Music I Used To Listen To, Part 4

Last month's Kelsey Lu set opening for Hundred Waters still has me thinking about the music I used to listen to back in the 70s.

There is probably no instrument more ungainly than the bass clarinet.  Sounds like a freaking petrified squid, amiright?  But Eric Dolphy, jazz visionary and performer extraordinaire, took this oddest of all instruments and played something amazing on it.  As John Lennon once famously said, "I’m an artist, and if you give me a tuba, I’ll bring you something out of it." Somebody gave Dolphy a bass clarinet, and this is what he did with it.

If you think that an almost nine-minute-long bass clarinet solo would be boring, guess again.  For some reason, those cyclic scales he plays at the start of the piece sound to my ears like atomic orbitals and give the whole thing a very modern, nuclear-age sound.  But he lands each scale, one after the other, right on the next sequential chord of Billie Holiday's 1942 hit God Bless The Child, and while it takes a while to recognize the song, it slowly emerges from the cycles.  That's brilliant right there and enough to satisfy the creative urges of most improvisers, but for Dolphy it's just the starting point, a launching pad for further explorations of the emotion of the song, the variety of sounds he can coax out of his instrument, and the creative possibilities of musical expression.  I especially love that the fine quality of this live recording even allows you to hear the sound of the pads hitting the instrument's tone holes.  And how he almost makes the instrument sound like it's laughing at some points (listen around the 5:15 mark, for example).

It's a virtuoso performance, a one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime improvisation, and amazingly was recorded 54 whole years ago at the University of Illinois. in Champaign, but I used to hear this being broadcast by WBUR late at night while I was up studying at Boston University.  I enjoy the music I listen to now, obviously, but also wish music like this was still being performed today.   

Enjoy.