Jazz Articles about Michael Ray

About Michael Ray

Album Review

Sun Ra: At The Showcase (Live In Chicago, 1976-1977)

Read "At The Showcase (Live In Chicago, 1976-1977)" reviewed by Troy Dostert

by Troy Dostert
April 28, 2024

Describing the music of Sun Ra is always challenging--perhaps even more so when it is documented on a live recording. A case in point is this offering from the Jazz Detective label, a substantial slice of Ra taken from two concerts at Chicago's Jazz Showcase in the mid-'70s. It can be dense and opaque, even impenetrable at times. But it also swings mightily, with a generous big-band sound which should appeal to all but the most closed-minded jazz listeners. It ...

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Living Sky

Read "Living Sky" reviewed by Stefano Merighi

by Stefano Merighi
December 5, 2023

Mentre la Enterplanetary Koncepts continua a sfornare inediti della Sun Ra Arkestra, il roccioso Marshall Allen--che va per i 100 il prossimo anno...-riesce a concepire di tanto in tanto nuove produzioni. Dopo l'apprezzato Swirling, ecco Living Sky, inciso a Philadelphia nel 2021, ancora sotto lo choc del COVID. E appare proprio come una seduta di musica dolcemente terapeutica questa raccolta di brani tenui, riposanti, deliziosi. Il gruppo raduna 19 elementi, che sotto la guida di Allen imbastiscono una ...

Liner Notes

Sun Ra at Inter-Media Arts, 1991

by Howard Mandel
March 25, 2023

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 ...

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen: Living Sky

Read "Living Sky" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
November 8, 2022

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, ...

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen: Living Sky

by Chris May
October 10, 2022

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 ...

Album Review

Sun Ra: Lanquidity (2 x CD Edition)

Read "Lanquidity (2 x CD Edition)" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
February 2, 2022

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 ...

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 ...