Tag: Sun Ra

Sun Ra and His Myth-Science Arkestra – The Lady With the Golden Stockings [AKA The Nubians of Plutonia] El Saturn Records LP 406 (1966)

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Originally released in a blank sleeve as The Lady With the Golden Stockings, but quickly renamed The Nubians of Plutonia for subsequent issues, this might represent the peak of the Sun Ra Arkestra’s Chicago period in terms of revealing the totally unique foundation of the group’s music.  While Jazz in Silhouette might be a better album, it doesn’t as explicitly present the otherworldly vision that would take the group to so many different stylistic touchstones over the coming decades.  But this album perhaps does point in that direction.  It’s eclectic.  The lineups and voicings shift.  At times an emphasis on rhythm supplants that of melody or harmony.  Vocal chants reveal hints of theatrical live shows.  The group sounds confident and polished.  The solos are incorporated in more daring ways here than on, say Angels and Demons at Play, because the solos retain a bit more of exotic, spacey elements and the polyrhythmic percussion backing holds constant throughout songs like “The Lady With the Golden Stockings.”  The band might not have had the recognition of the top jazz stars of the day, with gigs still sparse, but they were reputedly fairly well known and respected within Chicago.  So this album is all about the warm glow of the Chicago years, before a move to New York City in the early 1960s shook things up and took the music into other unexplored corners of the universe.  Great songs, great performances; you can’t ask for more.  This is one of the essential Sun Ra recordings.

Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra – Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy El Saturn LP 408 (1967)

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One of the more difficult Sun Ra albums, but a great one too.  It was recorded in 1963.  Like some of the other recordings from the early 1960s in New York this features vaguely psychedelic reverb effects.  These recordings are the most effective of Sun Ra’s experiments of the era.  The reed players are stretching (“Voice of Space”) and laying the foundation for what they would do after the October Revolution in Jazz the following year.  While the band had experimented with dissonant, spacey sounds for years, they use those techniques for longer, sustained stretches on many of these songs.  The polyrhythmic percussion finds new life here by bridging the newer recording effects and soloing with sci-fi exotica stylings the band had used for years.  That is to say that this actually marks a break from the merely superficially “exotic” approach of the prior years, giving way to something a lot less bound to conventional swing and bop structures and more able to float about purely on moods and washes of sound.  If this doesn’t sink in right away, give it time.

[Historical note: This music was recorded in New York City in the early 1960s, but was inspired by a performance at the Edward Hines, Jr. VA Hospital in Chicago on February 28, 1957, at which a (formerly) catatonic woman who supposedly hadn’t spoken in years exclaimed at the end of the performance, “You call that music?!”]

Sun-Ra and His Astro Infinity Arkestra – Holiday for Soul Dance El Saturn ESR 508 (1970)

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A set recorded in 1960 mostly consisting of standards plus one song (“Dorothy’s Dance”) written by Phil Cohran.  This is traditional jazz, something along the lines of Bad and Beautiful, Some Blues But Not the Kind Thats Blue and Standards.  “Early Autumn” has vocals by Ricky Murray that recall the mannered, almost swallowed vocals of Kenny Hagood on Miles Davis‘s “Darn That Dream” with the Birth of the Cool band.  Yet, these are not throwaways from the vault, but rather pleasant readings suitable for playing in company that would bolt for the door with most outer-space Ra stuff.  In fact, this might be the all-around best of Ra’s standards albums — though Some Blues But Not the Kind Thats Blue with its great John Gilmore solos is a very close runner-up.

