Out to Lunch
By Eric Dolphy
......
ArtistEric Dolphy
TypeAlbum
Released1964
RecordedFebruary 25, 1964
RYM Rating 4.09 / 5.0 from 4,112 ratings
Ranked#1 for 1964, #172 overall
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Eric Dolphy in Europe, Vol. 2

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Credits

Credits

140 Reviews

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5.00 stars
+81
So, I brought my wife (ex) to lunch the other day when I was visiting my old haunt of Brooklyn. She is a little strange. Always biting the nails. You know that type. Well anyway, we sat down at this coffee shop because our favorite restaurant was all booked for lunch. I told her it was either the coffee shop or lunch at my mom's house in New Jersey. She picked the former. We sat there in silence eating our muffins, coffee cake, and drinking lame herbal tea with a waitress who had fluorescent red hair and some nose ring. She was working on her bachelors degree at some random liberal arts school nobody has ever heard of. Those places. She'll get a degree and still be working at the coffee shop, and telling everyone else her music tastes are better than everyone elses. You know those types. Anyway,  I asked the waitress what music she liked.

A giant smile like as if she was a 12 year old again when that good looking boy gives her a wink.

"Well everything."

I was not impressed.

"Everything really? Is that possible?"

"It can be, believe it or not, it's called the internet" She said in total art school arrogance.

"Oh really, so having instant access to music now constitutes having universal tastes?"

"Yes it does, apparently you missed the curb on that."

"Hold it! What artists do you like? Give me a top 5." I pounded the table, disturbing my ex- from her valium induced mellowness.

"Ummm....Fleet Foxes, Gogol Bordel, Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem, Rise Against, and umm Flaming Lips....all unique and different"

I was floored by the utter garbage she spewed. She thought she was different. She thought she was unique with her Arts education, expensive designer hipster clothes, and all that fucking hair dye. I mean, she was a walking product of the corporations and she was simply oblivious to this. The MNCs had gotten her. They had given her a teenage lobotomy with a couple of credit cards. She was one of those trendy zombies walking all the streets of western cities. IT MADE ME SICK.

Almost immediately, my hand flung out of my bag, without a conscious thought, a cd of "Out to Lunch". I demanded that it be played and she would understand real diversity in taste. The hip girl initially refused and then I insisted this was a life changing album. She walked into the back and within minutes. "Hat and Beard" appeared over the coffee shop's sound system, rather than that John Mayer or that Italian guy from Mars being lazy about something. Bobby Hutcherson's vibe playing started to give me the dancing chills. My shoulders started to sway rhythmically back and forth. When Dolphy came in with his sax, I started to sway my head wildly and my hair turned into a mess. My browline glasses fell to the floor and the ghost of Dolphy had invaded my body again. I could see Dolphy hovering above me saying,

"Dance you motherfucker! This is your chance to show what being Out To Lunch is really about!" The ghost disappeared and he had possessed me.

The shop crowd was silenced by the sheer power of this album. The hipster girl stood there and looked embarrassed. She said to me, "I might be fired for this."

I just got up and took the hand of the hipster. She pulled away with a look of disgust, "No, don't touch me"

I started to gyrate in the shop and my ex wife got up and left annoyed. Swagging my hips like Elvis back and forth. Kicking my feet up to the wild solos. Soon I lost control. My body to the end of "Hat and Beard" was swinging into the tables and patrons started to flee. The hipster girl was yelling something at me and then she went into a back room. It hit me that she would be disconnecting the music and so I chased her into the back. Her finger was about to press "Stop" and I tackled her to the ground. Some other dufus hipster guy - who wore probably the same plaid shirt that I wore in the 80's, and had a beard that Rutherford B. Hayes would be jealous of - jumped on top saying,
"Get off of her you asshole!"
Then I heard a voice---
"Call the police."

Before I knew it all these hipsters were  pulling me away from the hipster girl. As I was pulled away, some hand pressed "eject", and I screamed "NOOOO! You fucking bastards! That's Eric Dolphy. This is real music."
The other female hipster who had dyed black hair , while wearing 70's gym shorts, a smiths t-shirt, and black converse said, with her finger holding the CD in the donut hole, "It's not. It's garbage"

I knocked her out with one punch. Then I took the CD from her finger -- other hands tried to grab it away from me. The player was only a foot away, but it seemed to be miles away. To break the hold of the skinny hipsters. I literally fell on the CD Player  and the table collapsed with several other people on top of me.  I rolled on top of the 70's gym shorts hipster who was just opening her eyes, and she was out again. Before I knew it, several NYPD officers with batons and tasers drawn pulled me out of the mess. I was thrown in jail for the day and my ex bailed me out the next day . Anyway, amazingly charges were dropped after I wrote a compelling apology to the coffee shop promising to never return again, and undergo a psychiatric evaluation. It's kind of funny, since I'm a licensed social worker in Montreal, so therapy is kind of ironic.

