Get the daggers out -- music from an iconic album has been tampered with: Eric Dolphy's 1964 Blue Note session Out to Lunch. On this 2005 recording by Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Orchestra, all five compositions from the original quintet LP are revisited in the same order, and the clever CD sleeve even duplicates the old album jacket, down to the typeface and black-and-blue color scheme, although a photo taken by Daido Moriyama inside Tokyo's massive (and massively busy) Shinjuku railway station replaces the Dolphy album's enigmatic "Will Be Back" sign, whose clock hands indicated no conventional time of expected return. Now, sheath those daggers, because it's hard to think of a more apt interpreter of celebrated avant-gardist Dolphy than Otomo, the always surprising and sometimes confounding turntablist, sound artist, onkyo improviser, and now avant jazzer heading up a 15-piece aggregation of Japanese and European experimentalists. Who better to grapple with Dolphy's legacy -- so idiosyncratic in its day and yet so influential to creative improvisers who followed -- than a musician with his own quite singular take on how sounds can be organized in the jazz realm over 40 years later and half a world away? In other words, don't expect the conventional from Otomo, any more than you would from Dolphy himself. That's not to say that recognizable themes ("Hat and Beard," "Out to Lunch," "Straight Up and Down") don't appear, or that individual players -- including Alfred Harth on bass clarinet bursting into the mix and leaping across the instrument's tonal range in a way that recalls the master himself -- don't carry forward echoes from the past in the spirit of a sincere and heartfelt homage that even a fairly conventional jazz fan could grasp.

1		Hat and Beard
2		Something Sweet, Something Tender
3		Gazzelloni
4		Out to Lunch
5		Straight Up and Down/Will Be Back

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