Sun Ra – Piano Recital: Teatro La Fenice, Venezia Golden Years of New Jazz GY 21 (2003)

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In all of the many, many recordings Sun Ra made over the course of about five decades of activity only a few were for solo piano.  Some listeners malign the solo stuff as weaker than the more widely known group recordings.  Personal opinions aside, solo piano albums like Monorails and Satellites and St. Louis Blues (and for the most part Solo Piano, Vol. 1 too) featured songs that Sun Ra’s larger bands didn’t play.  Ra’s solo material was simply different.  But the posthumously released Piano Recital dips into the Arkestra’s songbook for some favorites like “Love in Outer Space,” “Outer Spaceways Inc.,” and “Friendly Galaxy/ Spontaneous Simplicity.”  There also are some standards, like Fats Waller‘s “Honeysuckle Rose,” Billy Strayhorn‘s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and a Cecil Taylor-esque read of Val Burton & Will Jason‘s “Penthouse Serenade” (popularized by Nat “King” Cole).  Sun Ra’s playing is a lot more assured than on Monorails and Satellites from a dozen years before.  Perhaps it was the live audience that made the difference.  In any event, he sounds relaxed and comfortable, and doesn’t strain to do anything out of character.  This album might be the best of the solo recordings.  It certainly is the only one that provides a crisp distillation of the familiar group material.  While still not an essential item, this should satisfy any looking for something in line with the solo piano concept.

Sun Ra – Monorails and Satellites El Saturn SR 509 (1968)

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Sun Ra has been criticized by some as not being a great pianist.  His first album of solo piano recordings, Monorails and Satellites, probably won’t change any minds on that score.  The material here covers a broad spectrum, from dissonant avant-garde to melodic balladry.  The songs are different from what Sun Ra’s larger band was recording around the same time, so rather than being a new take on familiar forms these solo records represent an expansion of his palette.  Unfortunately, the performances are mediocre at best.  The most difficult material, like “Space Towers” and “Cogitation,” sounds like inferior renditions of compositions by Arnold Schönberg with added syncopation.  The ballads are a bit better, but often seem like the work of a merely adequate performer being self-consciously difficult to try to project himself beyond his means.  The most effective passages are where Sun Ra shows his versatility by playing stride piano and the like.  Monorails and Satellites probably won’t win any new fans.  Even longtime fans might find this difficult to enjoy.

Sun Ra – The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums: Cymbals / Crystal Spears Evidence ECD 22217-2 (2000)

Rescued from the dustbin of history by Evidence, this pairing of albums originally intended for release by Impulse! in the early 1970s (a few tracks from Cymbals were released on Deep Purple) highlights Sun Ra in electric small combo settings.  Cymbals is very a much a continuation of efforts like “The Night of the Purple Moon”.  Yet where The Night of the Purple Moon had Sun Ra up front, Cymbals finds Ra taking a more secondary role while the reed players are at center stage.  Songs like the lengthy “Thoughts Under a Dark Blue Light” are based around extended sax workouts, and built out with plenty of welcoming grooves.  Crystal Spears goes in a different direction though.  The performances are more challenging.  Sun Ra takes on a more prominent role too, with John Gilmore getting a ton of space to himself on “Sunrise in the Western Sky”.  It’s the more intriguing and unique of the two discs, though it may leave a few listeners behind not in tune with the noisier aspects of Sun Ra’s music.

Sun Ra’s synth (mini-moog) blasting out raw sound on “Crystal Spears” is not unlike Miles Davis‘ keyboard in the mid-1970s.  Miles would lean his whole forearm on the keyboard to create massive blocks of sound, as on “Maiysha” from Get Up With It or much of Dark Magus (“Tatu” for example).  This took Davis away from any tonality of course, but it also broke the bonds between melody, harmony and rhythm by presenting sounds that were independent from much of what else went on with the music.  Davis got these ideas from German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (thanks to house guest Paul Buckmaster), whose compositions like Prozession pointed the way for electronic music organized in elemental terms based on moment-to-moment relationships rather than any kind of overarching guiding structure.  Most call it “noise”.  Noise?  “2 a : sound; especially: one that lacks agreeable musical quality or is noticeably unpleasant b : any sound that is undesired or interferes with one’s hearing of something.” “noise.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 20 October 2009. But the negative connotations that term carries are purely relative, because it’s only disagreeable or unwanted if you assume from the start that traditional rules about tonality and the implicit guidelines set by standard musical notation define the exclusive boundaries of “agreeable” music.  For the rest of us we can just enjoy the more wide-ranging possibilities that exist outside those assumptions.  That undoubtedly was how Sun Ra looked at it — he was a guy who wouldn’t hesitate to mention that he was from Saturn after all (though it is interesting to note that Stockhausen too believed himself to be of extraterrestrial origin, and also was greatly influenced by swing-era jazz).

