It doesn’t matter what the hot social media site du jour is, every autumn around this time I feel the need to alert people that it is the perfect time of the year around these parts. It’s cold, but not too cold. There’s wind, but not always too much wind. There’s a little bit of that good ol’ November Rain, but not that much. It’s middle- or late autumn, it honestly depends on how you want to look at it. We’re truly dead in the middle of the month since this one stretches out over just about five weeks, but next week is also Thanksgiving. That means the upcoming Monday through Wednesday will feel like a dead zone even if you’re one of us that has to work. We’re all just scrambling to get to the long weekend and eat as much stuffing as possible. It’s the time of year when the most perfect and appropriate outfit is the Eric Dolphy.
The photo of Eric Dolphy by Francis Wolff is one of those iconic jazz photos you see pop up all the time. Maybe not as instantly recognizable as more household names like shots of Miles in his Ivy Style era or Coltrane on the cover of Blue Train, if you’ve opened any book on “jazz style” or found yourself exploring the depths of Pinterest for sweater inspiration then you’ve likely seen it once or a thousand times.
I first saw the photo when I was around 17 or 18. I was leafing through some book at the library because I was a Teenage Jazz Head and had slowly found myself drifting from the insanely chill radio station I’d sometimes listen to that tended to focus on more bop stuff, Sidney Bechet, Duke, maybe I remember some big band and swing on there, but I might be wrong about that since my brainwaves have gotten pretty scrambled over time. All I know was that I was also listening to punk and had started to hear about how there was all this connection between a lot of the noisier stuff I’d been gravitating toward and free jazz. I didn’t exactly know what free jazz was, but when I went to the library and started digging through the bin that had all the CDs you could borrow, I found this one album called Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet. This was a huge deal for me.
First, there’s something very special about Coleman’s Free Jazz that those of us who spent our teen years picking through thrift store racks and bins before eBay and high-end vintage might recall. It was one of those albums along with Whipped Cream by Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass or the lounge records with a picture of a cigarette with a lipstick-stained tip in an ashtray or a woman looking out over a balcony that you were almost always certain to find. These remnants of the middle of the century were what people bought to be hip once upon a time, and something like the cover of the Alpert album with the lady all covered in whipped cream made sense to me. But Free Jazz was something else. I think a lot of people made a big mistake buying that record. Not because it’s bad. It’s certainly not that. I just think a lot of people heard of the album or saw “jazz” on the cover and thought “This looks interesting and smart and my neighbors in the suburb I live in will think I’m interesting and smart if I own it” so they bought it. That’s the only thing I can think of after all these years that would explain why there was a solid decade or so that you could walk into almost any thrift in the country and there was a copy of Free Jazz.
But I’m digressing. The real story here is Eric Dolphy. I personally loved and still love Free Jazz. It probably didn’t hurt that the librarian who checked me out that day gave me a look and called the record “unlistenable,” but I went home, locked my door, smoked some weed out my window, then put the CD in my Discman and just listened. It was beautiful. Weird, chaotic, here one second, there the next; basically like nothing I’d heard up until that point. I got so into it that I did the thing that we used to do back before we could just search Google or scan Wikipedia to learn more about something: I looked at the liner notes. I wrote down the names of the other players, and I remembered them for a later time. I didn’t know a lot about jazz then, but I knew enough that I noticed some of the names you’d see in the group were worth looking into. Dizzy, Miles, and Coltrane, all started somewhere playing for someone. And for whatever reason, the name Eric Dolphy, the bass clarinet player on Free Jazz, stuck in my head so much so, that a few weeks or months later when I found myself in another library looking through some book of jazz photos, there he was. I knew him! It was Eric Dolphy, he played bass clarinet and…he looked incredible.
Jazz guys tend to look incredible in photos. We really have them to thank for inventing basically everything we consider cool in American culture. Even the word itself, “cool,” means more than just a temperature, thanks to jazz. And yes, Miles, Duke, Chet and whoever else you can think of do look cool in about every photo you see them in. But there’s also something else to me that is striking about so many jazz musicians, especially some of the ones that made their names in the post-war era, and that’s how chill they look, how intense and focused they are on their art. That picture of Dolphy from 1964 is the peak to me. At first, you might think that he looks bored as if he’s waiting to just start playing again. And that might be the case. Wolff didn’t really take notes of what was going on. He was an executive at Blue Note, the countless photos he took were more for publicity purposes. But you look at a lot of them now and you can’t help but think Wolff’s eye helped the shape of things to come. Black and white, noir-ish, up close and personal, Wolff is a big reason we think jazz and we think “cool.” But that Dolphy photo is my favorite.
The shot is one of many from the sessions that would produce Dolphy’s most well-known work, Out to Lunch. I like the one at the top when Dolphy is just looking at…something. That’s the one for me. But I like anything from the session photos because the look is honestly the peak in my opinion. That shawl collar cardigan and beanie is just the greatest damn combo ever. It’s utilitarian, but underneath he’s got a shirt and tie on, so it’s also got some pop to it. Dolphy had served time in the army and enrolled in the U.S. Armed Forces School of Music in 1952. I’ve always suspected the cardigan might be from that time as it looks a little beaten up. But the thick wool makes me think it’s something that came in handy when he was around the water during his navy days. I’ve seen images of servicemen from the era wearing somewhat similar sweaters, but he also gives off a little of a dockworker feel. Very On the Waterfront extra to me.
Today you’d spend hundreds on something like it. I always have at least one shawl collar cardigan in my closet that I pull out around this time of year that I call my Dolphy Cardigan. The one I’ve had for the last few seasons is Polo, though any designer that works in with “the classics” probably has one available right now. Todd Snyder, Brooks Brothers, etc. It isn’t hard to find one. And the beanie, well, Dolphy was a pioneer of the “If you’re cold they’re cold, bring them inside” look that is so popular in Brooklyn that I have a theory the main reason Kevin Durant signed with the Nets was that he saw every barista near Barclays rocking this look and he felt like he could fit in here.
If that’s why K.D. came to Brooklyn then I guess the joke is on him, but the beanie rolled up over the ears is still a pretty solid look. Is it one that can get the New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs treatment? Absolutely! Just ask Tyler Watamanuk after you read his “I’m a tiny beanie and this is my modern life” piece. But when done right, it’s killer. I think Durant is one of the people doing it best these days. And if you’re currently wearing a beanie like this, then darn it, so are you. Now go out and get yourself a thick shawl collar cardigan and complete the look. Get yourself the Full Dolphy and ease into true autumn.