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Album Review

Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra: Space Is The Place (Music From The Original Soundtrack)

Read "Space Is The Place (Music From The Original Soundtrack)" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
June 7, 2023

Do not expect The Criterion Collection to reissue the 1974 film Space Is The Place anytime soon. It is though, a cult classic in the truest sense of the word. Sun Ra and his Arkestra had been at the forefront of avant-garde music, developing and refining his vision since the 1950s. Today listeners are most likely acquainted with Ra's claims of being from Saturn and his mission to save our doomed planet. Back in the late 1960s and early 70s ...

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Swirling

Read "Swirling" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
January 2, 2021

Though Sun Ra departed Earth in 1993, his music has continued to thrive, first under the stewardship of John Gilmore and, since 1995, by the remarkable Marshall Allen who turned 96 in May 2020. A live Arkestra show still contains many of the elements that have been present since the 1950s and '60s--color, pageantry and music boasting the entire history of jazz. There have also been some extraordinary continuities in the personnel of the band, with several members present since ...

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Swirling

by Chris May
November 8, 2020

Saturn moved into the ascendant in October 2020 when the Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of alto saxophonist Marshall Allen released its first studio album in over twenty years. Swirling presents new arrangements of both well-known and more obscure Ra tunes, played by a fifteen-piece lineup which includes band veterans and relative newcomers. It is a welcome addition to the Arkestra's near seventy-year catalogue. When Ra passed in 1993, tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, an on-off band ...

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Seductive Fantasy

Read "Seductive Fantasy" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
July 8, 2020

It seems entirely fitting that “Seductive Fantasy," the single from the Sun Ra Arkestra's first studio album in twenty years, should be a reworking of an old song, one that dates back over forty years to On Jupiter (El Saturn, 1979). With Sun Ra it was ever thus; old is new and new is old. The original “Seductive Fantasy" was a sprawling, seventeen-minute affair that morphed from loose groove and extended soloing into increasingly abstract, and almost arrhythmic terrain. Significantly ...

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Live In Kalisz 1986

Read "Live In Kalisz 1986" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
May 17, 2020

In December 1986, the Sun Ra Arkestra performed at the 13th International Jazz Piano Festival in Kalisz. The Arkestra was making its first ever appearance in Poland and the historic occasion was duly recorded for posterity. The tapes, however, languished in a basement, unloved and forgotten, until they were unearthed over three decades later. Thanks to vinyl specialists Lanquidity Records, they have been remastered and released--on striking yellow vinyl--for the first time. The sound quality isn't always perfect-- a couple ...