How Eric Dolphy Made me Forget What the Tonic Was

Putting on songs in the car is always a particularly nerve racking task for me. In a publicly applicable sense, my ears are “broken”- the main characteristic of all “feel-good” music is tonality, maintaining a sense of grounding through basing a tune around a singular note. A majority of the music I listen to lacks that grounding factor, instead finding itself scattered in the harmonic air, never revealing to the listener its next motion, phrase, or the contour the subsequent line will assume. It is random.

And so for the majority of people, listening to players like Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and Steve Grossman is the opposite of “feel-good”- the music is anxious, uneasy, and certainly not catchy. So scrolling through my playlist consisting of experimental Trane, Michael Brecker, Kenny Garrett, and hidden records of Dolphy playing at the Vanguard always makes my hand hesitant.

I turn on some Coleman Hawkins instead.

The main posed question that people consider when listening to the music of innovators like Ornette and Grossman is one that captures the distastefulness of the music to an untrained ear: “Why would anyone ever listen to this garbage?”

That question dates all the way back to the time contemporary to Ornette and Dolphy, leading the way for the avant-garde jazz movement with an emphasis on expression rather than melodies. Listening to their music, it’s very apparent why their music was not well-received by the majority at the time. Compared to what this subsection of jazz sprouted from, bebop, though still characterizable for its fast and spontaneous nature, had tonality. In fact, tonality was a big part of bebop- what made a good line in bebop was how it followed the chord changes, adding chromaticism ever-so-slightly to the mix to create an ear-pleasing type of music.

However, in the time of the avant-garde jazz movement, tonality stood as old news- a sudden emphasis on freedom, harmonic ambitiousness, and energy was now placed. And sure enough, Eric Dolphy’s music captured that. A lot of the music in “free jazz” is synonymous with randomness- the idea that not all music has to be purposeful, and in fact, imperfection is perfection. As contemporary music surfaced, this was often an idea that was played with- even within the classical realm, pieces like “4:33 by John Cage” supported the idea that institutionalized music and written music has put too much emphasis on perfection.

This movement was also pushed forward through the civil rights movement- the energy conveyed through many artists in the avant-garde movement attempt to capture the disgust people, predominantly black artists, had with the political situation at the time. Many works such as Max Roach’s “Freedom Suite” and Charles Mingus’s “Fables of Faubus” encapsulate the frustration of the Civil Rights Movement. The fact that no change was being made.

Much of Eric Dolphy’s music is similar- it’s wild, anxious, robust, and powerful. You get an imposed sense of pure energy, pure rage, pure feeling from listening to his music- it is untamed, uncontrolled, and innately human. In an interview, Joseph Campbell once told of what made us human. And sure, you can make the scientific argument that it’s our anatomy, but Eric Dolphy understood that it was our flaws. It’s the same reason people say Ornette Coleman plays like a kid, and it’s the same reason why people say early Trane was better.

Next time I’m in the car, I won’t hesitate to play Eric Dolphy. It is an understatement to say he “made me forget what the tonic” was, because the tonic was gone long before, amidst the Wagner operas and the impressionistic music that was being created in the early 1900s. Eric Dolphy helped me connect with what it meant to be human, and moreso, how everyone is human. We all are flawed, and there’s nothing race, ethnicity, gender, or color-wise that makes us more or less flawed than others.