Eric Dolphy Quintet with Booker Little - Far Cry

Early 1960s Classic

This creative set of "advanced hard-bop" (if this music can be characterized) has become one of my favorite jazz albums from the early 1960s. FAR CRY is mellower and more accessible than Dolphy's better known OUT TO LUNCH, recorded a few years later. It features the multi-talented Dolphy on alto sax, bass clarinet, and flute; Booker Little, one of my all-time favorite trumpeters; and a great rhythm section of Jaki Byard (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Roy Haynes (drums). Dolphy and Little were a truly unique and wonderful front-line pair. The disc includes 8 great songs--and no alternate takes! I am enjoying this CD more with each listen. The flute and trumpet harmonies on "Ode to Charlie Parker" are delightful. Haynes's percussion is splendid throughout. An earlier reviewer suggested that the songs didn't really fit well together; personally, I don't find this a problem and enjoy the variety and contrasts on this album.

If you can find one (currently there are still a few available from Amazon 3rd-party sources), I heartily recommend the 20-Bit K2 remastered version. The older OJC (Original Jazz Classics) disc is the one listed here. June 4, 2007

Dolphy In All His Glory

Even Charles Mingus, a tough critic of just about everything, couldn't find anything nasty to say about Eric Dolphy, referring to him as a saint, not just as a player but as a man. Dolphy was known to be incredibly dedicated; he would frequently disappear at parties only to be found practicing one horn or another on a fire escape or other private place. His early, and completely avoidable death, has added even more shine to his halo. Today he holds a well-earned seat in the pantheon of great ones likes Coltrane, Bird, Young, and Hawkins. However, his residence there is more the result of his astonishing technical virtuosity than his contribution to moving the music forward.

Dolphy could play anything with keypads, he had an almost Faustian brilliance. But the dirty little secret about Dolphy is that often he was doing nothing more than running up and down the stairs. One might marvel at his ability without being moved. His famous rendition of God Bless The Child, on bass clarinet, is only the most blatant example of this syndrome. He touches the melody as a child touches base when playing tag, runs up and down the stairs for a few minutes, touches base again, and repeats the cycle.

When he is at his very best is when he's most lyrical, and in Far Cry he really delivers the goods. The early tracks cook; providing lots of room for Booker Little to dazzle with his own technical prowess. Then, mysteriously, it's almost as if Booker Little leaves the building and Dolphy takes center stage. From there on out, you are treated to some of the most exquisite Dolphy solos ever recorded. The flute playing is especially select, (he has no rival when it comes to jazz flute), but the alto on Tenderly is astounding and the bass clarinet on It's Magic, while overdone, showcases Dolphy's command of the instrument and ability to stretch a melody brilliantly without abandoning it. Collecting Dolphy is a hit or miss proposition, he recorded a lot and there is inconsistency in both the material and performances. Here there is only gold. Highly recommended. June 4, 2006

One of Dolphy's best

This is Dolphy at his best with up-beat energy that blows away the dolldrums. Listeners should immediately grasp its optimistic searching outlook.

Bird's Mother is wonderfully angular with great humor. The flute on Left Alone is as bluesy as a flute can be. What a wonderful tribute to the great Billie Holiday, who as we know sang nothing but the Truth.

Booker Little is one of the tragic losses that jazz endured, an immensly talented trumpet player who died in his early 20s. You can hear some of his best work here and he was the perfect horn player to work with Dolphy. And unfortunately, Dolphy was to die tragically a few years later.

Dolphy was a positive spirit that is always valuable when represented in music.

