There are musicians that expand not only what an instrument can sound like, but what music itself can sound like. Eric Dolphy was one. The instrument in question was the bass clarinet (although he also played alto sax and flute), and during his too-short career, he played it in ways that no one else had even imagined. He created a vocabulary that sounds adventurous even today. His 1964 recording Out to Lunch is rightly considered a jazz classic, as he and a stellar band (Richard Davis on bass, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Bobby Hutcherson on vibes, Tony Williams on drums) find just the right balance between freedom and discipline.

Records like this one remind us that jazz is a very open type of music in concept, and personally, I hope it stays that way. The extraordinary achievement that is this album proves that jazz can't (and shouldn't) be defined.

The album's opener, "Hat and Beard" with its 9/8 theme, is a tribute to Thelonius Monk (another musician to whom today's first sentence applies). Dolphy's solo is first: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tnPkQufnZY

When jazz musicians discuss their favourite players, one name that often comes up is the late great trumpet giant Freddie Hubbard. Even by the high technical standards of jazz, his work is awe-inspiring. He was what some jazzers call a conversation-stopper: a player who could make musicians in the club stop talking, even in the middle of a sentence, to avoid missing a note of his solos. And he had a full and varied career, recording many albums as a leader as well as playing in groups led by Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, and Sonny Rollins, to name a few. He was a standout contributor to some of the most important albums in jazz history, including Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil. As this list shows, he was able to shine in pretty much every conceptual context - tonal, modal, or free. Here's a really cool clip of him with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, circa 1962: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4noNAphDFA8. And if you haven't heard even one of the albums mentioned above, you know what to do.