What the crux of the story is that the power of this album can compel people to do many strange things, and a brawl at a coffee shop is one of them. That is why this is my all time favorite album. I lost the CD in that mess. It was probably crushed by a bunch of Urban Outfitter models,but no worries I bought it again.

Some may see this as a generational divide between older and younger hipsters, and how violent this divide can be. I honestly don't know about that, but I saw Sonic Youth and Swans, even before they were conceived.

Greatest Album ever made. It was great in 1988 when I first heard it and it still is.
Published
4.00 stars
+1
It's the twenties.  The nineteen bloody twenties.  More so than any other work of literature, music or art, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch sends my mind racing back to the time that existed well before either myself, my parents or indeed my grandparents were born, the period of history catalogued and often shaped by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway and George Gershwin.  But whilst The Great Gatsby, Fiesta and Rhapsody in Blue can inform, instruct and provide me with a sense of what it was like in the decade that many labelled as "roaring", Out to Lunch, despite having been written and performed thirty-odd years after the first great boom of the twentieth century, transports me through time and puts me at a table in a fancy restaurant, quite literally out to lunch, surrounded by the likes of Jordan Baker, Tom Buchanan and Lady Brett Ashley.

The women are chattering away, mainly about themselves, and the banter is so fast that it is hard to get a word in edgeways.  Even when a moment presents itself, such as about 2:54 through "Gazzelloni" when the two women are laughing hysterically about something in high pitched, squawking union, I realise that it is a conversation that happened so many years before I was even thought about that I have absolutely nothing to say.  So I sit back with my cocktail served in a Manhattan glass and become increasingly more innebriated as the conversation tumbles out of control and the women talk over each other and about themselves with such fervour that it becomes something of a sporting contest, so competitive that none of them are willing to give the other a moment's grace and so it builds to a cacophonous din tinged with all the drama and epic plot twists of a cinematic classic.

There are some undesiarables lurking around our table; they are lurking around all the tables in fact, making brief conversation with the occupants, passing pleasantries and following their own sinister agendas.  I keep my eyes on them too.  Despite their unpleasant nature, they are fascinating to observe as they grease oily palms with a slimey handshake here and an agressive back pat there.  

The men talk business, mostly they brag, but few of them know what they're talking about, business is just something that their parents did, the economic boom has made them disproportionately wealthy and they are frightful bores.  I know that if I had their fortunes then I could charm some of these highly desirable woman who ooze sexual charisma but remain unattainable because they just won't shut up and let me speak.  But it's probably for the best, they would eat me up and spit me out and I would become like the lovelorn and foolish Jake Barnes; a shell of the man I could be.

Having said that there are moments of quiet where all that can be heard is the hum of conversation coming from the other tables and our own thoughts which are pleading with us to leave this terribly boastful group of people because we know only to well that none of us have anything in common with the others except for money and a lack of ideas about what to do with it all.

But when the record stops I am back in the noughties, facing the prospect of a continued economic downturn, and it's not so bad.  The twenties have always been a period of time that I have romanticised, but just as Eric Dolphy doesn't belong there, neither do I.  We come from periods of time which followed in the aftermath of economic booms and will perhaps never know what it is to be young and in love with ourselves.  