In the final judgment, both discs here are highlights from a fertile period when Sun Ra and his faithful cohorts were finding new ways to make their music more accessible while still retaining the essence of the loose, free musics on which they had established their roles as interstellar musical travelers in the preceding decades.

Sun Ra and His Myth Science Arkestra – On Jupiter El Saturn 101679 (1980)

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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sun Ra made quite a few recordings that revealed an affinity for relatively straightforward contemporary music.  Count On Jupiter among those.  “UFO” is probably his most obvious overture to the pop market, sounding a lot like mainstream funk rock of the day.

Sun Ra Quartet – New Steps Featuring John Gilmore Horo HDP 25-26 (1978)

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New Steps provides studio recordings from Sun Ra’s late-1970s Italian tour.  This is a small group set, with a quartet featuring Ra on various keyboards, saxophonist John Gilmore, trumpeter Michael Ray and drummer Luqman Ali.  It’s an eclectic batch of tunes, with lots of ballads, one track of intriguing synth experiments (“Moon People”), and a few songs that inhabit space that’s uniquely Ra-like and unclassifiable — blending balladry, free jazz, and afro-futurist exotica.  Gilmore receives special billing on the album sleeve, and he gets a number of nice solo spots, notably delivering a lovely rendition of “My Favorite Things.”  This benefits from being a recorded in the studio (at two January 1978 sessions in Rome) rather than live, for a change.  It probably won’t bowl over the newcomer, but it’s a great album for the fan, especially anyone who liked Some Blues But Not the Kind Thats Blue or even Bad and Beautiful.

Sun Ra – Space Probe El Saturn 527 (1974)

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Another interesting one from Sun Ra.  Side 1 is an extended experiment with electronics. It is more of an exercise in knob-twisting than a pure keyboard performance.  Side 2 hearkens back to the way Sun Ra’s albums were sequenced in the 1960s, with almost the entire second side devoted to the kind of exotica his band recorded extensively in the 1950s.  But then “The Conversion of J.P.” turns into a very warm and consonant piano number by the end.

Sun Ra – Nuits de la Fondation Maeght, VOL 1 Shandar SR 10.001 (1971)

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Europe has a very different culture than the United States.  European countries like France have retained something from old aristocratic traditions, whereas the Unites States adheres to a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” myth that fosters selfishness and smugness set against a colder business-oriented mindset.  After the May 1968 uprising, opposition to the new had also retreated in France, becoming more permissive.  So it was in Europe (St. Paul de Vence, France), not the New World, that a wealthy benefactor from the art world bankrolled a festival entitled “Nuits de la Fondation Maeght” featuring new jazz and modern composition.  Sun Ra made the trip, and that was something of a major breakthrough because his Arkestra did not yet have a worldwide following, or even much of a domestic one!

Nuits de la Fondation Maeght, Vol 1 ranks among the best of the group’s live recordings.  Though there are a few very nice shorter pieces with vocals (“Enlightenment,” “The Stargazers”), this is mostly given over to long-form free improvisations.  “The Cosmic Explorer” is mostly a solo feature for Sun Ra on various then-new keyboards.  His efforts make even the excursions on the solo half of My Brother the Wind Vol.2 sound tame.  A great extended sax solo on “Shadow World” also helps place this on the more aggressive and challenging end of Sun Ra’s musical continuum.  In all, a wonderful set, especially for the converted, and a compelling reminder of how this group of musicians managed to make music that, in its varied totality, was fundamentally different than what anyone else has done before or since.