Sun Ra Sunday

Sun Ra: Heliocentric Worlds Vol.3: The Lost Tapes (ESP-Disk’ 4002)

In 2005, ESP-Disk’ released Heliocentric Worlds Vol.3: The Lost Tapes, purported to be unreleased material recorded at the November 16, 1965 session that produced Heliocentric Worlds Vol.2. After some close listening, I am pretty certain this date is incorrect, although some of this material might have been recorded at the April 20th session for Heliocentric Worlds, Vol.1 (but then again, maybe not). Confusing? Yes! But these are the eternal mysteries of Mr. Ra! Nevertheless, the discovery of previously unheard music from the nineteen-sixties makes this CD essential listening for the Ra-fanatic.

“Intercosmosis” is another expansive, 18-minute conducted improvisation wherein Gilmore establishes a terse melodic cell that is subsequently passed around the Arkestra in small concertino groupings punctuated with acappella horn solos and cued “space chords.” Meanwhile, the rhythm section lays down a propulsive free-tempo groove that enters and exits on cue – but the percussion is mostly held in reserve so that the relentless motion is internalized and carried forward by the chamber-music-like instrumentation. Ra plays densely arpeggiated piano throughout and the piece climaxes with an extended alto saxophone duel between Marshall Allen and Danny Davis which gives way to an almost-pretty piano interlude, with Pat Patrick blowing beautiful, breathy baritone saxophone. The rest of the ensemble enters with an improvised coda before a conducted ending. Was this recorded on November 16th? Admittedly, the piece shares a conceptual similarity to “The Sun Myth,” but the unmistakable presence of Danny Davis is troubling since he is not audible on the other Heliocentric Worlds Vol.2 material. Also conspicuously absent is the Selmer Clavioline, whose electronic whine defined the sound of that album. Finally, the presence of subtle reverb effects suggests the presence of Tommy Hunter, which would require an earlier recording date. Some have speculated this track was recorded at one of the When Angels Speak of Love sessions and, further, that When Angels Speak of Love was recorded later than 1963 as posited by Prof. Campbell. Who knows? Regardless, it is classic long-form Ra material.

It is plausible that the remainder of the CD was recorded at the April 20th session, with Ra on bass marimba, piano, and electric celeste and the prominence of trombones and tympani. The fragmentary “Mythology Metamorphosis” opens with tumultuous trap drums and hand percussion to which Boykins adds some thrumming bass. Ra enters on the bass marimba while Marshall Allen plays sinuous oboe. The instruments drop out leaving Ra to rumble around on the bass marimba until Boykins enters with an insistent bass figure to which Allen replies with a brief oboe phrase. At the four-minute mark, clattering percussion re-enters just before the track cuts off. “Heliocentric Worlds” is a showcase for Ra’s orchestral piano and electric celeste playing with only bass, trap drums and booming tympani to provide intermittently dramatic accompaniment. “World Worlds” is an interesting ballad form, obviously rigorously composed (if somewhat raggedly performed). After a piano/celeste introduction with bowed bass pedal, thick blocks of dissonant chords blare forth from the full ensemble, rich with trombones, saxophones, flute, and trumpet. Over a gently swinging pulse, brief solo statements hew closely to the weirdly shifting chord changes until the big, held ensemble chords return with a brassy trumpet lead to end. After repeated listenings, this piece sounds vaguely familiar – was it ever recorded again under a different title?

The final track, “Interplanetary Travelers” is actually an alternate take of “Other Worlds” from Heliocentric Worlds Vol.1 which first appeared on the 1989 Blast First compilation, Out There a Minute. However, Prof. Campbell dates this to the April-May 1965 session that yielded side-2 of The Magic City, creating yet more discographical confusion. In any event, this track is a stunner, a full-throttled New Thing-style blowout with lots of two-fisted piano/celeste action, intensely wailing horns, and hard-driving drums. Is it possible that Heliocentric Worlds Vol.1, side-2 of The Magic City and tracks 2-5 of Heliocentric Worlds Vol.3 were all recorded at the same session on April 20, 1965? For that matter, is it possible that When Angels Speak of Love was also recorded during this time period? The stylistic resemblances are striking and, taken together, all of this music demonstrates how intently Ra was developing his composed improvisational approach in the mid-nineteen-sixties. Heliocentric Worlds Vol.3 adds another fascinating piece to the puzzle, yet ultimately raises more questions than it answers.

