JAM, IX: Eric Dolphy on "Take the 'A' Train"

Every weekday this month I'll be posting new content in observance of Jazz Appreciation Month (J.A.M.), so-designated by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History beginning in 2001. International Jazz Day, so-designated by UNESCO in partnership with the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, is on the last day of April, the 30th; it was first celebrated in 2012. Debating the relative merits of designating specific days or months for celebrating heritages, traditions, and the like aside, Jazz Appreciation Month is at the very least an excuse to dig into some material that I've been interested in for a while on the blog. 

Friday's installment featured Vijay Iyer's solo over his composition "Actions Speak," from 2012's Accelerando. Tomorrow's will feature West Coast tenor heavyweight Harold Land blowing over "Crazeology," from which Scott LaFaro's bass solo was featured on April 3.

†If you enjoy the content on this blog, please consider supporting my band's homegrown effort to get our record through the final stages of mastering and production. It's all recorded—you can listen to it now!—but we just need a bit more help to get to the finish line. We appreciate it. </self-promotion over>

* * * * *

Fewer than three months before he passed, Eric Dolphy played this while on tour in Europe with Mingus. It's a brilliant, simple arrangement: every soloist plays for a bit with the band, then the band drops out for a while while the soloist goes exploring, then the band comes back in. Jaki Byard leaps into gleeful stride during his break, Dolphy continues to pitch-warp his ideas through far-flung octaves in his, and Clifford Jordan shouts the blues. Vijay's recent release Break Stuff has recently called more attention to something most people instinctively know about the generative properties of breaks:

"As American musicians, we tend to make music out of breaks: building inside them, moving through them, embellishing, flexing and warping them. The expansive, ritualistic possibilities of the break are central to African diasporic music, which informs everything we do." (liner notes to Break Stuff)

I don't know how much sense this will make out of context, but I'm reminded of other readings Vijay's assigned in the past dealing with the relation of ruptures/breaks to Black music, particularly this, from Fred Moten's chapter "Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester's Scream," from In the Break:

What's the revolutionary force of the sensuality that emerges from the sonic event Marx subjunctively produces without sensually discovering? To ask this is to think what's at stake in the music: the universalization or socialization of the surplus, the generative force of a venerable phonic propulsion, the ontological and historical priority of resistance to power and objection to subjection, the old-new thing, the freedom drive that animates black performances.

I haven't yet transcribed what's in the break for Dolphy, but here are the first two choruses immediately proceeding the leap into the unknown:

C
Bb
Eb