Out To Lunch!

Blue Note, 1964. The personnel: Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Bobby Hutcherson on vibes, Richard Davis on bass, Tony Williams on drums — Williams then 18, three months away from joining Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet, the unit that would by 1969 invent the music that Panthalassa later remixed. Richard Davis would record with Van Morrison on Astral Weeks and be sampled across decades of hip-hop. Dolphy himself died four months after the sessions, in Berlin, at 36, of undiagnosed diabetes.

The engineering is Rudy Van Gelder’s — recorded first at his parents’ Hackensack living room, later at his Englewood Cliffs studio, in what many engineers consider one of the best-recorded rooms in popular music history. Van Gelder’s approach was specific: close-miking, a particular depth and warmth in the low-mids, a quality of room that sounds intimate rather than live. Every hip-hop producer who sampled Blue Note was sampling Van Gelder’s room as much as the musicians in it.

Bobby Hutcherson connects this directly to Grant Green’s Idle Moments, recorded the year before with almost the same personnel. Two records that are, in effect, the same Blue Note moment captured from slightly different angles.