Eric Dolphy Far Cry 180g LP

TAS Super LP List! Special Merit: Informal

This item not eligible for any further discount offers!

Part of the ultimate audiophile Prestige stereo reissues from Analogue Productions — 25 of the most collectible, rarest, most audiophile-sounding Rudy Van Gelder recordings ever made.

A half-century after his death at 36, the astonishing saxophonist and flutist Eric Dolphy is still influencing and inspiring the most adventuresome jazz musicians. Dolphy was daring and iconoclastic while fully immersed in the jazz tradition. His musicianship was so thorough that innovators like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane held him in awe.

In a dream partnership, Dolphy and trumpeter Booker Little made a handful of recordings in 1960 and '61, shortly before Little's own premature death. The first of them are in this album. With Jaki Byard, Ron Carter and Roy Haynes.

On this session Dolphy is joined by two like-minded weirdos in Little and Byard, as well as an able rhythm section in Carter and Haynes... Everything that we've come to love about Dolphy is on display here, from the unorthodox instruments to the stuttering, belligerent solos that seem to go from New York to LA by way of Saturn... Like Dolphy, Little was another prodigy who died early in his career; his smoothly wandering lines provide a sharp contrast to Dolphy's prickly approach. Byard, of course, has an affection for all styles of piano playing and often welds them into the same passage, a technique he would really perfect in the company of Roland Kirk. At the time, this was forward thinking music that even today has a whiff of the avant-garde.