Featured Essay: Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch & The Abstract Truth 

by Laton Carter

It was 1987, I’d had my driver’s license for six months, and my father had just won at auction a  weathered Renault Le Car for $500. It became my first car. I could now drive to the public library  where there was a vinyl section. Yes, a person, with the help of their library card, could check out  a physical slab of wax—the cardboard jacket encased in thick mylar—to take home with them.  There was no limit on the number of records you could check out. It was like shopping in a free  candy store. 

I didn’t want to go overboard with how many records I’d check out. As a result, I remember clearly  the first four records I brought home: The Best of John Coltrane on Atlantic Records, The Best of  Ornette Coleman, also on Atlantic, Archie Shepp’s Live In San Francisco, and Eric Dolphy’s  monumental Out To Lunch. At the time, this fourth record wasn’t monumental at all. I’d never heard of it. No one, not even my saxophone teacher, had told me to seek it out. (My saxophone teacher was a Sonny Rollins devotee.) I simply thought it had a cool cover. When I flipped the record over, I saw that Mr. Dolphy played two other instruments in addition to alto saxophone: bass clarinet and flute. That was enough for me to give it a try. I tucked the four records, each entombed in the thickest, yellowing polyester protective sleeve you can imagine, under my armpit  and headed to the checkout. Inconvenient? YouTube didn’t exist. Streaming and downloads didn’t  exist. Compact discs barely existed. For a 16 year-old with a job at Wendy’s, there was little  disposable income to actually buy a record. And what if you did, and didn’t like it? It was much  easier to browse what the library had and take your chances. 

I had no idea the record would essentially change my life. That sounds like exaggeration, and  maybe it is, but the moment I played Side 1—Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Dolphy on bass  clarinet, Richard Davis walking a jagged and beautiful bass line, Bobby Hutcherson’s vibes ringing  out like well-tempered doorbells across the neighborhood, and Tony Williams’ precise and  gymnastic snare and cymbals marching out an insistent cadence—I was hooked. Really hooked when Dolphy’s bass clarinet solos exploded into my bedroom. Music could be like this. It could  doodle, screech, split notes, squawk, and vocalize all in one coherent sentence. This wasn’t simply  instrumental music, it was human yearning translated into sound. It was something to play over  and over, not for an attachment to lyrics (there weren’t any), but for the consistent surprise in  hearing five musicians coming together and improvising. Improvising in this case didn’t mean unabridged blowing, but rather the use of a forward-looking sonic vocabulary within the  framework of a determined structure. It was the opposite of chaos, and yet it sounded unleashed.  Free.

My parents did not give me grief for playing this record—which I should add was comically  warped—over and over. I had one friend in high school, and this friend had recently acquired a  girlfriend. I was unattached, so it was natural that I would attach myself to something I could rely  on: five short stories inside the grooves of this publicly shared record. My friend was busy making  out with his new girlfriend, my parents had their jobs, and I closed my door. It felt like I was inside  a laboratory of possibilities. It felt like, as a person, I was changing at the micro level, the synapses  firing inside my brain rewriting themselves to accommodate such wooly and fine-tuned music. 

A note about the Reid Miles-designed cover (which I’m sure many readers are already familiar  with): the photograph, by the one-man Blue Note photography team of Frank Wolff, shows a closed door with a “Will Be Back” sign in the window, sporting a paper analog clock with…seven hands.  Well, that’s no way to tell time. Back when? Doesn’t matter. Push aside your distractions (no  smartphones yet) and listen. No, don’t listen. Absorb. That’s what I did without thinking. Without  being told how or what to listen for. Note: I wasn’t hip, or even trying to be hip, for knowing this  record. I certainly wasn’t cool. I was a high school student. An introvert, lonely, sometimes overly  sensitive, and wanting to hear something that would give me a new way to hear, and therefore see,  the world. I’d lucked into just that record. 

One standout moment: on the track “Something Sweet, Something Tender,” there is a written-out  duo sequence with Dolphy on bass clarinet and Richard Davis on arco bass. The other members  of the session sit out. Listening to Richard Davis, a classically trained bassist, bow in unison with  Dolphy’s bass clarinet, in the same register, is near magical. Descriptions like simpatico partners 

or linked minds are apt here. Everyone, especially people who claim to hate jazz, should listen to  this short moment in musical history. Stravinsky would likely have given a thumbs-up. Bartok  might have smirked and kept listening. Roberta Flack would grin and slowly nod. 

Decades have passed, and I still listen to Out To Lunch. I still marvel at how the music hasn’t aged.  Eric Dolphy’s soundworld is still available for younger ears, and still as exciting. I’ve owned the  record in multiple editions and in different media, but the music itself resists collector fetishism.  It’s simply waiting for the next lonely, or un-lonely, person to come along and try out its grooves. 

Laton Carter is a writer and educator based in Western Oregon.