Eric Dolphy

Featuring: Freddie Hubbard

condition (record/cover): EX / VG+ (sticker removal damage on front and minimal wear)

With original innersleeve.

February 1964, and one of the handful of perfect records in jazz: Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch!, with Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Richard Davis and an eighteen-year-old Tony Williams reinventing ensemble time from the inside out. "Hat and Beard" tips its hat to Monk while walking somewhere Monk never went; Hutcherson's vibes replace the piano and change the music's entire light, all shimmer and open air where chords would have closed the windows; Davis and Williams stretch the pulse until time itself becomes one of the soloists. Every composition is a mobile - balanced, asymmetrical, always moving - and the band treats them with the exact mix of rigor and play they demand. Four months later Dolphy was gone in Berlin, and this stands as the summit he reached rather than merely a promise unfulfilled - though it is that too, unbearably.

Blue Note stereo pressing. If a desert island allows ten records, this one is on the boat, no discussion.