Eric Dolphy
Out To Lunch

Today I want to go out for lunch, I don't want the usual sandwich, the usual bland salad, eaten quickly and distractedly, without even really tasting the flavors and swallowed, moreover, with some fizzy drink, in the manner of Jules Winnfield. Today I want to sit down, calmly order a good wine, red, and then first course, second course, side dish, dessert, liqueur, and coffee. Yes, I want to savor the 5 courses, slowly, enjoying the taste and understanding the pairing of ingredients… the chef is top-notch, a genius, it's Eric Dolphy, in my humble opinion among the greatest saxophonists history remembers and I believe even Uncle John wouldn’t turn up his nose.

This album, besides being the best album of this extraordinary artist, is a true landmark of free jazz and jazz history at large. One of Dolphy's last albums (previously widely dedicated to pure bop), marking the end of his short but intense career, a sort of testament for posterity… and judging by what is to come, I think many have drawn from his lesson. Eric Dolphy's free, refined, and sophisticated style alternates brilliantly between saxophone, flute, as in "Gazzelloni," but also clarinet and leads us on a seesaw of emotions, a rise and fall which is hard to resist. Dolphy is the indisputable protagonist of the album with his flights of lucid madness, although he is surrounded by leading musicians of Blue Note, like Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, and especially Tony Williams (already seen and heard in the Miles Davis Quintet), capable of creating bold and complex rhythms, where the vibraphone of another legend like Bobby Hutcherson slides wonderfully, also helped by the absence of a piano.

The result is a simply thrilling album, five tracks that step completely outside any framework or preconceived imposition and yet maintain an absolute and disarming balance.