Mary LaRose - Out Here
Jazz singer/visual artist Mary LaRose embarked on one of the most daring and enlightening projects I’ve heard in a long time. Out Here lovingly reimagines compositions by, and associated with, Eric Dolphy, the supremely gifted multi-instrumentalist who died tragically at 36, in a Berlin hospital, of a diabetic coma after physicians presumed him merely a drugged-out jazzer.
LaRose and an excellent quintet resurrect Dolphy. Jeff Lederer’s clarinets superbly evoke Dolphy’s exclamatory, sinuous playing style. Drummer Matt Wilson goes “out there” like a dancing tightrope walker. LaRose ingeniously sets Dolphy’s music to vocalese and scatting. She reveals the meaning of tune “245”—the Carlton Street address in Brooklyn, where many jazz musicians resided. She’s a “fly on the wall” in this hippest of abodes. She shows that Dolphy’s “Out There”—“You’ve got to push yourself, get out there.”—is cutting-edge but not free jazz, sustained like a gyrating thread of many colors.
Her singing lends warm humanity to Dolphy’s wide intervals, his way of releasing, and containing, musical expression. “Music Matador” revels in Dolphy’s underexposed roots in lilting Panamanian rhythms. Finally, “Warm Canto” glows, amid LaRose’s poetic ode to death, as strangely moving as anything modern jazz has produced. A separate book of her superb pastel jazz portraits is also available on Bandcamp.
