The 50th anniversary of Eric Dolphy's chef d'oeuvre, Out To Lunch – and more to the point, one of the great entries in the Blue Note catalogue – is marked in rewarding style here. Johnson's excellent group reprises the five songs on the original album and extends the programme with a composition based on the work of one of Dolphy's main champions, Gunther Schuller, whose son is also in the band. This wider framework is not without merit but the handling of the far from easy source material impresses for its many astute confirmations and wily extrapolations, none more so than on the title track which eventually breaks down to a ballad with the kind of eerie romanticism that runs through much of Dolphy's other work. Replacing the vibraphone of Bobby Hutcherson with the piano of Myra Melford gives the group sound a very different backbone and rootedness, and the way that some of her fuller, sturdy chords fill out the tightly entwined unison lines of the horns is excellent. It picks up on and cements the immense orchestral implications of Dolphy's work, something that is perhaps overshadowed by the verve of his playing. Essentially, he bequeathed to modern music mercurial lines, shapes and patterns to be remodeled as well as solos to be admired, and the brilliance of his mind took him above borders between mainstream and avant-garde. This work makes that clear.