Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch
Released - August 1964
Recording and Session Information
Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, February 25, 1964
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto sax, bass clarinet, flute; Bobby Hutcherson, vibes; Richard Davis, bass; Anthony Williams, drums.
1309 tk.4 Gazzelloni
1310 tk.10 Hat And Beard
1311 tk.12 Something Sweet, Something Tender
1312 tk.17 Out To Lunch
1313 tk.21 Straight Up And Down
Session Photos
 |
| Eric Dolphy |
 |
| Tony Williams |
 |
| Richard Davis |
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| Hat and Beard | Eric Dolphy | 25 February 1964 |
| Something Sweet, Something Tender | Eric Dolphy | 25 February 1964 |
| Gazzelloni | Eric Dolphy | 25 February 1964 |
| Side Two | ||
| Out To Lunch | Eric Dolphy | 25 February 1964 |
| Straight Up and Down | Eric Dolphy | 25 February 1964 |
Liner Notes
Ever since Eric Dolphy broke up the Showplace with the Charlie Mingus group some four years ago. New York hasn't quite known what to make of him. Nobody could believe it was the same Eric Dolphy who'd been "through" the year before. Couldn’t be. That Eric Dolphy played nice — pretty and all. This one was wild and woolly. played all kinds of unmentionable things you wouldn’t say in front of your mother.
Since that second New York debut, Dolphy got a ton of critical copy written on him, some of it rabidly for, some violently against, much of it ‘what the hell is going on”-ish, but none was noncommittal, which is often in itself endorsement in reverse. Much of the criticism had as its premise that Eric was a slightly taller Ornette Coleman-styled rebel (that both spent their formative years in Los Angeles proves it; and anyway, all avant-garde jazz musicians look alike) and they put him down for whatever funny reasons they put Ornette down for: that he was repetitious, bombastic, unmelodic, and impenetrably abstract: he tends to interpret all his tunes on the same level, they said.
His supporters, of whom Martin Williams seems to have been the first, and who’ve been growing in number ever since, found Eric an exciting tone colorist whose technical dexterity was practically unmatched, an imaginatively advanced improviser, and a vital alternative to the melodic cliches and rhythmic orthodoxy of the hardbop mainstream, etc. What I’m saying, if facetiously, is that Eric’s career to date has been highly controversial, for reasons the listener will detect on the first playing of this particular date. This is not music to roller skate by. It is the kind of muscularly individualistic stuff that will not tolerate indifference, that invokes such a strong reaction in the hearer that these essentially emotional initial responses must finally, through qualification, be the basis of criticism. (The reader will have noticed by now that this writer’s considered bias is with the musicians on this date.)
A far more important index to the validity of an artist’s work than the opinions of professional critics, favorable or unfavorable, is the judgement of his peers. Eric’s work is greatly admired by his contemporaries, even imitated by some. He’s in almost constant demand for work as a sideman in clubs. concerts and recording sessions, even where some club owners have been reluctant to hire him as a leader. Besides Mingus, with whom Eric works at this writing, Eric has played and/or recorded with the likes of Ornette Coleman. John Coltrane, Gunther Schuller and Oliver Nelson, which means, when you consider the incredible range of musicians encompassed in all this, that he’s performed at some time or other with most of the jazz avant-garde, and much of the mainstream.
About this record: It would be hard as hell to find a more formidable cast of young masters than those Eric’s assembled for this date. Freddie Hubbard. who was once Eric’s room- mate, was a shocker at 18 and he’s been gaining in stature ever since. Freddie, with Lee Morgan and the late Booker Little, was one of those fabulously dexterous trumpet prodigies who showed up suddenly to cut a whole generation of Browniephiles into pieces. Because he’s best known for his work with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and because most of the bands he’s led have been comprised of members of that group, Freddie’s generally thought to be a “groovemaker” in the funky soul sense. Those who haven’t heard Hubbard in a different context, as on Ornette’s Free Jazz date, or on his earlier recordings with Eric, will have quite an ear-opening experience with his playing here. Freddie Hubbard impresses me as a kind of updated Fats Navarro in that he has a penchant for sequences of intact but related phrases strung together at even the quickest pace, as opposed to the long open lines of a Dizzy Gillespie. His playing here is often like a balance of fragments around the machinations of one of the very most brilliant and imaginative young rhythm sections I’ve heard.
