Resonance Records is proud to announce the first official
previously-unissued studio recordings of Eric Dolphy in over 30 years,
including 85-minutes of never before released material. Musical Prophet: The
Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions is being released in partnership with
the Eric Dolphy Trust and the Alan Douglas Estate with remastered
high-resolution monoaural audio transferred directly from the original tapes.
Captured
after leaving Prestige/New Jazz Records, and just before recording the timeless
classic Out to Lunch! album, Musical Prophet is a 3LP/3CD set that contains the
under-appreciated masterpieces Conversations and Iron Man recorded in New York
City on July 1 and 3, 1963. Originally produced by Alan Douglas — most
well-known for his association with Jimi Hendrix, but who also produced classic
jazz albums such as Money Jungle with Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max
Roach — the tapes had been stored in a suitcase with Dolphy’s personal
belongings and given to Dolphy’s close friends Hale and Juanita Smith just
before he embarked on his fateful European trip in 1964. Years later the
contents of the suitcase were given to flutist/educator James Newton, who had
developed a close relationship with his mentor Hale Smith and Hale’s wife
Juanita in the late 1970s. Then in 2015, Newton connected with Zev Feldman at
Resonance and they began working in conjunction with the Eric Dolphy Trust in
Los Angeles on this definitive edition of Dolphy’s 1963 New York studio
sessions. These tapes were recorded in mono, unlike the stereo versions that
were used for the original studio albums and are the only known master sources
in existence.
The LP/CD
packages are beautifully designed by longtime Resonance designer Burton Yount
and include exhaustive booklets replete with rare and never-before-published
photos (several of which are in color!) by Chuck Stewart, Jean-Pierre Leloir,
Val Wilmer, Hans Harzheim, Lennart Steen, Roger Marshutz and many others, plus
reproductions of the original album covers for Conversations and Iron Man. The
five essays cover different aspects of Eric Dolphy and this music, starting
with co-producers Zev Feldman and James Newton’s accounts of how this album
came to be and what Dolphy’s music means to this world. Newton says in his
essay, “Eric Dolphy taught us to listen much more carefully to voices from all
around the world, but never to forget that the substantially personal and
complex feelings within field hollers remained in the mix.” Jazz scholar and
author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Robin
D.G. Kelley, gives us the full historical context of these recordings and
Dolphy in 1963. Japanese Dolphy scholar Masakazu Sato and Douglas label manager
Michael Lemesre give us accounts of Dolphy’s impact in Japan and of producer
Alan Douglas’ role in these recordings and relationship with Dolphy.
We’ve
gathered a large congregation of voices to reflect, remember and reexamine the
person, the music and the legacy of Eric Dolphy. The saxophone colossus
himself, Sonny Rollins, recounted first meeting Dolphy when he asked to sit in
with Max Roach’s band. Roach liked to embarrass young musicians who asked to
sit in by playing a tune at an extremely fast tempo and running them off the
stage. Of course, Dolphy was no average musician and he hung in there the whole
way through the tune. From that point forward, Rollins knew Dolphy was a
serious musician to be reckoned with. The sole living members of the band
interviewed for this release, saxophonist Sonny Simmons and Richard Davis,
remember Dolphy as being “a Saint” and “angelic” respectively. Close family
friend Juanita Smith gives a detailed account of the time she and her husband,
Hale Smith, spent with Eric, including the anecdote about how Eric got the
enigmatic bump on his head that we see so clearly in photographs from his later
years (including our Chuck Stewart photo on the album cover).
The words
and thoughts of no less than 17 musicians – from jazz legend John Coltrane to
the Pulitzer prize-winning saxophonist/flutist Henry Threadgill – are
represented in this deluxe tribute to Eric Dolphy and this archival discovery,
and paint a complex portrait of this heralded, loved and misunderstood artist.
Acclaimed flutist Nicole Mitchell says, “I don’t know if there’s a better way
to start listening to someone improvising on the flute than to hear Eric Dolphy
. . . He really was — bar none — one of the greatest flute players of his time,
and of any time before him.” Award-winning saxophonist Steve Coleman stated
bluntly about Dolphy, “He’s a virtuoso. There’s nothing else to say about that.
It’s amazing that he could get that kind of fluency on different instruments.
He’s the first guy I heard to play the shit out of the bass clarinet, the
saxophone and the flute.”
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