Eric Dolphy 1960
‘Les’ is from Eric Dolphy’s “Outward Bound” album, his first album as leader. The head is a great example of the “Advanced Form” Jazz emerging in the 1960’s.
We can begin with overall structure. The piece is a 14 bar blues: I-IV-I-I-IV-#IV-I-turnaround. The framework is an important “Traceable Movement” that helps give this Advanced Form its “Aural Logic” (Link).
The idea of “The Altered Scale” and “Alt. Chords” can help us understand what’s going on here harmonically. Unfortunately, we will never know how Dolphy and his collaborators thought about this harmony. Was the scale used as a basis of the piece or did the scale only come after in order to “explain” what they were doing?
Whether it was the chicken or the egg that came first, the Altered Scale and Chord theory fits very well with this piece. We discuss the Alt. Scale in our section on Stylistic Scales (Link, bottom of the page).
In the first bar, Dolphy uses (1) the Flex-tone third – flat 3 in the melody against the diatonic 3 of the chord; (2) the flat 9 and (3) the #11 or b5. In bar three he also uses the b13 which completes the Altered Scale.
It is time well spent to get these indeterminate chords and their inversions under your fingers. Try running some of the cycle of fifths with these chords.
Special mention should be made of Jaki Byard’s piano accompaniment on the recording. Here, and in his work with Charles Mingus he always seemed to have an appropriate solution even in the most challenging situations.