Every time I write or say something about Bobby Hutcherson I find myself consciously holding back accolades like "the greatest new vibist since Milt Jackson," which, even if they were valid criticism. would tend to be compromised in liner notes. I do feel that Hutcherson has the most radical, if not the only new appreciation of what the vibes may be orchestrably capable of as an instrument. He certainly sounds less like Milt than any contemporary vibist I know of For one thing, he avoids the tight pedaled. piano-like effect of long and lucid arpeggios that most vibists try for. His is a more ringing, chime sound. His chords, once struck, hang in the air, and this is particularly effective when his vibes are functioning as a percussive pedal point for the rest of the band to move around. For another, more and more musicians are starting to dig Bobby’s vibes as an alternative to using piano accompaniment. Eric says, “Bobby’s vibes have a freer. more open sound than a piano. Pianos seem to control you, Bobby’s vibes seem to open you up."
Richard Davis represents still another departure in avant-garde bass playing . Unlike most post Haden-LaFaro bassists, who've been largely concerned with catching up with the saxophone, today’s preeminent instrument. Richard Davis has stayed closer to the traditional heavy pizzicato bass lines. though he can strum and bow with the best of them. The importance of this is that in a rhythm section where everyone solos constantly (Everyone’s a leader in this session, says Eric), Richard is a steady reference for changing rhythmic patterns. As Eric puts it, “Richard doesn’t play the usual bass lines. He plays rhythm with his lines. He leads you some- where else."
Young Anthony Williams is a drummer who’s already occupying an important niche in the ever changing groupings of new jazz forces. He represents a bridge between completely free time as exemplified by a Sonny Murray, and the complex polyrhythms of Elvin Jones or Ed Blackwell. Often on this record he will keep accountable time with the cymbal while using the snares to accentuate or punctuate the free movement of the group. Every musician I’ve ever talked to about this man has been high on him, whose thesis seems to be that soloists, after half a century of rhythm accompaniment, have by now grown a metronome in their heads, and can best serve by opening up the beat. This is what Eric means when he says. “Tony doesn’t play time, he plays pulse.” More on that later.
About the tunes, Eric says: “Something Sweet, Something Tender” — I think the title explains the tune. The opening bars, with Richard bowing under me, set up the whole piece. The group got just the lyrical feeling that I wanted. and, taking it out, Richard and I really got together in the unison duet."
“Hat And Beard” — 1 was thinking about Monk when I wrote this tune. He’s so musical no matter what he’s doing, even if he’s just walking around. It opens in 5/4, but once the whole group is in, the basic count is really 9/4."
“Gazzelloni’ is the name of a really great modern flautist. He’s a master. He can get incredible sounds out of the flute and make them work. Everybody holds to the construction for the first 13 bars, then — freedom.”
“Out To Lunch” — This is a recurring figure around an improvised chorus. This figure, in 5/4, sets the rhythm section up with a definite solo feeling. In the improvised sections the rhythms overlap. The bass follows no bar line at all. Notice Tony. He doesn’t play time, he plays. Even though the rhythm section breaks the time up, there’s a basic pulse coming from inside the tune. That's the pulse the musicians have to play."
"Straight Up And Down" - "This one reminds me of a drunk walking, straight up and down I call it. It gasses me that everyone was so free. I wanted a free date to begin with. All rhythm sections are different, but this one was really open, that is, they can play different kinds of ways, like Tony does here - different ways, but you can still count it."
Eric says about his immediate future: "I'm on my way to Europe to live for awhile. Why? Because I can get more work there playing my own music, and because if you try to do anything different in this country, people put you down for it."
