Before the tour began, Charles Mingus had written a piece called “So Long Eric”. He wrote it for Eric Dolphy, the extraordinary alto saxophonist, flautist and bass clarinettist in his band, who had told him he was going to stay in Europe when the tour finished rather than come home.
Ten weeks after the performance you can watch below, Dolphy was dead in Berlin at the age of 36.
The band
The group Mingus took to Europe in April 1964 is one that people still argue about more than sixty years later, though the argument tends to be over which of his bands was best rather than whether this one belongs in the conversation.
Dolphy played alto saxophone, bass clarinet and flute. Jaki Byard was at the piano, a musician who could move from stride to free playing inside a single chorus without it sounding like a trick. Clifford Jordan played tenor. Johnny Coles was on trumpet. Dannie Richmond, who had been with Mingus since 1956 and understood his tempo changes better than anyone, played drums.
They had already recorded together at Cornell University on 18 March, a few weeks before flying out, and the European itinerary was punishing: Amsterdam on 10 April, then Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Bremen and Paris within a week.
Why the piece has that title
Dolphy had decided to stay on in Europe when the tour ended. He was 35 and had been recording prolifically, as a leader and as a sideman for John Coltrane and others. He wanted to remain in Europe after the tour, where he had found an enthusiastic audience and expected to work.
Mingus wrote “So Long Eric” in acknowledgement of that. It was a farewell to a musician leaving the band, and nothing more than that — it was already being played at the Cornell concert three weeks before the group left for Europe.
That is worth being clear about, because the title reads very differently now than it did in April 1964.
The trumpet chair is empty for a reason
On 17 April, Coles collapsed during the group’s concert at the Salle Wagram in Paris. The cause was a perforated gastric ulcer, and he was taken to hospital. His tour was over.
In the early hours of 19 April, the remaining five musicians played at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées — the performance later issued as The Great Concert of Charles Mingus. Later that day they travelled to Liège, where Belgian television filmed them at the Palais des Congrès.
So the film shows five musicians rather than six. No trumpet, and a band that had lost a member two nights earlier and was reorganising on the stand.
Watch the 1964 Belgian television film
The programme opens with “So Long Eric”.
What you are listening to
“So Long Eric” is a blues, taken fast, and one of the pieces the band had played at the troubled Salle Wagram concert in Paris two days earlier. Watch how much Mingus is doing with his eyes and his body while playing — he conducted this band from the bass, constantly, and the film catches it in a way no recording can.
“Peggy’s Blue Skylight” is the lighter of the three and the easiest on a first hearing. Mingus had recorded it before, and it gives Byard and Jordan room to stretch out without the intensity of the opener.
“Meditations” closes the programme and is the longest and most searching thing here. Mingus introduced it in performance around this period as having been written after Dolphy told him about conditions in the American South — barbed wire, and the need for wire cutters. It appears under several titles across his discography, including “Meditations on Integration” and “Meditations for a Pair of Wire Cutters”.
What happened next
The tour continued through Marseille, Lyon, Zurich, Italy and Germany, finishing in Hamburg at the end of April. Dolphy stayed on in Europe as he had planned.
He recorded Last Date in the Netherlands on 2 June. He died in Berlin on 29 June, aged 36, from complications arising from undiagnosed diabetes.
The title afterwards
“So Long Eric” stayed in Mingus’s repertoire, and it kept its name. What it meant had changed entirely.
There is a persistent story that Mingus retitled the piece “Praying with Eric” after Dolphy’s death. That title does exist in his discography, but it belongs to “Meditations” — the piece that closes this film — which circulates under that name along with several others. “So Long Eric” remained “So Long Eric”.
Which leaves the film as it is: five musicians in a Belgian concert hall on an April evening, playing a goodbye to a colleague who was moving to Europe, none of them knowing what the next ten weeks held.
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