Marco Colonna & Alexander Hawkins - Dolphy Underlined

Over time, jazz has developed the habit of attributing curious nicknames to its protagonists, resulting in a colorful bestiary of descriptors.

For a start, it's a world teeming with ‘cats’. We also find the Bear, Fox, Hawk, Rabbit, Stork, Frog, and perhaps by way of climax: Bird.

For our subject, however, the discourse changes, and we have to deal with fantastical zoology: that of Borges, of Kafka's Odradek, Cortázar's Adberkukus, or Tommaso Landolfi's Vipistrello.

We have to do this because ERIC ALLAN DOLPHY Jr., born in Los Angeles in 1928 and died in 1964 in Berlin, is one of the most unclassifiable musicians to have navigated the skies of modern jazz. On bass clarinet, he staked out an unprecedentedly virtuosic territory within the Afro-American improvisational practice; he liberated the flute into spaces similarly exotic to those contemporary ‘densities’ of Edgar Varese or Gazzelloni (as a result of the latter’s attendance at Darmstadt); and finally, on alto sax, although it was the instrument on which he was perhaps most rooted in the (Parkerian) tradition, he transgressed the bop vernacular with his intervallic and rhythmic logic. His instruments represent the plumage, the claws, beak and fangs which could not be categorized among the known species until the appearance on the scene of our man.

Moreover, with some exceptions, his compositions cannot be pigeon-holed. With their unpredictable harmonic relations, wide compass, awkward and sudden gaps (all the while with a certain 'songfulness'), and their orchestration, which above all in the last works, such as Out To Lunch and Other Aspects, sees him bringing jazz into the territories of ‘Total Music’, these compositions can be defined as the natural habitat for the imaginary animal Dolphy (whilst a potentially treacherous one for his collaborators).

Having said that, the reflection on how it is possible to face and "capture" the spirit of this Phoenix par excellence comes spontaneously. It is an intrinsic difficulty shared with a few other composers of the time, who decided in the 1960s to delineate a language in which references to common jargon, automatism, and the mainstream often lost any effectiveness: in this sense, as for Dolphy, so with Monk, Ornette, Lacy, or Don Cherry, to name but a few.

The great territories of songs and ‘standards’ are certainly open and inclusive to the point that even today, everyone can navigate them without risk of misunderstanding, so long as they communicate in a codified language (which nonetheless, of course, allows for personal ‘accents’).

It is different in the world of Dolphy, however. Here, it is easy to give in to the temptation of a 'lectio restituta', an exercise in style, with the unfortunate consequence of trying to force square pegs into round holes. To free oneself from the perils of a tribute which becomes a quicksand, it is necessary to have - in addition to undoubted skills of technical and interpretative control - a creative focus that manipulates the material not only to formulate a new version of this or that song but also has the goal of building new authorship, with the starting point of Eric Dolphy's songbook.

Marco Colonna and Alexander Hawkins are undoubtedly two of the personalities of the new generations who possess these qualities; and indeed, these are the primary tactical tools of their philosophical vision of making music. They belong to that group of free improvisers who have behind them a severe preparation; and whose approach to interplay, soloing, and contrapuntal invention essentially moves along the same Cartesian axes as European academic rigor. They are musicians distant from the naïveté of a historicized radicalism by now in its 70s, just as they are distant from a certain equally historicized Afro-American lexicon. Colonna and Hawkins fully represent the new era of ‘conscious research’, and for this reason, I think I am not mistaken in saying that they have taken into account a figure such as Anthony Braxton, who certainly more than many others has taken on board Dolphy’s message.