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Jazz Articles about Ronnie Boykins
Charles Tyler Ensemble: Voyage From Jericho
by Mark Corroto
Was it a matter of timing, or simply living in the shadow of giants, that has kept saxophonist Charles Tyler off most listeners' radars? Born in Kentucky in 1941 and raised in Indianapolis, Tyler first gained recognition through his association with Albert Ayler. After relocating to Cleveland in the early '60s, the two became fast friends, and Tyler's fiery saxophone can be heard on Ayler's early ESP-Disk recordings Bells (1965) and Spirits (1965). He soon stepped forward as ...
Continue ReadingSun Ra: The Futuristic Sounds Of Sun Ra - 60th Anniversary Edition
by Doug Collette
Produced by Tom Wilson, the same man who also helmed recordings by the Mothers of Invention, Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground, The Futuristic Sounds Of Sun Ra may belie its title when described as one of the most accessible titles in his lengthy discography. Nonetheless, like its concert companion piece, At Inter-Media Arts, April 1991 (Modern Harmonic, 2016), the relatively concise approach overseen by its famous studio supervisor can reasonably function as the gateway into that vast universe of ...
Continue ReadingSun Ra Arkestra: Nothing Is... Completed & Revisited
by Maurizio Comandini
L'etichetta svizzera Ezz-thetics sta facendo un lavoro eccellente con capolavori degli anni sessanta riproposti in edizione da loro stessi definita 'revisited' che cerca di fare ordine e chiarezza anche su momenti un po' dimenticati che meritano di essere riscoperti e pienamente apprezzati. Tutto questo è ancora più necessario quando ci troviamo alle prese con la discografia di Sun Ra, uno dei primi artisti a scegliere di auto-prodursi con la mitica etichetta Saturn, piena di episodi memorabili ma ...
Continue ReadingSun 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 ...
Continue ReadingSun 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 ...
Continue ReadingNew York Contemporary Five: Consequences Revisited
by Mark Corroto
This 2020 reissue of the New York Contemporary Five recordings from 1963-64 can't help but draw one's attention to the social unrest occurring in America in 2020. In 1964 the riots in Harlem and Philadelphia over police brutality were followed by similar riots a few years later in Watts, Newark, Detroit, etc. In the growing civil unrest these recordings were born. The New Thing was the equivalent to what Chuck D of Public Enemy claimed when he said rap music ...
Continue ReadingRonnie Boykins: The Will Come, Is Now
by AAJ Italy Staff
Racconta Bernard Stollman, padre-padrone della ESP, che ci vollero undici anni perchè Ronnie Boykins si decidesse a incidere il primo e unico disco a proprio nome. Tanti ne trascorsero dall'invito ufficiale, recapitato al bassista di Sun Ra nel '64, dopo un concerto dell'Arkestra in un loft di Newark, al febbraio '75, quando Boykins si disse finalmente pronto a entrare in studio. Al suo fianco, in quell'occasione, un sestetto di meteore più o meno lucenti (più meno che più) della seconda ...
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