Ignore the program notes in the score, those are kind of stupid.
Ode to Eric Dolphy is a composition for 16 musicians and is based on a transcription I made of pianist Jaki Byard's piece Ode to Charlie Parker. The album that work debuted on, Far Cry (1962), blends elements of what was at the time considered to be the “aging” bebop tradition with the “new” improvisational and orchestrational approaches of Ornette Coleman, whom Dolphy was performing with regularly when he recorded this album. What appeals to me about Far Cry and Dolphy’s playing in general is the way in which he balances those elements and allows them to make concessions to each other. Bebop is known for its blistering tempos, but the harmonic demands it makes of improvisers is also quite strict. Dolphy manages to not only creatively meet those harmonic demands but does so while exploring motivic ideas derived from his own uniquely visceral, quasi-expressionist, language. There’s a tension here, between “old” and “new,” that Dolphy navigates in a way that I find greatly appealing, and which is also highly relatable to me personally as a composer and former improviser.
Like Dolphy and Byard before me, I wished to pay tribute to one of the forebears of my own musical journey. My piece uses only the first 30 seconds of the transcription (which in the piece proper marks the end of the introduction) and “stretches” it out in such a way that phrases are broken into fragments that become the motivic basis upon which I construct my own “improvisations.” It is worth noting that this piece is entirely composed and not at all improvised – i.e., there is no improvisation on the part of the performers – however, I did deliberately try to evoke an atmosphere of “free improvisation” by having instruments or groups of instruments “play telephone” with the fragments, the result being a kind of heterophony that continually morphs as it discovers and plays with transformations of itself. The form of the piece consists then of several digressions in this manner that eventually jump back to material more strictly related to the transcription. My aim with all this was to create something that captured the same sense of duality that Dolphy so elegantly reconciled with in Far Cry.
Recording Notes
Live performance. March 2014. Oliver Hagen conducting.
Performer Credits
Eastman School of Music Graduate Composer's Sinfonietta
