Jazz Revolutionary: The Life and Music of Eric Dolphy by CSUDH Music Professor Jonathan Grasse has been named the winner of the 2025 Jazz Journalism Association (JJA) Award for Biography/Autobiography of the Year.
The avant-garde musician’s life, which ended tragically at the age of 36 due to complications from undiagnosed diabetes, had never been explored in such detail, says Grasse. “I think winning the award has a lot to do with the fact that a book of this depth on Dolphy’s life is decades overdue.”
For Grasse, the project gestated a long time before springing to life a few years ago. His interest in the multi-instrumentalist dates back to Grasse’s teenage years, when he discovered the name Eric Dolphy in the title of an offbeat Frank Zappa song.
“I looked up Eric Dolphy in the local library,” recalls Grasse. “They actually had a record of his, and I’ve been hooked ever since. There’s something about Dolphy’s playing and composing that, combined with the fact that he died so young and tragically, he sort of festered into a mystery.”
Starting in the late 1980s, Grasse starting compiling facts, notes, and lists about the late jazz great. “That project grew and grew, but always took a back seat to all the other things that I was doing with music,” says Grasse.
By 2020, most of Grasse’s work was focused on documenting Brazilian music. When the COVID-19 pandemic rendered South American travel and research impossible, “It dawned on me to switch to what I had grown to call ‘the Dolphy Diary,’ almost as sort of a dare. COVID was so awful, it drove everyone a little crazy. So maybe there’s a little bit of that in the audacity of writing the book, because I’m not a jazz scholar or journalist, but I love and understand the music.”
Grasse spent about two years fleshing out his research and writing the book, using the UCLA library and online sources like Discogs to help compile a timeline and accurate discography. The title Jazz Revolutionary is a reference not only to Dolphy’s outrageous, avant-garde playing style, but to the musician’s willingness to speak out against injustice during the early years of the civil rights movement.
“I don’t think it’s far-fetched to color it that way,” says Grasse. “I feel that he was literally a revolutionary. You could say he was a music revolutionary, but I believe that he envisioned a lot of necessary social change and spoke about it extremely eloquently. He paid the price in jazz circles for being sort of outrageous and unpredictable.”
“Jazz Revolutionary: The Life and Music of Eric Dolphy” by Jonathan Grasse was published by Jawbone Press. It is available for purchase at https://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Revolutionary-Jonathon-Grasse/dp/1916829082/.
