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Jazz Articles about Marshall Allen
About Marshall Allen
Instrument: Saxophone, alto
Related Articles | Concerts | Albums | Photos | Similar ToSun Ra Arkestra: Nothing Is... Completed & Revisited
by Chris May
The 1966 concert recording which comprises this album--here in a new, audio-improved edition--has travelled the discographical spaceways in what, when it comes to Sun Ra, is properly circuitous and confusing fashion. Eight tracks from it were scheduled for release by ESP-Disk in 1967 or 1968 as The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra Volume III, complete with a catalogue number (ESP 1046), but the release never happened. The same tracks were then issued by ESP as the LP Nothing Is in ...
read moreSun Ra: Lanquidity (2 x CD Edition)
by Chris May
When it comes to Sun Ra, the elephant in the room--or perhaps the intergalactic space frigate orbiting your sound system--is how many musicians in the band were bombed out on acid during a typical recording session? By all accounts, Ra ran a tight spaceship and drugs, mind expanding or numbing, were strictly off limits. Then again, Frank Zappa was a similarly sober micro-manager, but bandmembers' memoirs have revealed what anyone with ears has suspected for decades: namely that weed and ...
read moreTyler Mitchell: Dancing Shadows
by Mike Jurkovic
There's a buzz to Dancing Shadows that is akin to the first time one stumbled upon a late 1950s to late 1960s Blue Note, Riverside, Verve, Impulse! or Prestige recording and time just stopped and the music took you places you were eager to go whether you knew where you were going or not. You stared at the cover, the wall, into the new, opening world. It may well have been your first mind-altering experience without, (or in conjunction with) ...
read moreSun Ra Arkestra: Heliocentric Worlds 1 & 2 Revisited
by Chris May
Heliocentric Worlds 1 & 2 Revisited presents in their entirety, newly and luminously remastered, the two albums which on release by ESP Disk in 1965 led, if not to actual commercial breakthrough for Sun Ra—who had been recording, obscurely, under his own name since the late 1940s—then at least to a heightened level of visibility for him and his music in the burgeoning transatlantic counterculture. Ra was no more an acid-tripping psych bandleader than was Frank Zappa; both musicians were ...
read moreSun Ra Arkestra: Swirling
by Ian Patterson
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 ...
read moreSun Ra Arkestra: Swirling
by Chris May
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 ...
read moreKing Khan: The Infinite Ones
by Chris May
Something about the vibe of this completely wonderful album, and the milieu which its record label inhabits, puts one in mind of Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's self-published limited-editions of the 1960s. These were, according to information given on page three, “Printed, published, freaked out, & zapped by the Fuck You/ press at a secret grope-bunker somewhere in the Lower East Side, New York City, U.S.A." King Khan (a.k.a. A.A. Khan or the artist formerly known as The ...
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