-A.B. SPELLMAN
RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes
A NEW LOOK AT OUT TO LUNCH
Jazz history is full of might-have-beens; but there are few sadder losses than the music that might have followed had Eric Dolphy lived to enjoy a more sustained affiliation with Blue Note Records. This album and Andrew Hill’s equally classic Point Of Departure from a month later are the only examples of what occurred when Dolphy recorded under the supervision of Alfred Lion, yet they add significantly to the legacy of both artist and producer. (A collection of privately produced tapes, Other Aspects, also appeared on Blue Note more than 20 years after Dolphy’s death.)
For all of the attention Dolphy received as a jazz revolutionary after moving to New York at the end of 1959, his previous recordings as a leader for the Prestige/New Jazz label rarely exhibited the level of artistic freedom enjoyed elsewhere by such ‘friends and collaborators as Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Max Roach and John Coltrane. Several live-in-Europe volumes featured Dolphy with pickup rhythm sections focusing on familiar blowing material, and even such notable studio projects as Outward Bound and Far Cry were cast in the common quintet format of the time and contained several standards. The quintet that Dolphy co-led with trumpeter Booker Little took a more personal slant in its Five Spot recordings; but, being a cooperative group and also including the prolific composer Mal Waidron, it featured limited examples of Dolphy’s own writing. Only the 1960 quartet session Out There, where he is accompanied by cello, bass and drums, and the various configurations employed on Doiphy’s 1963 recordings for producer Alan Douglas convey the sense of unmediated personality heard here.
The number and quality of original compositions on Out To Lunch and the absolute empathy of the supporting players suggest that Dolphy is in the long line of musicians who found the positive atmosphere at Blue Note liberating. There is no question that he blossomed as a composer on this session. This is the only Dolphy album made up exclusively of his own compositions, which had rarely been featured in the past. (Out There, where four of the seven pieces are his, is again a notable exception.) Perhaps like Coltrane on Blue Train, Dolphy felt that the added rehearsal time Blue Note allowed and the more honest business approach of Lion and Frank Wolff made it more propitious than ever before to document his own music.
While a look at the personnel may suggest strong input by Lion, most of the players had previously demonstrated their compatibility with Dolphy on record. Freddie Hubbard, the trumpet on Dolphy’s debut album Outward Bound, had used Dolphy in 1963 on his own Impulse! album The Body And The Soul, and in between they had appeared together on such classic recordings as Free Jazz, Ole! and The Blues And The Abstract Truth. Bassist Richard Davis was a member of the Dolphy/Little band that recorded at the Five Spot, and like Dolphy was subsequently involved in the John Lewis/Gunther Schuller ensemble Orchestra U.S.A. But the pair really hooked up on the Douglas sessions, where they recorded three duets that anticipate their astounding work on “Something Sweet, Something Tender.” Bobby Hutcherson, also heard on the Douglas recordings, had first played with Dolphy in their home town Los Angeles and became a regular East Coast collaborator after Herbie Hancock (who worked but never recorded with Dolphy) joined Miles Davis. Tony Williams was the new voice here, though he had already made two brilliant Blue Note recordings with Hutcherson in similarly pianoless rhythm sections under the leadership of Jackie McLean and Grachan Moncur III. Dolphy employed the identical instrumentation on three of the tracks he recorded for Douglas; but the chemistry of these five particular musicians coupled with Blue Note’s approach to preparing for recording produced a much freer and altogether more visionary result. The responses of each player reveal what was possible when each participant was thoroughly conversant with traditional techniques yet in no way felt shackled by them. If this was not music for finger- popping, the clarity of Dolphy’s concepts and the coherence of the band’s responses did not produce chaos or obscure abstractions. Jackie McLean, Grachan Moncur, Andrew Hill and the increasingly inquisitive Herbie Hancock had been leading Blue Note in this freer direction, and the signing of Williams, Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter, Sam Rivers, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor would shortly thrust the label more wholeheartedly into the center of the new music. Seen in this light, Out To Lunch is a logical step in the music’s and Blue Note’s evolution, though the album proposes its own unique solutions that do not rely on the context of contemporary trends for their lasting power.