This is music that no music lover can afford to ignore. July 5, 2002

Two young masters

This is the first of several collaborations between Eric Dolphy & the fated trumpeter Booker Little; it was recorded in December 1960, though it was oddly released only belatedly--in fact, it has a later catalogue number than the Five Spot recordings from July 1961. (The other date recorded by Dolphy & Little was _Out Front_, recorded under Little's name for a different label, Candid.) Listening to it again, I find it hard not to meditate a bit on Dolphy's ill-starred career. He was certainly recording at a ferocious pace in 1960-61, both as a leader & sideman--this is the best-documented period of his career, aside from the 1964 concert recordings with Mingus--& yet it's hard not to feel that Dolphy never really got a chance to create a music commensurate with his talent. He was a great _soloist_: but unlike Coltrane or Coleman, he never really got the chance to develop his music as a group music. Every disc of his has completely different personnel, often containing both bop players like Haynes & Persip & nascent radicals & innovators like Little, Carter, Byard &c. (in this Dolphy's output is comparable to early Charlie Parker discs, which mixed boppers with swing-era players). Prestige was clearly not an ideal base for his talents: they were perhaps hoping to get music in the vein of the extremely popular Chico Hamilton band, of which Dolphy was an alumnus, not a player whose inclinations were to the increasingly radical experiments of the 1960s avantgarde. Dolphy's most unconstrained work on Prestige was on the live Five Spot albums; after he was dropped by the label, he recorded almost nothing under his own leadership, but did turn out his most fully-achieved album at Blue Note (_Out to Lunch_, his most experimental album) & two other interesting dates for United Artists, which are again much more robustly experimental than any of his Prestige discs. As the oeuvre stands, it is as frustratingly but enticingly incomplete as Bix Beiderbecke's or Herbie Nichols': what remains is essential & terrific music, but it could have been much more.

Anyway, back to _Far Cry_. It's an album that's oddly organized, as it's split in three (slightly overlapping) sections. Tracks 1-3 are a loose meditation on the legacy of Charlie Parker, beginning with two Byard originals, a blues called "Mrs. Parker of K.C. (Bird's Mother)" (on which Dolphy plays bass clarinet) & the ballad "Ode to Charlie Parker" (flute). Both tracks are if anything features for the brilliant trumpet of Booker Little, who gets the most solo space. The 3rd track is "Far Cry", which Dolphy in the liner notes says is a summing up of Parker's legacy & how it stood 4 years after his death. This is a brisk, angular line played on alto--curiously it's exactly the same theme as "Out There", the title track of his previous Prestige LP. Perhaps he was dissatisfied with the first version?

"Far Cry" & "Miss Ann" are closely related, as slashing uptempo numbers for alto sax, & thus might be considered the 2nd part of the album. At this point the album takes a mysterious left turn: Booker Little, who up to this point has been if anything more prominent than Dolphy, doesn't play on the rest of the album, which is turned over to three standards. "Left Alone" is given a lovely flute rendition, & "It's Magic" is given a rather exaggerated, almost satirical reading on bass clarinet. The masterpiece here--& what really pushes this album into the front rank of the Dolphy canon--is "Tenderly", a 4-minute acappella alto-saxophone improvisation. It is not given a conventional chords-based reading, but instead treated almost like a classical cadenza: Dolphy hews fairly closely to the melody, but it is stated only in tiny fragments which open up into soaring arpeggios, loops & trills. This is one of the key tracks of the 1960s. I still find it tremendously moving after years of listening.

The CD reissue also includes a version of Dolphy's blues "Serene" (again, this was recorded earlier for Prestige, suggesting Dolphy was not happy with the previously released version). It's as strong as anything on the original album, & I don't know why it was left off the first time around. November 14, 2001

great, but could be better

Nearly every song on this album is of 5 star caliber, but they don't seem to fit together very well. They don't seem to have any kind of connection with each other. The rhythm section is pretty good, but they are rather conservative on this album. As far as eric and booker go, this album contains some of their most wonderful playing. I think that a good way to describe eric's playing is exclamatory. It sounds like he is speaking through the horn. Sometimes it sounds almost as if he is inhaling through the horn rather than blowing. Little's blowing sounds somehow more sophisticated and intelligent than most trumpeters. All of the compositions are great. I am especially fond of "far cry" and the solo "tenderly." It's a shame that they both had to die so young. March 25, 2001

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