Playlist 5-30-09

* J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol.1 (Richard Egarr) (Harmonia Mundi 2CD)
* Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment: Corn Exchange, Brighton, UK 3/4/09 (FM/CD-R)
* Ensemble Baroque de Limoges: Brussels Conservatory, Belgium 11/2/08 (FM/CD-R)
* Mendelssohn: Songs without Words (Lívia Rév) (Hyperion 2CD)
* Grant Green: Idle Moments (Blue Note CD)
* Grant Green: Street of Dreams (Blue Note CD)
* Bill Frisell: Good Dog, Happy Man (Nonesuch CD)
* David S. Ware Quartet: Shakti (AUM Fidelity CD)
* Anthony Braxton: Four Compositions (GTM) 2006 (Important 4CD)
* The Red Crayola: The Parable of Arable Land (Charly CD)
* Bob Dylan: Street Legal (Columbia SACD)
* Bob Dylan: Together Through Life (Columbia 2LP/CD)
* Emmylou Harris: All I Intended to Be (Nonesuch CD)
* Big Star: Radio City (Fantasy SACD)
* Fleetwood Mac: Tusk (Warner Bros. – Japan 2 LP)
* Robert Pollard: From a Compound Eye (Merge 2LP)
* Sonic Youth: Sonic Nurse (Geffen 2LP)
* Spiritualized: Songs in A&E (Sanctuary CD)
* Tool: Ænima (Zoo CD)

Joe Morris / Lowell Davidson

While we were in New York City last month, I went with a friend to see the Joe Morris Trio at The Stone on April 3rd. I had been aware of Morris since way back when I lived in Boston, but was always kind of lukewarm about him if only because he plays (mostly) electric guitar yet eschews all attendant electrical aspects: no distortion; no effects; no feedback, no reverb. And he seldom bends a string or plays more than one (cleanly articulated) note at a time. Now, I always especially liked his Singularity record on AUM Fidelity, since the solo acoustic guitar set did not raise any unrealistic expectations of how I think the instrument should sound. But I also understand that my own biases and expectations can often be an unnecessary impediment to my enjoyment of music that tweaks those biases and expectations. So, I really was excited to see him perform live. We sat in the front row, not three feet from Morris, where I could closely observe what he was doing. The trio, consisting of Morris on electric guitar (a Washburn semi-hollowbody through a small Fender amp), Steve Lantner on piano, and Luther Gray on drums, played three long improvisations in the generous, seventy-five minute set. I was immediately blown away by Morris’s ability to spin endlessly intricate lines across such vast expanses of time, and, watching him play, I came to appreciate the subtlety of his technique: the widely variable range between dampened and ringing strings is always expertly controlled and deeply expressive, even at the fastest tempos. And when he did choose to play more than one note at a time, the effect was thrilling, at times intensely cathartic – there was a long moment during the second piece where the room seemed to levitate. It was an enormously satisfying concert and I have since been listening to his records with new, welcoming ears.

They were selling CDs at the door so, before the concert, I picked up Anthony Braxton/Joe Morris: Four Improvisations (Duo) 2007 (Clean Feed CF 100) at a very reasonable price. I was already a committed Braxton fan and, besides, I thought maybe I could get Morris to sign it. After the set, and nearly awestruck, I nervously approached him with my request and he was actually most gracious about it. We chatted a bit and I told him I thought he had a unique way of playing the electric guitar. He replied that he was trying to play the guitar like a horn, “like Jimmy Lyons.” I thought that was a revealing comment and it resonated with my own sudden revelations. As for the Braxton/Morris box set, well, it’s over four hours of music and I have only listened to it all the way through twice. I can only say it is beautiful, very compelling music, downright lyrical at times. Having never played together prior to this recording, it is remarkable how attuned they are to each other and how fearless their epic improvisations. I usually prefer to hear Braxton playing his own compositions rather than just freely improvising, but, as Braxton himself points out in the liner notes: “even though [the music is] improvised, it has a very strong compositional dimension to it in the sense of movement through time and space and interaction dynamics between the two of us.” Indeed, the music never feels ad hoc or static, but consciously develops a deep-form structure over each of the hour-long improvisations. Morris is a perfect foil for Braxton’s excursions on the full range of saxophones, contrabass to sopranino, unfurling a variety of approaches from single-note counterpoint to almost-jazzy chordal accompaniment. OK, I’m sold. If Joe Morris can successfully go toe-to-toe with Mr. Braxton, then he truly is a master musician!

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The following day, my friend and I went to the world’s greatest record store (for us fans of weirdo avant-garde music anyway), Downtown Music Gallery. While spending a good long while combing the racks and chatting with Bruce and Mike, they put on a CD consisting of some squiggly acoustic guitar, achingly strained bowed bass, and…trombone?! It was totally gripping.

