Bowie on Dolphy

Much like whiskey, cigarettes, Indian food, you need to build up a tolerance when it comes to the avant garde. So as I stood in the first room of David Bowie is at the MCA Chicago last year I was happy to hear Bowie say in an old interview talking of Eric Dolphy: "I understood nothing of his music, but I persuaded myself that I was a fan until I ended up liking him."

In high school I had a similar experience with Ornette Coleman. I started with Change of the Century, which I really took too, but then struggled with his later work. (Coleman's later work would have been everything after Change of the Century which was his first album). I started listening to Eric Dolphy a decade or so after first hearing Coleman and it felt a bit like a happy middle ground—sound exploration within the framework of a song. This, opposed to Coleman which feels like sound exploration with intermittent suggestion of song.

There is something fantastic about the saxophone and maybe Bowie hits it with, "For me the saxophone always embodied the West Coast beat generation… It became a sort of a token, a symbol of freedom." Hot rods and hot dogs, cowboys and Kerouac, self-sovereignty and saxophones—America. Sounds good to me.