Remastered versions of Dolphy’s first release for Prestiege, in 1960, and the landmark (posthumously released) Out to Lunch, from 1964, measuring the ground covered between. Lunch is one of the great classics of ‘60s jazz, straining at the edges of the form with highly contemporary compositional innovations, impressive writing and an easy complexity which gives the whole band licence to extrapolate and innovate and deviate in service of the compositions. ‘Everyone's a leader in this session’, Dolphy wrote, and that’s true - but it’s Dolphy’s writing that makes it all possible and, of course, his selection of bandmates: long time collaborator Freddie Hubbard (tpt), the great Bobby Hutcherson (vibraphone), the ubiquitous Richard Davis (contrabass) and a young Tony Williams (listed here as Anthony Williams) in a perfect environment to do what he does best: support, invent and counterpose; he’s pretty fearless here, and not so jazzy. Lunch is full of changing time signatures, angular writing, constant variation, shifts from pulse to suspended time, polyrhythms, inspired playing, detail, absence of cliché and a general pushing toward an extended musical language that reads as more as ‘music’ than as genre to the ear. ‘Lunch’ was a pivotal record that inspired experimental rockers as much as it shook up the jazz community, and as such it’s an indispensible volume for the must-have C20 music library. Fifty years and it hasn’t aged at all.