(1928 – 1964)

Eric Dolphy, in full Eric Allan Dolphy – American jazz musician born and raised in Los Angeles, and a virtuoso improviser on woodwinds. 

Dolphy began playing clarinet, oboe, and alto saxophone in his youth and attended Los Angeles City College. He wanted to join the Los Angeles Philharmonic but was prevented from doing so by virtue of the racist policies of the Orchestra at that time. He was famous amongst musicians in the city for his relentless practice regimen. He was in Roy Porter’s big band during the late 1940s. He first became nationally recognized when he toured and recorded with the Chico Hamilton quintet in 1958–59.

Settling in New York by early 1960 led to Dolphy’s most noted performing associations, with fellow Angeleno Charles Mingus, trumpeter Booker Little, and John Coltrane. He recorded often, but opportunities to play in public were erratic. He died in 1964 of complications from diabetes.

Dolphy’s impact resulted largely from his brilliant playing of not only alto saxophone but also flute (then uncommon in jazz) and bass clarinet (which he virtually introduced into jazz improvisation). Besides his thorough mastery of these woodwinds, he introduced an unprecedented range of unique expressive techniques on them. While his phrasing usually resembled Charlie Parker’s in rhythmic terms, Dolphy harmonically was given to wide, angular leaps and distant relations to fixed harmonic structures, so that his chromatic lines at times seemed to approach atonality. Typically, his solos proceeded by free association. By 1963–64, however, he had discovered unique ways of organizing his improvising, using original themes and radical harmonic means, as in his major album Out to Lunch.