Empirical

Maybe Empir­ical can rehab­il­it­ate the vibra­phone in my affec­tions, though inter­est­ingly, it’s not part of their usual line-up.  I didn’t catch the name of the vibra­phone player but he was really good.  Oth­er­wise the group con­sisted for this gig of alto sax, bass, and drums.  They were doing almost entirely Eric Dolphy mater­ial in advance of record­ing their next CD.  Of course, as a dab­bler on the Nor­dic fringes of jazz, for the most part, I’d never heard of Dolphy, but appar­ently he used to play with Col­trane and Min­gus.  I liked Empir­ical — they were quite enga­ging, had a sense of humour in their play­ing and were clearly enjoy­ing them­selves per­form­ing for us.