The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse

Possibly the greatest album ever made by a septuagenarian: Recorded in 1971 and released a year after his 1974 death, The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse has the kind of zest you’d associate with a much younger man. Not Duke’s own youth, but something like this version, a youthful contemporary with wide-open ears — it even incorporates rock rhythms in ways that sound utterly Dukish — with an offhanded casualness underlining even the most florid touches. Certainly, nobody in music made more of Marshall McLuhan’s theories, explicitly acknowledged in the album’s long spoken introduction.