Chris Biscoe Quartet - Gone in the Air: The Music of Eric Dolphy

Trio Records: - TR 578

Chris Biscoe: Saxes;
Tony Kofi: Alto;
Larry Bartley: Bass;
Stu Butterfield: drums.

This review is a little late in coming, as the album was released in the summer, but the enforced delay has given me the opportunity to listen time and again. Brian Morton, writing in The Life and Music of Eric Dolphy (Equinox Publishing) tells us:

Towards the end of his life, Eric Dolphy told an interviewer: "When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air; you can never recapture it again".

I’m sure this is much quoted as I seem to have read it before, but have never analyzed it in terms of the man and his music in retrospect. Now it seems to me that although we talk much of Dolphy, his music is not often played by today’s musicians: gone in the air in a different sense. Biscoe and Kofi make up for the omission with this fine album, on which Dolphy classics such as ‘Hat and Beard’, ‘Miss Ann’, ‘Out to Lunch’ and ‘Serene’ are tackled with no attempt at reproduction and every effort to shun cliché. Other tracks that he recorded also appear here, along with an alto flute improvisation by Biscoe that appropriately takes the name ‘Gone in the Air’.

The acerbic Kofi is ever authoritatively balancing Biscoe’s audacious flight and howling exigency. Hard-pressed with relish by bassist Larry Bartley and drummer Stu Butterfield the quartet realise jazz of the highest order, an authentic blaze of intelligent and swinging innovation.

Don’t overlook this album: it should be a part of every permanent collection.

Reviewed by

ken cheetham
November 2008