Jazz Articles about Roger Blank

About Roger Blank

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Heliocentric Worlds 1 & 2 Revisited

Read "Heliocentric Worlds 1 & 2 Revisited" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
August 11, 2021

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 ...

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Extended Analysis

Pharoah Sanders: Tauhid

by Chris May
July 1, 2008

Conventional wisdom has it that saxophonist Pharoah Sanders' signature, late-1960s astral jazz recording is “The Creator Has A Master Plan" from Karma (Impulse!, 1969). But conventional wisdom is rarely to be trusted. Clocking in at an unhurried and mesmerising 32:45, “Master Plan" is certainly definitive Sanders of the time; yet “Upper Egypt And Lower Egypt," from Sanders' own-name Impulse! debut, Tauhid, recorded in November, 1966, is arguably the finest statement in his astral oeuvre.At a relatively brief 16:16, ...