Eric Dolphy died in Europe before Out To Lunch was released, yet Blue Note chose not to acknowledge his passing at the end of A.B. Speilman’s liner notes. The decision seemed fitting at the time, as if the promise of Dolphy’s further growth remained palpable in the sounds contained on this immortal recording.
— Bob Blumenthal, 1999
Blue Note Spotlight - April 2013
http://www.bluenote.com/spotlight/out-to-lunch-with-eric-dolphy/
Free-flying Eric Dolphy veered into the contrarian zone in his musical approach on his one and only Blue Note album, Out to Lunch. Breaking away from the clichés of postbop jazz and speaking boldly on his array of instruments (flute and alto sax as well as bass clarinet, seldom heard at the time but sounding profoundly visceral in his hands), Dolphy displayed the avant-garde modus operandi to expect the unexpected. The sometimes abstract and off-kilter yet often whimsical album turned heads and opened ears immediately, and it has gone down in jazz history as one of the genre’s masterpieces. A must-hear. A best bet. A revelation.
The recording took place on February 25, 1964 at engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs, N.J., studio—the home base where most of the Blue Note catalog was being documented. While Dolphy returned to Van Gelder Studio less than a month later as a sideman on Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure on Blue Note, Out to Lunch, comprising five Dolphy compositions, proved to be his finale as a leader.
At the age of 36, the Los Angeles native and New York emigrant tragically died on June 29, 1964 in Berlin after setting off on tour to Europe with longtime friend/collective collaborator Charles Mingus as a member of the bassist’s sextet. Much to Mingus’s chagrin, Dolphy told him while on tour that he was staying put on the continent. He had already made that plan while recording Out to Lunch, sharing with the album’s original liner note writer A.B. Spellman that he was going to live in Europe for a spell “because I can get more work there playing my own music, and because if you try to do anything different in this country, people put you down for it.”
The angular nature of Out to Lunch may have short-fused some listeners at the time of its release (Miles Davis famously said that he’d like to stomp on the saxophonist’s head). But today, nearly a half-century later, what the mercurial Dolphy concocted with his youthful quintet—two relatively new-on-the-scene cats, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson; wunderkind drummer Tony Williams, who was 18 at the time; and bassist Richard Davis, who the leader had enlisted for his 1961 Booker Little date, At the Five Spot, in 1961 and later for Iron Man in 1963—sounds so cutting-edge and vital, serving as an important link to what would take place in jazz during the rest of the decade (including in Davis’s own classic ‘60s quintet, with the free improvisation spurred on in part by rhythm maestro Williams).
Out to Lunch captivates from the get-go with the out-leaning “Hat and Beard,” inspired by Thelonious Monk, who in the original liners, Dolphy described as “so musical no matter what he’s doing, even if he’s just walking around.” The playfully creeping 5/4 bass line served up by the leader’s loopy bass clarinet and Davis’s steady acoustic bass creates the perfect 9/4 vehicle for the solos. Of particular note is Hutcherson’s plunks, splashes and shimmers that have a prankster vibe. He contributes unpredictable floating accents and wink-in-the-eye drop-ins throughout the session.
Hubbard and Dolphy connect brilliantly on the slow-paced “Something Sweet, Something Tender,” while the leader flits and twitters on the flute through his “Gazzelloni” tribute to classical flautist Severino Gazzelloni. The capricious title tune, originally the opening track on the second side of the LP, is an irregular epic piece that has extended explorations by each band member, including Dolphy’s twisted alto lines, Hubbard’s soaring trumpet support and the exhilarant rhythm driven by Williams and Davis. The end song, “Straight Up and Down,” is in Dolphy’s words, a tune about a drunkard walking, with the appropriate wobble and weave. After a break of inebriated free playing, the group returns to the theme, walking the straight line without a misstep.
Out to Lunch is a thoroughly engaging 42 minutes of the most profound and far-reaching jazz recorded in 1964. While there’s a flair for the esoteric, it all makes sense upon close listen. After finishing “Straight Up and Down,” don’t be surprised if you stream right back to the “Hat and Beard” beginning. It’s worth the second ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment