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 Daid? 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. However, a good deal of the time all bets are off; this might be a "jazz orchestra" but in addition to the usual brass, reeds, bass, and drums (and of course a bit of vibraphone, here played by Takara Kumiko in far less prominent role than that of Bobby Hutcherson) are such sonic paraphernalia as sine waves, contact mike, no-input mixing board, and, of course, "computer." (Otomo himself plays skronky electric guitar.) From composition to composition and even during episodes within compositions, the band takes radically different approaches. There are blasts of free jazz energy not too far removed from the Peter Brotzmann Tentet, an impression reinforced by the presence of spluttering wildman Mats Gustafsson on baritone sax, and one occasionally feels the album is an homage to Ascension rather than Out to Lunch. Not surprisingly and often in contrast with the Dolphy original, the music is dense and filled to overflowing with sounds -- sometimes due to fundamental reworkings in structure rather than just the larger size of the ensemble. The middle section of "Something Sweet, Something Tender" somewhat belies the original's title with elongated howls and cries from the horns over slo-mo bass, drums, and electronic noise poised somewhere between dirge and drone, and the sudden explosion of punk-ish rock energy in the following "Gazzelloni" is a startling contrast. One might argue that the detailed arrangements in which acoustic instruments and electronics find balance are the most successful, as when electronics pop, buzz, and whir in "Hat and Beard," recalling -- as Otomo's turntablism has previously on an album like Altered States' Lithuania and Estonia Live -- the experience of listening to a scratchy old vinyl jazz LP. And yet "Will Be Back," 13 minutes of sparse, sometimes barely audible sound art appended to "Straight Up and Down" at the disc's conclusion, might be the most compelling inclusion here when considering it is named after that famous sign from 1964, with those seven clock hands pointing every which way. As the liners point out, Dolphy did not come back -- his all-too-brief life ended four months after the recording of Out to Lunch. Regardless of Otomo's int to be continued...

Rovi