Eric Dolphy - 1960
‘245’ by Eric Dolphy was released on the album ‘Outward Bound’. It was recorded the same year as Ornette Coleman’s 1960 recording of ‘Ramblin’’ (Link). It is interesting to compare these blues songs to see how the two “avantgarde” composers approached the form at this point in time.
Example 1 is the head played over the root movement of a very basic blues structure. The piece works reasonably well over these changes. So why does the final rendering sound so “modern”?
There is a great temptation when looking at a piece like this to get over analytical. Example 2 shows the first chorus with the bass accompaniment as played by George Tucker. The red dots point out where the Flex-tones (Link) or “blue notes” are (see example 3). The green circles show us the only notes not found in the basic blues scale.
We can see that there are just three places where altered notes appear! The genius of Dolphy’s song is where these altered notes fall. He adds colour/ambiguity at precisely the places we would expect to hear “anchor” notes that emphasize the changes.
For more on the blues scale check out this page (Link).
The second chorus in the main excerpt above has an example of the chord changes found on some other available transcriptions. For some this analysis might be more satisfying but I suggest it is overly complex for “Preparational Analysis” (Link).