1054 - Mojo 40. Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch (1964)

Track Listing

1. Hat And Beard
2. Something Sweet, Something Tender
3. Gazzellioni
4. Out To Lunch
5. Straight Up And Down

Review

Ahh! More Free Jazz, just what you need when you come home from a hectic day at work, something that reminds you of traffic and construction work to give your nerves the required edge to murder your family with an axe.

If you are like me and spend your days looking out the window at the boats on the river, while you scratch yourself, thinking that maybe you will get some writing done after dinner, it actually sounds somewhat refreshing. But only somewhat.

I can tell how important this album is, how it evolves jazz musical forms, how it frees the player to play whatever notes he feels like, how that is a reflection of inner landscape etc. etc. It just is not very pleasant most of the times, and it is only when the music kind of coalesces together into a whole for a few seconds that you get some pleasurable respite. So while I admire it rationally I cannot relate to it emotionally at some level.

Track Highlights

1. Something Sweet, Something Tender
2. Out to Lunch
3. Hat and Beard
4. Straight Up And Down


Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The title of the album's first track, "Hat and Beard", refers to Thelonious Monk; the song contains a famous percussive interlude featuring Tony Williams and Bobby Hutcherson. "Something Sweet, Something Tender" includes a noteworthy duet between Richard Davis on bass and Dolphy on bass clarinet. The third composition, "Gazzelloni", was named after classical flautist Severino Gazzelloni, but is otherwise the album's most conventional, bop-based theme. The second side features two long pieces for alto saxophone: the title track, and "Straight Up and Down", intended, according to the original liner notes, to evoke a drunken stagger.

Something Sweet, Something Tender: