Eric Dolphy - At the Five Spot to Iron Man Revisited (2023)

Eric Dolphy’s legacy is well represented by these performances from The Five Spot and the sessions supervised by Alan Douglas. They confirm him to be an artist who straddled the divide then so deep in jazz, drawing sustenance from the music’s past as he cleared a path to its future. Dolphy’s was a sensibility that could celebrate Fats Waller and honor Jomo Kenyatta, its inclusiveness rare in the polarized early 1960s. Fortunately, his example has not simply endured, but has become more resonant sixty years on.