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Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.
Sinatra In Vegas With Sun Ra Discovery
by Arthur R George
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 ...
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 ...
read moreSpace Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra
by Ian Patterson
Space Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra John F. Szwed 512 Pages ISBN: 978-1-4780-0841-5 Duke University Press 2020 Of all the 20th century jazz figures, perhaps only John Coltrane and Miles Davis have achieved greater cult status than Sun Ra. Unlike Coltrane, Ra lived into old age. And unlike both Coltrane and Davis, Ra is not usually credited with pioneering or leading new directions in jazz. Ra's fame had ...
read moreSun Ra And His Astro Infinity Arkestra: Pathways To Unknown Worlds
by Ian Patterson
To make sense of Sun Ra's teeming discography would require a forensic sensibility. The Alabaman's output was vast, reissues on multiple labels numerous, and the provenance of much of his studio work--the dates, location, personnel etc—is often uncertain. This reissue of Pathways to Unknown Worlds, first released in 1975 on ABC/Impulse!, is a case in point. It's not the first CD reissue of Pathways to Unknown Worlds. In 2000, Evidence released a version that included an untitled five ...
read moreSun Ra's Journey To Moers
by Greg Drusdow
This story first appeared in the 1996 Moers Jazz Festival program. For those who attended the Moers Festival in 1979, they should remember the closing show of the last night as being one of the most exceptional events in the Moers Festival history--the night the Sun Ra Arkestra landed there. Getting Sun Ra to bring the Arkestra was quite a challenge to festival organizer and impresario Burkhard Hennen, since at the Moers Festival in 1978 he ...
read moreSun Ra: Monorails & Satellites: Works For Solo Piano Vols. 1, 2, 3
by John Ephland
Sun Ra as a pianist could be in your parlor, entrancing you with all manner of wistfulness, star-gazing, even a dash of the down-and-dirty via some dusty blues or off-kilter, angular, jagged afterthoughts. In this two-disc solo piano set, the nine selections that make up disc two bring it all back home, the music coalescing in sometimes strange and wonderful ways that, perhaps, give a more intimate look into the man's musical heart. Ending with an at-times dreamy then jaunty, ...
read moreSun Ra: God Is More Than Love Can Ever Be
by Karl Ackermann
Herman Poole Blount, contrary to some urban myths, didn't claim to be born on the planet Saturn but had purportedly been transported there--and back--in his teens. A life shrouded in mystery, it isn't entirely clear when Blount became Sun Ra but it's estimated to be in the early 1940s when he was active on the Chicago jazz scene. Ra was a prodigy, playing piano and composing before he was in his teens. In his lifetime, he released sixty-eight studio albums ...
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