Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch (1964)
The bulk of what has been written about Eric Dolphy's masterpiece is extremely inaccessible to the average music fan. That's because this is, admittedly, some really heavy stuff, avant-garde jazz that plays with tones (or rather atones) and odd time signatures. But for the music fan (me) that prefers to leave the technical intellectualizing to the experts, Out to Lunch can still be a supremely rewarding listen. That's because Dolphy, who always refused to extract the joy from his playing no matter how complex it got, made the record at a time when experiments in Jazz weren't just fodder for insider circle jerks. This isn't different to be different, but different to be good, and, as the title Out to Lunch implies, the end result is less a music lesson than a crazed experiment in pleasure without boundaries. Take a listen to opener "Hat and Beard," a decisively marbled jumble of abstract dots and lines mixed in with swirling bop sections. Dolphy died tragically young just after recording this record, but it's a great treat for him to have left behind such a brilliant record.