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Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra: Space Is The Place (Music From The Original Soundtrack)
by Mark Corroto
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 ...
Continue ReadingSun Ra at Inter-Media Arts, 1991
by Howard Mandel
On April 10, 1991, the night of this concert at Inter-Media Art Center in Huntington, Long Island, Sun Ra was near the apogee of his earthly transit. Having led his transformative iterations of his Arkestra around the globe for an unlikely if not unimaginable four decades, the visionary composer, keyboardist, conceptualist and cosmologist was, even though in recovery from a stroke, at the peak of his powers, two years from breaking free of his local orbit entirely. He ...
Continue ReadingTyler Mitchell: Sun Ra's Journey Featuring Marshall Allen
by Mark Corroto
Sun Ra's Journey from the Tyler Mitchell Octet signals listeners to begin their own happy joy dance. Recorded live at Smalls Jazz Club in August 2021, the music is an animating run through six familiar Sun Ra compositions, plus plenty of surprises. Tyler Mitchell is a Ra alumnus who can be heard on the Black Saint recordings Hours After (1989) and Reflections In Blue (1987), Live In Kalisz 1986 (Lanquidity Records, 2019) and the 1986 studio session Prophet ...
Continue ReadingTyler Mitchell: Sun Ra's Journey Featuring Marshall Allen
by Mike Jurkovic
Along with elder alum, alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, Sun Ra's Journey Featuring Marshall Allen, the second of bassist Tyler Mitchell's deep dives into Sun Ra's master playbook, breaks glorious from the start. As an entry into the Smalls Live Living Masters Series, this octane-infused set was recorded live in 2022 at Smalls in NYC as the city began to cautiously emerge from eighteen months of pandemic-induced nightmare and doom. “Care Free" greets all fellow Arkestra crewmen and women ...
Continue ReadingSun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen: Living Sky
by Mark Corroto
In 2022, Sun Ra has been gone nearly thirty years, but thanks to maestro Marshall Allen his Arkestra has survived. Allen had been a member of Sun Ra's band since the late 1950s and it has been under Allen's leadership since 1995. Fans that have enjoyed the Arkestra in concert certainly hoped for the band to record and it wasn't until the splendid Swirling (Strut) was released in 2020 that wish was fulfilled. The Marshall Allen-led the Arkestra's second offering, ...
Continue ReadingSun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen: Living Sky
by Chris May
When Sun Ra aficionado and Omni Sound Records founder Ahmet Ulug reached out to Sun Ra Arkestra leader Marshall Allen to commission a new album from the band, he gave Allen a tight brief. Ulug said that he wanted something: “Spiritual and hypnotic... down tempo, melodic and grooving... Music that is accessible and healing." Even though the crisis the world endured in 2020 and 2021 called out for such music, Ulug's directions to the veteran sonic-warrior may seem ...
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