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James Jacson
Sun Ra at Inter-Media Arts, 1991
by Howard Mandel
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 ...
read moreSun 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 ...
read moreSun 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 ...
read moreSun Ra: Lanquidity (2 x CD Edition)
by Chris May
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 ...
read moreSun Ra Arkestra: Live In Kalisz 1986
by Ian Patterson
In December 1986, the Sun Ra Arkestra performed at the 13th International Jazz Piano Festival in Kalisz. The Arkestra was making its first ever appearance in Poland and the historic occasion was duly recorded for posterity. The tapes, however, languished in a basement, unloved and forgotten, until they were unearthed over three decades later. Thanks to vinyl specialists Lanquidity Records, they have been remastered and released—on striking yellow vinyl—for the first time. The sound quality isn't always perfect—a couple of ...
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