Eric Dolphy

Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. was born in Los Angeles on the twentieth of June 1928, to Sadie and Eric Sr., immigrants from Panama. The clarinet and saxophone came at six, the flute after; Los Angeles City College and a music scholarship trained the hands, Roy Porter's bebop big band gave the first bandstand, and the Army took three years. Chico Hamilton's quintet carried him to the country's ear in 1958, and New York received him the next year.

He joined Charles Mingus's Jazz Workshop in 1960, and the sixties' great laboratories all wanted him: his own Prestige records — Outward Bound, Out There, Far Cry — the co-led Five Spot residency with Booker Little in July 1961, and John Coltrane's band, where his added voice made the quartet a quintet through the Africa/Brass sessions, the Village Vanguard nights, and the European tour of late 1961. He played alto like an argument, flute like a bird remembering, and made the bass clarinet a solo voice jazz had never granted it.

On the twenty-fifth of February 1964, at Van Gelder's studio, he set down Out to Lunch! with Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Richard Davis, and the teenaged Tony Williams — widely held his masterwork and a landmark of the music's outward edge. That April he crossed to Europe with Mingus's sextet and stayed when the tour ended, engaged to be married, gigging toward a Paris life.

He arrived in West Berlin on the twenty-seventh of June 1964 already gravely ill, barely finished his sets, and died two days later of a diabetic coma — the diabetes undiagnosed in his lifetime. His bandmates recounted bitterly that the hospital assumed a Black jazzman's collapse meant drugs; he used none. He had just turned thirty-six. Honored be Eric Dolphy, who heard music in birdsong and made instruments confess it.