RGC: What is this?!
BLG: MVP – LSD – it just came out.
RGC: Wow! Joe Morris?! We just saw him last night and I wouldn’t have even recognized him! I gotta get this!

So, onto the growing pile of CDs it went. But it wasn’t until I returned home that I could really examine what I had: MVP – LSD: The Graphic Scores of Lowell Skinner Davidson (Riti CD10). MVP is Joe Morris on guitar, John Voigt on bass, and Tom Plsek on trombone. LSD is, of course, pianist/multi-instrumentalist/composer Lowell Skinner Davidson. The disc consists of ten compositions by Davidson (and one group improvisation) and it is every bit as wonderful as I remembered it. I am kind of ashamed to admit I had never heard of Lowell Davidson before now. Born in 1941, he was a Harvard-educated biochemist who jeopardized his post-graduate scholarship by traveling to New York to play piano with Ornette Coleman in the 1960s. He recorded one LP for ESP-Disk’ in 1965 (see below) but, shortly thereafter, was badly injured in a lab accident that radically curtailed his burgeoning music career. Davidson managed to remain semi-active on the fringes of the Boston music scene in the nineteen-seventies and eighties where Morris, Voigt, and Plsek worked with him until Davidson’s death in 1990.

According to Morris’s liner notes, Davidson drew on his background as a biochemist in his music: “He often declared that new sounds had the capacity to reformulate the biochemistry of the brain. He was sure that had to happen with music and that there was no point in playing music that didn’t reach for that result.” To facilitate this goal, Davidson relied (in part) on a self-conceived system of graphic notation. The compositions featured here were written on 3x5 notecards, with arbitrary staves “that veer off somewhere or fade off the card completely,” amorphous blobs of proportional noteheads, and swathes of richly evocative color. The seeming dichotomy between composition and improvisation is squarely addressed through the use of these graphic scores. Morris says: “They offer the player a specific guide toward randomness and imagination, a requirement that they be read as regular notation, but that the results find a balance between melodic line and pure sound.” The music is something more than mere free improvisation with each piece cohering into a cogent, unified whole that is no doubt the result of the musician’s focused concentration on an external stimulus – even if that stimulus is utterly abstract and deliberately non-specific. Each player explores a range of extended techniques from Morris’s plinking and scraping, Voigt’s sul ponticello bowing, and Plesk’s gurgling and buzzing mutes; but such extremes are balanced with more conventional instrumental approaches and a delicate, selfless approach to chamber-like ensemble dynamics. Listening to this hour-plus-long CD is a contemplative, prayerful, experience. Or, rather, this is music that may indeed alter the biochemistry of the brain as Davidson intended. Morris decribes Davidson’s too-short life as “a psychedelic-like search, pondering light and darkness, the constructs of the Universe, and a way of expressing them with music.” With this exquisite CD, MVP has realized Davidson’s most profound, evolutionary ambitions.

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Naturally intrigued by the MVP disc, I soon thereafter picked up Lowell Davidson’s sole commercially available recording at Nashville’s finest record store, Grimey’s. Lowell Davidson Trio (ESP-Disk’ 1012) was recorded on July 27, 1965 thanks to the efforts of Ornette Coleman, who somehow convinced Bernard Stollman to sign Davidson to the fledgling label without so much as an audition. Accompanying him on this date are ESP label-mates, Gary Peacock (bass) and Milford Graves (drums) to comprise a typical piano trio that is anything but typical. Unfortunately, the sound quality is dry, boxy, closed in and, at times, downright distorted, with Graves’s extended kit swamped by bloated, ill-defined bass frequencies. Even so, Davidson’s uniquely brilliant musical conception is plainly apparent. At times, his piano playing reminds me of Andrew Hill, with his smeared notes, short-breathed phrasing and a harmonic sensibility that balances "in" and "out," tonal and atonal, "free" and composed. But, unlike Hill, Davidson is already wholly emancipated from any kind of “jazz tradition” and his compositions explore color, timbre, and gesture in a way that is sui generis. Much of the music is loosely modal and balletic in its rhythmic conception: flitting, leaping, and pirouetting here, stomping and stamping there; single-note runs alternating with blocky, chordal tuttis; grand, tremulous statements alternating with scumbled, scampering figuration. In this way, his approach resembles Cecil Taylor’s, but, again, the music sounds nothing like Taylor and points to a “third way” that is unprecedented. Peacock and Graves provide supple, sensitive, but at times overly-aggressive accompaniment, although the rough sound quality drastically distorts the instrumental balance. Davidson apparently led a working trio with David Izenson on bass and Paul Motian on drums around this time and it would be interesting to hear their (undoubtedly more intimately familiar) interpretations of this material. Quibbles aside, one should be grateful that this lone document of Lowell Davidson’s genius survives and, as such, it is unreservedly recommended. According to the liner notes, ESP-Disk’ is negotiating the release of Davidson’s self-produced cassettes from the nineteen-seventies and eighties and one hopes that this will come to fruition. It would go a long way towards rectifying the sad neglect of this visionary artist.

