Eric Dolphy - (1964) Out To Lunch! LP

Out To Lunch is probably multi-instrumentalist Dolphy’s most adventurous album, combining as it does some established bop references with well-articulated atonal attack, staged over a large experimental canvas.

Not for the faint-hearted, Out to Lunch is a bible for the avant-garde and the goatee-stroking set.  Along  with fellow innovator Ornette Colman (and of course Coltrane) Dolphy created the foundation of the avant-garde, a lethal riposte to the predictability of swing. But significantly, it is not free-fall: more a musical bungee-jump, with its attendant adrenaline rush. No matter how far-out Dolphy gets, the solos contain a controlled experiment in danger, and a safe return to earth. Still to come, those players who believed every song should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, just not necessarily in that order. Or just only a middle.

Dolphy was spontaneous innovator who leapt from idea to idea at great speed, rather than harmonic development over a stable rhythmic line. The bass clarinet is a perfect tool for sonic attack, marking out a change from the familiar tones of the alto. This is going to be different. With three horns, he uses every available tonal range .He also emulates ‘nature’ sounds, including included imitating birds and others gathered from nature. Squawking indeed, but squawking with intent. The birds are free, it’s us that live in a musical cage.

Most notable is the absence of a piano, and its role as an accompanist. Dolphy has no need of an accompanist, his quintet of five original voices, young guns, all walk tall. The most uneasy of those voices was Hubbard. It’s Hubbard who tries to bring things back within bounds, with fanfares and slower counterpoints to Dolphy’s impassioned solos, pulling the tune back towards bop. He was never going to wear the mantle of avant-garde trumpet, which was passed to Don Cherry.

Four months after Out To Lunch Dolphy died in Berlin, only days past his thirty-sixth birthday, it is said, as a result of mis-management of a diabetic coma, an undiagnosed medical condition of Dolphy, mistaken for a drug overdose. In a tribute to Dolphy, Mingus said:  Usually, when a man dies, you remember—or you say you remember—only the good things about him. With Eric, that’s all you could remember.