Jazz Articles about Sun Ra

About Sun Ra

Album Review

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

Read "Nothing Is... Completed & Revisited" reviewed by Maurizio Comandini

by Maurizio Comandini
July 11, 2022

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 ...

Album Review

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

Read "Nothing Is... Completed & Revisited" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
March 31, 2022

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 ...

Building a Jazz Library

Sun Ra: Ten Great AfroFuturist Albums

by Chris May
February 22, 2022

With one hundred and twenty five albums to his name, not including reissues, any attempt to compile a Sun Ra Top Ten is a pretty ludicrous endeavour. There is simply too much great music from which to choose and way too much to put to one side. So the honour roll which follows should be regarded not as The Sun Ra Top Ten but one of several. One thing that is indisputable, however, is that each of ...

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: 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 ...

Radio & Podcasts

Size Matters: (Mostly New) Jazz for Big Bands and Orchestras, Part 1

by Ludovico Granvassu
August 3, 2021

More is not always necessarily better, especially in music. However, the proliferation of remarkable jazz big bands and orchestras of the last decade or so is providing plenty of material to prove that quality and quantity can go hand-in-hand. This week we focus on recent releases by some of the most compelling large ensembles around, the exception-to-the-rule being a few older albums that fit with the forward-looking tenor of this music. Happy listening! PlaylistBen Allison Mondo ...

Just For Fun

Sinatra In Vegas With Sun Ra Discovery

by Arthur R George
April 1, 2021

Atomic! Sun Ra and Frank Sinatra at The Sands, a previously unknown 1966 recording of the Intergalactic Navigator onstage with The Chairman of the Board, was released today in a joint venture by Blue Note and Mobile Fidelity. “We didn't know if it was real when we first found these recordings. Had we been had? Or did we have what we thought we had? Was it really what it was?," Don Was, president of Blue Note, wondered about his first ...