So why did Dolphy try and evoke this period of the past?  I think the simple answer is that he didn't, all that you have just read is merely my interpretation of his music, music that is so out there that it is hard to predict where any listener will land after the unsettling tones have blown them out of their minds to somewhere entirely new, distant and removed from their own reality.  Out to Lunch is one of my favourite albums to spin when I want to be somewhere else for a while.  Sure, I almost always end up around that table with those abhorrant, selfish and ruthless individuals, but from time to time that's exactly where I want to be.
Published
5.00 stars
+2
There are gaps in my knowledge of Dolphy's music which makes this album a bit puzzling: I know Dolphy as the wonderful reeds player who through his time with Charles Mingus and performances with John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman proved himself to be one of the finest sidemen in early 1960s jazz, but his work as band leader was less impressive - not that it wasn't good, just overshadowed, less interesting, less ambitious than the work by the others. Then there is Out to Lunch: not just one of the great jazz albums but some of the most exciting music of the twentieth century. I have never heard Dolphy play as well as he does here: listen to his flute on Gazzelloni – this is not free jazz as played by other 1960s avant garde figures when they picked up the flute (e.g., Joseph Jarman), who can gain extraordinary effects but whose playing remains very limited, too often sounding like an unruly mosquito, instead Dolphy works within clear structures, exploring and pushing those structures, but not throwing them out, but then compare his playing with a more conservative player such as Rahsaan Roland Kirk and you can hear and feel the greater flexibility, the room for stretching the imagination; listen to his bass clarinet – where a few years before he seemed over excited by the instrument, like a driver who is so excited by his new Ferrari that he drives it off the road and into a tree on his first trip out, but now he has control, he produces music rather than effects; and, of course, listen to his alto, moving between the relaxed gentleness of Ornette Coleman’s playing and the tenor aggression of John Coltrane (and I don’t want to make it sound as though he has just mixed together these other two musicians, he has his own uniqueness, his own personality that he is exploring). But this album isn’t just about Eric Dolphy, it is an ensemble work. Freddie Hubbard is perhaps at his most extreme (well, except for Ascension, of course), which doesn’t, in itself, mean that he is at his best, but it is one of his great performances, pushing against his usual safety limits. Bobby Hutcherson’s vibes fill the role of the piano, giving the music a slightly different texture, a lightness that contrasts with the horn players. Richard Davis continues his work with Dolphy, showing their mutual understanding – I know there are people who find Davis a bit too knowing, a little stiff, but for me he is one of the great imaginative bass players of the 1960s (the great decade of the jazz bass). And Tony Williams is as good as the young Tony Williams.
Published
5.00 stars
+1
This may be stretching it, but the cover art makes me wonder. Apparently nobody's minding the store, as the drawn shade and Will Be Back sign on the door imply, but there's hope they may be back at some point in the future. Yet the fact that there are seven hands on the clock indicates that the promise of the musicians' imminent return could be a ruse.

That's the spirit of the session. Five mid-tempo enigmas that appear accessible and vaguely discernible if you've got them on as background, but that become slipperier and slipperier as you lend them increased attention. And while Dolphy's Viennese twelve-tone serialist-via-Monk influenced compositions may map the anatomy of the puzzle, Bobby Hutcherson's forever-futurist vibes vibe are the bloodflow in the otherwise standard instrumental lineup's deliberate, pensive character.

Out to lunch indeed, but don't go looking for them at the corner diner.
Published
 
+1
90% of Blue Note albums bore me to death, and this is one of them. I am glad I could listen to it on line for free ...
Published
4.00 stars
+3
The absence of the resonant qualities of a piano is perhaps the most notable aspect of the album's sound; with accompaniment foisted onto the relatively reverberatively dry vibraphone and bass, the set gains a stark, seductive, witchy blackness, present most prominently when Dolphy steps back instrumentally. The dynamically and harmonically limited accompaniment allows for some truly inventive solos, with the listener imaginatively colouring in the relatively blank musical canvas. Filled with endless, strange harmonic turns and total melodic deconstructions, the album is constantly engaging and wholly cohesive, with the tantalising tension of its unchanging, sparse quietness never quite resolved.
Published
5.00 stars
+1
A masterful work of experimental jazz with a light-hearted, almost whimsical touch that makes the entire album enormously fun to listen to and immediately appealing despite it being "challenging."   The composed themes to half the songs have a drunken cheeriness that's immediately likeable (not to mention their being rhythmically creative and entertainingly odd).   The solos are wacky and meandering, yet the music never comes across as being too unstructured or disorganized because it's just so seamless and enjoyable.
Published
5.00 stars
+3
As I've increasingly found among successful avant-garde jazz albums, the combination between the adventurousness and innovation of the compositions and the freedom, creativity and chemistry of the performers creates a perfect storm of blissful, challenging sounds.

On the compositional side, Dolphy provides songs that run the gamut between dissonant odd-metered avant-garde ("Out to Lunch," "Straight Up and Down," "Hat and Beard," dedicated to Thelonious Monk, one of the only jazz composers who could be said to foreshadow Dolphy's style), early 1900's gospel jazz (the ballad "Something Sweet, Something Tender") and frantic, twisted bop riffing ("Gazzelloni").  On the more dominant weird stuff, Dolphy strikes a fascinating balance between abstractness (which often pleasingly extends typical jazz harmony to the brink of atonality) and Ornette Coleman's sinuous sense of head melody.  "Hat and Beard," with its constantly mutating descending scale and lurching unison non-melody, fits the former category, while the title track fits the latter with a seemingly never-ending head that winds around in spiraling circles, somehow never separating the tight unison between trumpet and alto sax.  The final track, "Straight Up and Down" is supposed to emulate a drunken stagger but, really, the same could be said of most of the rhythms here!  What I really love about Dolphy's compositions is that they travel well beyond the head-solo-head formula that sometimes hangs like an albatross from so much ultra-orthodox jazz; sure, the songs have recognizable and recapitulated heads, but there are innumerable pockets of group dynamic shifts, coordinated rhythmic interplay and near complete dropouts that you never get the sense that things are happening without a good reason.

