JAZZBO NOTES HIGHLY RECOMMENDED RECORDING
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If you heard about a live CD of Eric Dolphy recorded in Holland with a Dutch pickup band, you might not expect too much. Pickup bands are often composed of utility players who accompany anyone and everyone who passes through. Last Date seems to be just such a recording, so it’s a bit of a shock to hear how good it is.
To explain why I like Last Date so much, I’m going to take a slight detour, so bear with me.
The modern instrumentalist that reminds me most of Eric Dolphy is guitarist Allan Holdsworth. At first glance, that may sound like a weird comparison, but hear me out. Both Dolphy and Holdsworth extend conventional harmony in their improvisations and compositions. In both cases, when they improvise over their own compositions, it can be a little too much of a good thing. If you’re listening to an improvisation that consists of extended harmony to a tune that is based on extended harmony, it’s easy to get lost.
That’s why I prefer to listen to Holdsworth when he’s bending his talent to someone else’s musical concept. I can better appreciate what’s unique about Holdsworth when I contrast his approach with someone whose musical ideas are more mainstream.
In a similar way, I find that one of the best ways to appreciate Eric Dolphy is when he plays standards. On Last Date, we are blessed with two such opportunities.
The first is Thelonius Monk’s Epistrophy. The surprise on this one isn’t how well Dolphy plays it. That’s pretty much a given. The real surprise is the band. Pianist Misha Mengelberg fully understands Monk’s rhythmic and harmonic universe. The first cool thing he does is to play the chord progression for the A section three against four, as if the tune was in 3/4 instead of 4/4. Then, for the B section, Mengelberg reverts to standard Monkian chord accents. (Actually, they’re hardly standard. Very few pianists pull them off as well as Misha Mengelberg.) During all of this, bassist Jacques Schols walks and drummer Han Bennink plays a straight 4/4, except his rhythmic accents show that he understands Monk, too.
Then Dolphy’s bass clarinet solo begins and it’s a treat, as expected. I always enjoy hearing Dolphy on bass clarinet — he’s unique. Misha Mengleberg continues to impress the hell out of me with his solo, which is utterly faithful to Monk’s conception, but adds highly advanced melodic, rhythmic and harmonic ideas of his own. Then Jacques Schols takes a turn in the spotlight, accompanied by drummer Han Bennink. It’s not a showy solo, but it’s impeccable in it’s understanding of the tune. Midway through the bass solo, Misha Mengleberg starts adding rhythmic accents. Out of nowhere, Dolphy alternates sixteen bars of improv with drummer Jacques Schols. Schols eschews the usual technical display in favor of elaborating on the rhythmic motifs inherent in the composition.
I have rarely heard such a faithful rendering of a Monk composition, even by the man himself. I hope Monk got a chance to hear it. He would have loved it.
The second standard on Last Date is You Don’t Know What Love Is, which Dolphy tackles on the flute. When Dolphy wants to, he can play pretty, and he sure does here. On the melody, Jacques Schols expertly bows the bass line. Dolphy does his usual far-out solo while the rest of the band plays it straight. When it’s pianist Misha Mengleberg’s turn, you find out that his affinity to Monk runs pretty deep. Mengleberg sounds something like a cross between Monk and Mal Waldron, another pianist I greatly admire. On the outro, Dolphy has an extensive cadenza.
The rest of the tunes on Last Date are Dolphy originals, except for one written by Misha Mengleberg, who turns out to be almost as twisted a composer as Dolphy. The band swings mightily on these selections and you can be sure that they know where Dolphy is headed and why, even if you are left scratching your head sometimes. It’s a good thing the original tunes are rather short and that the covers are lengthy, which provides a good balance.
If you are at all a Dolphy fan, I recommend picking up Last Date. For those who aren’t, or who aren’t sure, I would go with Outward Bound, which is probably his most coherent and cohesive statement as a leader.
