By Chris M. Slawecki
On September 26, Evidence Music released five new entries in its sterling series of new and reissued titles that painstakingly document the recorded legend of Sun Ra pianist, prankster, composer, cosmologist, arranger, architect, bluesman and bandleader of a particularly unique band of gypsies. These five titles provide the labels follow-up to their acclaimed double-CD set Sun Ra: The Singles in 1996 (Thats a particularly personal acclaimed right there; as Editor for Music Boulevard back then, I was asked for an essay compiling my 1996 Top Ten list and clocked in The Singles at Number One).
The music of Ra has often seemed inscrutable. Its tough enough to accurately assess the career of any musician whose career arc begins as pianist-arranger for the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in the 1940s and ends in the computerized electronic age in the 1990s. But you get more than music with Ra even though the musicianship of his bands, which most often included tenor saxophonist John Gilmore and multi-horn and reed player Marshall Allen, is considerable. You get an entire mythology of backward and forward space and time travel, all wrapped up in the twinkle in the eye of a multi-talented musician who composed original music and arranged it for his own bands, bands that maintained and developed his highly personal sound across decades, and yet who seemed equal parts visionary and whack-job. Its all that other stuff that has made Ras proper musical stature difficult to assess.
Three of these five new Evidence titles present Ra with different bands and in different settings but all in free-wheeling, warp-speed overdrive. Recorded in New York in 1963 and released in 1969, When Angels Speak Of Love by Sun Ra and His Myth Science Arkestra is among the rarest titles that Ra recorded for and released on his own eclectic El Saturn label (hand-printed and -distributed and generally available only at gigs, from bandmembers themselves, or at Third Street Jazz in Philadelphia, Ras hometown record shop owned and operated by Jerry Gordon, Evidence co-founder and President). Angels is so far out that its tempting in retrospect to consider it born in time and place from the free jazz movement in mid-60s New York City, and it certainly seems to either echo or announce, depending on your chronology, the free jazz being explored around this same time and place by Ornette Coleman. However, the liner notes include Ras own insistence that, I dont play free music because there is no freedom in the universe.
The double-CD set The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums: Cymbals / Crystal Spears resurrects two albums Ra recorded with his Arkestra (in 1973) for the impulse! label but were never issued. The late 60s home for Trane and Pharoah Sanders, impulse! seems like a good fit for Ras melodic tyrannies and mutations of the early 70s, although management and other changes quickly aborted the labels relationship. Cymbals features Thoughts Under A Dark Blue Light, a tenor-honkin blues shuffle warped into Ras interplanetary vision. Like most recordings from this period, Ra testifies and hollers on various electric organs and keyboard, swinging cool funky bop. Crystal Spears presents a more percussion-heavy ensemble, with the title track a rare recording of Ra playing marimbas.
Pathways To Unknown Worlds / Friendly Love, by Sun Ra & His Astro Infinity Arkestra, combines two lost 73 impulse! albums on one new CD (although the label did release Pathways in 75). Friendly Love drops the bass and drums and employs percussionists instead; its master tapes included no song titles, so it is here presented as Movements I through IV. Begging pardon from Ra fans everywhere, I simply cannot comprehend portions of Pathways (The first three tracks, for example, remind me of the soundtrack to the sort of insane Japanese video game that would give children seizures).
Ah, but the new Evidence reissue series presents more than dark, swirling night visions. This first CD issue of Lanquidity, originally recorded and available only for a limited time in 1978 on Philly Jazz vinyl, suggests what trip-hop might sound like without the influence of rap, and its weird and spacious (and ultra-rare) grooves have long been a favorite among underground DJs. The opening, and title, track is one of Ras most beautiful melodies: While the drummer beats New Orleans funeral time the saxophones suggest a lovely Pharoah Sanders ballad; the background grows more swirling and otherworldly, then the opening melody returns to close the song like sunset. Where Pathways Meet and Thats How I Feel come straight out of the 1970s keyboard-heavy R&B pocket; bassist Richard Williams shines throughout this set, but especially in Thats How I Feel, where he lays the groove foundation based upon a mutation of the famous bassline to Whats Going On?. Ras piano solo in Feel offers an object lesson for those who insist he cant (or wont) play jazz.
The compilation Sun Ra & His Arkestra: Greatest Hits Easy Listening for Intergalactic Travel completes this new Evidence series. Compiled by label head Gordon from fifteen albums, the soundtrack to the Ra documentary Space Is The Place and two singles, this kaleidoscopic retrospective masterfully overviews Ras many adventures and provides a singular introduction to the breadth and depth of Ra.
Its a great mainstream jazz album, featuring a tender and unfettered I Loves You, Porgy and Round Midnight with a blues vocal from June Tyson, a straight-ahead big band ballad thats unsettling because you keep waiting for things to get weird and they never do! The opening Saturn, a hard-driving swing chart, serves as a reminder of Ras roots in Fletcher Hendersons band. The sound of Cootie Williams in Medicine For A Nightmare and subtle shades of Miles in Enlightenment are rather traditional, too.
Ra employed traditional elements and structures, but in a thoroughly unique way. Rocket Number Nine Take Off For The Planet Venus is a stop-start, strictly from space yet somehow straight-up bop riff on Salt Peanuts (with Venus repeated often to suggest the word peanuts). We Travel The Spaceways stomps on top of one of the most rockin left-hand piano basslines ever, like elephants chewing the scenery of an epic Cecil B. DeMille production, the members of the Arkestra chanting We travel the spaceways as they levitate and disappear into the mysterious night sky.
Much has been written about the unique character of Ra, who, admittedly, provided no shortage of material. For myself, I dont know that I first considered Ra to be more than some sort of merry prankster dancing on the fringes of jazz, a serious joker who became so adept at folding, spindling and mutilating musical icons that in time he became an icon himself. But I will write about that no more, because it detracts from his music. As Evidences reissue series continues to demonstrate, Ras recorded legacy constructs a body of work that, like Monks, developed within and yet tangential to jazz and pop and blossomed into an organically deep and broad, influential and individual musical language worthy of comparison to that of Duke Ellington. Music that Sun Ra wrote and recorded three and four decades ago STILL sounds ahead of its time. Hes been waiting for us all along.