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So, thank you, Mr. Morris – not only for your own superb musicianship – but also for exposing me to the music of Mr. Lowell Skinner Davidson!

Sun Ra Sunday

I'm taking a little break for the holiday. In the meantime, check out this WILD performance of “The Shadow World” from West Berlin circa. 1986. The Arkestra literally tears up the stage. Any ideas of the exact date of this performance?

Playlist 5-22-09

Here’s an idea I’ve been toying with. A friend of mine will sometimes ask me, “So what are you listening to?” And I often have to stop and think. I listen to a lot of music. I have an iPod for the car and a thirty-minute minimum commute each way every day. At home, I have thousands of records. I can’t see keeping up a complete list, but here are some things that stood out this past week:

* J.S. Bach: Brandenburg Concertos (AAM/Egarr) (Harmonia Mundi 2SACD)
* J.S. Bach: Violin Sonatas (Manze/Egarr/Linden) (Harmonia Mundi 2CD)
* Mary Halvorson: Crackleknob (hatOLOGY CD)
* Anthony Braxton: Seven Compositions (Trio) 1989 (hatOLOGY CD)
* Anthony Braxton: Quartet (GTM) 2006 (Important 4CD)
* Bob Dylan: Together Through Life (Columbia LP/CD)
* Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisted (mono) (Sundazed LP)
* Grateful Dead: To Terrapin: Hartford ’77 (GD/Rhino 3CD)

More Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren should be Secretary of the Treasury.

With Bill Maher:



With Charlie Rose:

Sun Ra Sunday

Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra: Heliocentric Worlds, Vol.2 (ESP-Disk’ 1017)

Recorded at RLA Sound Studios, New York, NY November 16, 1965
Originally released in 1966

Less than seven months after recording Heliocentric Worlds Vol.1, a smaller, eight-piece Arkestra returned to RLA Sound Studios to record Volume 2. “The Sun Myth” is another epic-length directed improvisation based upon a two-note figure that is freely extrapolated by the ensemble across eighteen highly variegated minutes. Anchored throughout by Boykins’s sliding, microtonal bass, Ra starts out by banging on tuned bongos and a cymbal before moving to the piano/Clavioline combo. Energy and intensity levels rise and fall with brief horn solos, duets, and trios that come and go, always yielding to the buzzing Clavioline and singing arco bass. According to Campbell, this track has been mastered three different ways:

(1) The original release (mono and stereo) had African singing throughout the piece, mixed as loud as the instrumental parts […] (2) The original release was quickly withdrawn and replaced with a more common variant in which the African voices are mixed way down and can be faintly heard at the beginning and end […] (3) The final remastering removed the African voices entirely (2nd ed. p. 122).

Interesting! Were these vocals added in some kind of primitive overdub? After all, this album was recorded in a low-budget studio in 1965! I have only ever heard the final, instrumental version and I can’t even imagine what this track would sound like with “African vocals.”

“A House of Beauty” is a strangely beautiful piece. It opens with Marshall Allen on silvery piccolo and Ra on the monophonic Clavioline. Boykins enters with the bow while Ra adds a fourth voice on piano. Eventually, piano and pizzicato bass improvise a lushly tonal ballad form supported by some soft percussion. Clavioline and piccolo return with some busy free-tempo counterpoint until a held Clavioline tone and arco bass figures bring things to a gentle close. The album ends with the aptly-titled “Cosmic Chaos,” a fifteen-minute New Thing-styled group improv punctuated with virtuosic acappella turns by Pat Patrick on baritone saxophone, Gilmore on tenor saxophone and Robert Cummings on bass clarinet. Ra is back on tuned bongos and cymbal, generating complex polyrhythms against Roger Blank’s roiling trap drums while Walter Miller blows some exciting post-bop trumpet. Curiously, what sounds to me like electronically processed bells peal in the background throughout. What is making that sound?! Is it Tommy Hunter’s echo-machine? The piece decisively ends with a grouping of obviously conducted “space chords.”

