Eric Dolphy - The Illinois Concert
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Eric DolphyEdition: Music CD
Format: Live
CD Release Date: 1999-10-05
Music Label: Blue Note Records
Soundtracks:
- Softly As In A Morning Sunrise
- Something Sweet, Something Tender
- God Bless The Child
- South Street Exit
- Iron Man
- Red Planet
- G.W.
Free Music Notes for The Illinois Concert
Free Music Review: 4.5, Actually........
Hit: 4 Stars
Given the brevity of Eric Dolphy's career, and the small number of albums released under his own name during his lifetime, it's not surprising that posthumously-issued live recordings form a considerable chunk of the reedsman's titanic legacy. Many such offerings are of bootleg quality, poorly recorded and/or edited, while others feature somewhat lacklustre performances as Dolphy tries to find common ground with one of the many pick-up rhythm sections with which he played.
This makes THE ILLINOIS CONCERT an even more welcome and important find than it would be otherwise. Superbly recorded for the most part, and featuring primarily Dolphy's own works, this 1963 performance also finds the leader in the invigorating and sympathetic company of his true musical peers.
With bassist Eddie Khan and drummer JC Moses, who would soon play on Dolphy's envelope-pushing "Iron Man" sessions, holding things together, there's no poking around for a beat here. Even more significantly, THE ILLINIOS CONCERT is one of only two known recordings featuring Dolphy's sometime pianist Herbie Hancock, then in the first glow of his own jazz celebrity and soon to join Miles Davis - and therefore necessarily un-join Dolphy - as a full-time sideman. If this sounds like a formidable foursome, it is, and one extremely well-matched to the material at hand.
That material opens with a twenty-minute evisceration of "Softly as in a Morning Sunrise," featuring Dolphy's spine-tingling bass clarinet work, then segues through a brief segment of "Something Sweet, Something Tender" (Dolphy's own composition, which he would record a year later on OUT TO LUNCH) and the inevitable solo "God Bless the Child." Switching to flute, the Maestro tackles another original number, "South Street Exit," which unfortunately suffers from insufficient miking and therefore serves as more of a showcase for the rhythm section than the leader himself. "Iron Man," here in its developmental stage, brings in Dolphy's blistering alto saxophone for the finale of the quartet segment, after which a full orchestra joins the group for two more Dolphy classics, "Red Planet" (a.k.a. "Miles' Mode") and "GW." Both are handled quite well, and provide interesting examples of Dolphy's underexplored scoring skills as well as his evergreen sax chops.
Apart from the 1961 Five Spot concert and 1964's mistitled LAST DATE, I can't think of another live Dolphy recording which manages to attain a finer balance of material, players and ("South Street Exit" excepted) sound quality than this one. Highly recommended and, dare I say it, damned good!
The Illinois Concert Poster
Eric Dolphy was a musician's musician, and over the course of his brief but incandescent career, he played and recorded with some of the finest pianists of his generation, including Jaki Byard and Mal Waldron. Still, as much as one might cherish their contributions to such Dolphy classics as Far Cry and Live at the Five Spot, nothing can prepare you for the concert experience of Dolphy's 1963 working band featuring a startling young pianist from the next generation, 23-year-old Herbie Hancock. Hancock reacts to the shamanistic energy of Dolphy's improvisations with the kind of exploratory open voicings and emotional urgency that characterized Bobby Hutcherson's vibraphone work on Out to Lunch!, save that no two-mallet vibist could hope to approximate the rich chordal canvas Hancock portrays on "Softly as a Morning Sunrise." Hancock abstracts and deconstructs the song form with imaginative polytonal overlays, allowing Dolphy to transcend the harmonic backgrounds and superimpose his own exploratory brand of calculated dissonance and speaking-in-tongues hosannas over the top. The virtuoso reedman engages the pianist and drummer J.C. Moses in ever more impassioned rhythmic exchanges. --Chip SternJazz Music CDs
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