Sun Ra: Space Is The Place (Music From The Original Soundtrack)

The outlandish persona Sun Ra created and maintained for himself over the years may sometimes distract from the adventurous intent of the music he made. Yet it is testament to his vigorous loyalty to both the music as means of communicating his cosmic ideology and the basic tenets of his unconventional means of creativity that neither theme intruded dangerously upon the other during the course of his sixty-some year career.

In a fittingly limited edition run (for both CD and vinyl), Space Is The Place explores the expansive panorama of this idiosyncratic artist's work. With its varied configurations housed inside the smartly-designed pizza-style cardboard box, the two compact discs, a Blu-Ray and a DVD proffer varied perspectives in an intensive examination of Sun Ra's art.

The best order in which to process this content is an open question. Certainly the ideal means for the novice might be to watch the feature-length documentary, then listen to the music as amplification of the impressions therefrom. Then again, a more serendipitous approach would more accurately reflect Sun Ra's work and allow the gleaning of less conventional, but no less valid viewpoints.

In terms of the audio, it is not surprising—and indeed wholly appropriate—that the initial less-than-abstract piece of music on the first compact disc is "Discipline." But in short order the percussion-dominated segments of "Watusa," like the abbreviated interludes of vibes on "Calling Planet Earth," illuminates the overall structure of Sun Ra music. As with "Blackman"/"Love In Outer Space," hearing those cuts, then comprehending the action within, is all a matter of recognizing the pattern(s).

Snippets of spoken words are alternately hints or decoys in that regard. The vocals on CD two are no more of a distraction during this newly-discovered forty-four minutes of content than during the movie. In fact, June Tyson's singing with the Arkestra constitutes clarification of the impetus at the heart of the music (and, actually, Ra's oeuvre in general). Including a bonus track, "The Idea of the Greater Age," The Mathematics of The Altered Destiny embodies a soundtrack to the film more cogent than the title disc itself.

A more direct complement is the prose dominating the twenty-eight pages of the enclosed booklet. Scholarly writing amplifies the impact of the roughly one-hundred twenty minutes of film, while the nearly sixty-minutes of 'extras,' comprising a half-dozen short films, mirror the rabid devotion the man's work inspired in his followers.

To that end, placing Ra's work in a context historical as well as practical, the various pieces exhumed from the Modern Harmonic label archives are devoted to the archiving of Sun Ra's work.

Nevertheless, this stream of psychedelic effects, trading in greater and lesser cliche, may be where headphones will come in handy, all the better to fully experience the sonic expertise of producer/curator Bob Irwin, not to mention this release's producer Jay Millar.

Interspersed with poetry and no small amount of levity, there is only the most oblique narrative to the Space Is The Place film itself. In fact, without the musical performance interludes, it might qualify as a purely nonsensical self-indulgence, depending on how much whimsy the viewer is willing to allow him/herself in watching and listening.

Still, as a potentially viable alternative, a complete concert on video might well confound as much as edify. At least the animated sequences within this one hundred twenty-some minutes carry some measure of humor, even as they are juxtaposed with sci-fi themes as well as references connoting environmentalism, racial equality and economic injustice.

In the end, the most open-minded music-lovers might quibble with Sun Ra's approach to his multi-media art, but there is no denying his fierce and unwavering commitment to it. Such artistic allegiance may well be the very source of his followers' own, a premise fully in play on Space Is The Place.

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