken a further step, fully embracing the “freedom principle” (as it has come to be known), collaborating on even more iconoclastic music. Dolphy, for his part, seemed half ready to make this leap, as witnessed by his
Out to Lunch
recording, made shortly before his death. But even at this late stage, Dolphy evinced, especially through his elaborate compositions, a reluctance to leave structure and tradition behind (as on his
Free Jazz
sideman date with Ornette Coleman). Certainly it is tempting to speculate how Dolphy and Little might have evolved had their partnership lasted another five or ten years. As it turned out, both players would be dead before the middle of the decade: Little felled by uremia in 1961 at age twenty-three, Dolphy succumbing to heart failure spurred by a diabetic condition in 1964 at age thirty-six. It would be left to others, more revolutionary in their ambitions and even less wedded to the bebop and hard-bop tradition, to bring freedom music to its fullest expression: an Ornette Coleman, an Albert Ayler, a Cecil Taylor.

In the late 1950s, however, the chief challenge to Coltrane’s preeminence as the leading saxophonist of his day came not from Coleman or Ayler—little known at the time—or even from Dolphy. The most persuasive alternative to his “sheets of sound” approach emanated, rather, from the heart of the jazz tradition, in the person of tenorist Sonny Rollins. More than any of these celebrated peers, Rollins would play the lead role in defining the mainstream sound of the tenor during these transition years. While other saxophonists were exploring the limits of dissonance, free improv and extended forms, Third Stream mergings with classical music, exotic instruments, nonets and octets and other expanded bands, Rollins stayed mostly focused on forging a classic solo style. Much of the history of Adolphe Sax’s invention found its way into Rollins’s playing. One could hear the connections that tied him to the legacy of a Coleman Hawkins or a Don Byas and other vintage horn players, seamlessly blended with hypermodern elements drawn from the current scene. “I like to think there is a direct link between early jazz and jazz of any time,” Rollins told interviewer Bob Blumenthal in 1982. “I like to think that jazz can be played in a way that you can hear the old as well as the new. At least that’s how I try to play.”
¹⁵

A celebration of improvisation lay at the core of his artistry and served as the organizing principle for his finest recordings and performances. At times his zest for the spontaneous flow of musical ideas would lead Rollins to produce extravagant unaccompanied sax musings. Here his creativity could run freely, with everything mixing together—snippets from operatic arias, movie themes, hoary pop tunes, bebop licks—a Joycean stream of consciousness as viewed through the bell of a horn. These unpredictable excursions came to achieve quasi-mythic status. Indeed, many of Rollins’s fans refused to acknowledge that any of his albums, even the best, matched what they had heard in person, especially when the tenorist was unfettered by a rhythm section. But extended
a cappella
inventions were only a small part of Rollins’s broad musical vision. Few jazz players of his day could boast of a more extensive repertoire, one that featured the highs and lows of the popular song tradition with equal fervor. And not just the standard American tunes: Kurt Weill, Noel Coward, and other Old World composers were honored alongside Gershwin and Porter. These deferential bows to songs from afar coexisted with the oddities, moldy oldies, and novelty tunes that Rollins somehow transformed into jazz, such as “I’m an Old Cowhand” or “The Tennessee Waltz” or “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.”

The scope of his music continued to grow with the passing years: in the early 1980s, it spanned everything from Dolly Parton to Stevie Wonder, tweaking the sensibilities of jazz purists and even occasionally unnerving his sidemen. But Rollins’s own hearty compositions played an equally critical role in his success. These were usually simple blowing pieces, favored not for their sophistication or their experimental implications but simply because they were inviting springboards for soloing. To this day, many of Rollins’s tunes (“St. Thomas,” “Pent Up House,” “Doxy,” “Sonnymoon for Two,” “Airegin,” “Oleo”) remain standard fare at jazz jam sessions for this very reason. Especially refreshing are the calypso-inflected pieces, etudes in foot tapping and finger snapping such as “St. Thomas” and “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” which eventually became Rollins trademarks. But even when Rollins tried his hand, uncharacteristically, at a longer form, as in his
Freedom Suite
, the performance still retained the feel and flow of a spontaneous jam. In an age when jazz was becoming increasingly self-conscious and wedded to various ideologies, Rollins showed that it was still possible to create great works simply by abandoning himself to the flow of the music, immersing himself in the magic of the moment.