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Jazz Articles about Sun Ra Arkestra

3
Live Review

Sun Ra Arkestra at SFJAZZ Center

Read "Sun Ra Arkestra at SFJAZZ Center" reviewed by Harry S. Pariser


Sun Ra Arkestra SFJAZZ Center Summer Season San Francisco July 18-21, 2023 Though on the surface, Dead & Company and the Sun Ra Arkestra--the first a Grateful Dead offshoot focusing on rock tunes featuring extended jams, the other an avant-garde jazz ensemble that remains ahead of its time--might seem really different, in fact they share surprising similarities. Both recently performed multi-night concerts in San Francisco. Dead & Company which has inherited The Grateful Dead's ...

10
Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen: Living Sky

Read "Living Sky" reviewed 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, ...

7
Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen: Living Sky

Read "Living Sky" reviewed 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 ...

Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Nothing Is... Completed & Revisited

Read "Nothing Is... Completed & Revisited" reviewed 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 ...

3
Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Nothing Is...Completed & Revisited

Read "Nothing Is...Completed & Revisited" reviewed 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 ...

9
Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Heliocentric Worlds 1 & 2 Revisited

Read "Heliocentric Worlds 1 & 2 Revisited" reviewed 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 ...

10
Album Review

Sun Ra Arkestra: Swirling

Read "Swirling" reviewed 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 ...


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