Out to Lunch (album)

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Professional reviews
Out to Lunch

Studio album by Eric Dolphy
Released	1964
Recorded	25 February 1964
Genre	Jazz
Length	42:31
Label	Blue Note Records
Producer(s)	Alfred Lion
All Music Guide link
Eric Dolphy chronology
Conversations (1963)	Out to Lunch (1964)	Last Date (1964)

Out to Lunch was Eric Dolphy's only recording for Blue Note Records as a leader. Today it is generally considered one of the finest albums in the label's history, as well as one of the high points in 1960s jazz avant garde and in Dolphy's discography.

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.

Out to Lunch! is often mischaracterized as a free jazz album, but the tunes are often quite rigidly structured, especially "Something Sweet, Something Tender" which, besides a brief solo, is purely strophic; though the soloists often interact briefly (typically Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard, or Bobby Hutcherson and Tony Williams) they tend to take fairly conventional solo spots otherwise. That being said, the lack of piano certainly adds chordal freedom to the proceedings, and the music is mostly atonal, and firmly rooted in the avant garde.

Tony Williams had turned eighteen a few months before this recording, and is listed as "Anthony Williams" on the album cover.

A few months after recording this album, Dolphy went on a European tour with Charles Mingus. He died shortly thereafter of a diabetic coma.