As far as the playing goes, like I said earlier, this is an undeniable example of a perfect storm where a dream team of players come together over a set that pushes them all to places they've never been before.  The absence of piano means that vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson carries the mid-range chromatic accompaniment on his shoulders, which means a lot of the accompaniment is more spacious than the type of comping that piano usually provides.  I really enjoy how Hutcherson swaps between helping state the songs' melodies, comping with two or three-note chords over occasionally strange intervals, and spontaneously supporting solos with minor melodic excursions.  While Hutcherson's replacement of piano on this album is often lauded (as must be his ability to make one of the geekiest jazz instruments as cool as it could possibly be), I think some credit is also due to bassist Richard Davis, who often uses two-note chords (sometimes with a bow) in addition to a more standard walking style to emulate the piano's absent tonal cluster effect.  The tightness of Hutcherson and Davis allows Tony Williams free reign to play counter-rhythm to the vibes, alternate between blasting and delicate fills out of nowhere, and keep the ideas coming one after another without obsessing about blatantly stating the beat--sometimes it's just implied, and that space is one of the best parts about this music.  Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard could easily be labeled this set's least adventurous performer, but there's really no denying his chops; though he can't compete with Dolphy in terms of out-ness, he ably makes up for his relative conventionality with furious energy, which just might be considered out on its own.

Finally, Dolphy manages to consolidate his well-documented strengths on all three instruments by stealing his own show.  I can never get enough of his bass clarinet playing--the instrument's ear candy timbre is enjoyable on its own, but in the hands of someone like Dolphy, it becomes something else entirely.  Especially with the bass clarinet, his intuitive feel for the instrument's range and voicing allows him to employ it quite vocally, screeching through wide intervals just as often as he blurts out vaguely tonal (but always strangely melodic) fragments.  The beauty of this approach comes out even more on "Something Sweet, Something Tender," where the slow tempo and old-timey feel allow for some wide vibrato and compelling emotional expression.  Dolphy's alto saxophone chops are another thing entirely; his tone is so flagrant it sounds like he's blowing fire out of his horn and the mics can barely handle it.  "Gazzelloni" is the only flute showcase, which seems like a good ratio--the vibraphone seems to overlap in terms of timbre, so one example of Dolphy's rapid fire, often viscerally percussive flute style satisfies quite well.

It's a shame Dolphy wasn't able to follow up this masterpiece with a few more albums of his own compositions--he was clearly on a roll.  Fortunately, there are numerous great examples of his ability as a sideman (my picks for a balance between Dolphy's chops and adventurous composition are Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, George Russell's Ezz-thetics, and Ornette Coleman's iconic Free Jazz), and if you just want to hear the man play, his Wikipedia page comprehensively lists his discography as a leader and sideman--enjoy the trip.  It's disappointing that few contemporary jazz artists have attempted to push the genre forward in this way--there's clearly lots of space left to fill with audacious sounds, and it's hard to argue that these guys didn't have a great time making this music.

Originally reviewed on my blog.
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Catalog

Ratings: 4,112
Cataloged: 3,570
Track rating sets:Track ratings: 67
Rating distribution
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30 May 2015
joetate  5.00 stars tru classic
29 May 2015
Sine_Nomine  3.00 stars Recommended (Heavy)
28 May 2015
surfs_up  4.50 stars
28 May 2015
Wunn  4.00 stars Liked this alot
28 May 2015
LinusLaber  3.00 stars Redeeming Qualities
28 May 2015
Bahjkaboo  4.50 stars
26 May 2015
TohtoriPervo  4.00 stars
24 May 2015
icchantika  5.00 stars
24 May 2015
Cleofis_Randolph  4.00 stars
24 May 2015
Cedd  4.00 stars
23 May 2015
caught CD5.00 stars
21 May 2015
surfer_rosa_ Digital4.00 stars RAD
20 May 2015
respirateur  4.00 stars
19 May 2015
HeroicPenguin  1.50 stars Not great
18 May 2015
overthehillside  4.50 stars
......
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Last Date
Eric Dolphy in Europe, Vol. 2

Track listing

Credits

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  • smartpatrol 02/28 03:36 GMT
    I am a baby, this album is the world. I don't understand it at all but I know I really like it.
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Contributors to this release: sundazed, Lnerg, marvelmaker, squandermani, fixbutte, guitarschool04, diction, End, hprill, Neodop, Siai, StonedWallaby, Reokal, Outh9X, Marchel, CurtisLoew, p_lemberg, jean_jax
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