Ultimately, Heliocentric Worlds Vol.2 is a bit less focused and not quite as compelling as either Vol.1 or The Magic City, but it still retains an air of mysterious discovery. The album cover, on the other hand, is a classic of the period with an antique illustration of the solar system perched above pictures of archaic scientists: Leonardo, Copernicus, Galileo, and Tycho Brahe. In the middle are portraits of Pythagoras and Sun Ra himself, “calling attention to Sun Ra’s links to the Greek astronomer-mathematician-musician who studied in Egypt, and who formed a brotherhood which attempted to purify their souls to allow the initiates to escape the ‘wheel of birth’ and to aid them in the transmigration of the soul after the death of the body” (Szwed p.217). Perfect!

Keeping Up With Robert Pollard (Spring 2009 edition)

Boston Spaceships: The Planets Are Blasted (GBV, Inc. 5) (LP/CD) The ever-prolific Robert Pollard started 2009 off with a sprint with January’s very fine The Crawling Distance and, in March, this quickly-assembled sophomore LP from his new band, Boston Spaceships. I have to admit, The Planets Are Blasted took a little while to grow on me. I excitedly cleaned and played the LP when it arrived in the mail and I enjoyed it well enough but from then on I only listened to the CD or on the iPod in the car. And it just wasn’t registering – until recently, that is, when I pulled out the LP again and gave it a close listen. This is a common phenomenon with Pollard because his records always have a carefully sequenced Side One and Side Two, with their own essential cohesiveness. That enforced pause when you have to get up and flip the record over allows one to contemplate and come to grasp the intra-song coherence of Pollard’s vision. Here, Side 1 flows with creamy pop (“Dorothy’s a Planet,” “Catherine From Mid-October”) and anthemic rock (“Canned Food Demon,” “Headache Revolution”) while Side 2 bristles with proggy, post-punk edginess (“UFO Love Letters,” “Sight On Sight,” “Heavy Crown”). Listened to all at once, the effect is diffused and disorienting; but as discrete sides, the songs gain tangible context that is inevitably lost in the relentless flow of the CD. The production is notably less polished overall than last fall’s Brown Submarine, but somehow that adds to the charm. While maybe not top-tier stuff, The Planets Are Blasted is yet another example of Pollard’s limitless capacity for tossed-off brilliance. Check out a free mp3 of the mini-epic, “Big O Gets an Earful” here.

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Boston Spaceships: “Headache Revolution” (HJRR 21) (7”) Continuing Pollard’s recent (and welcome, in my opinion) decision to revisit his vast catalog of rough demos and give them the full-blown rock band treatment, “Headache Revolution” is the obvious choice for the (imaginary) “hit single” from The Planets Are Blasted. Pollard’s wispy original demo can be heard on Suitcase 2 and the Spaceship’s treatment is an improvement in every respect. The 33rpm B-side presents three quirky LP outtakes. “Dementia Is Rising” starts out with bouncy, up-and-down acoustic guitar and an accusatory vocal that erupts into some Chrome-like deconstructionist noise at the chorus. “Take That Off (And Put This On)” romps around with just the kind of cock-rock swagger you would expect from such a title. Pollard knows what he likes -- and what he doesn’t! Finally, “7 Is the Hot Noose” twitches with a 1980s New Wave yelp complete with cheesy Syndrum fills. It ends before it ever begins. Inessential, but fun.

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Circus Devils: Gringo (HJRR 22) (LP/CD)
Gringo is billed as “an acoustic song cycle with a 1970’s Morricone-esque Southwestern flavor.” Well, OK. Despite the Circus Devils’ reputation for electrified, twisted and distorted weirdness, the acoustic guitar is not exactly unheard of. Still, there is a definite mood to this record that is unique and I guess “Morricone-esque” is as good a word as any to describe it. Rather than indulging in the usual psycho-sci-fi art-rock the Circus Devils are known for, Gringo feels almost wistfully sentimental and decidedly earth-bound. In fact, some of these songs would not sound out of place on Pollard’s recent solo records – but then something strange will occur: especially eccentric wordplay, a sudden lurching dissonance in the bridge, or a tense swell of atmospheric effects will signal that, yes, this really is the Circus Devils. The term “song cycle” is appropriate as well, with vague themes running throughout the album that culminate in the penultimate song, “Gasoline Drinkers.” That’s not to say it makes any real narrative sense – Pollard’s lyrics are as elliptical and obtuse as ever, something about prisons, ants, witches and some vile concoction called “hot water wine.” But as a whole, Gringo works perfectly and exudes a warmth and emotional directness that is frankly unusual for a Circus Devils album. Certainly, Gringo is by far the most accessible Circus Devils record yet and a fine place to stick your toe if you’re curious. And, again, the LP is where it’s at with its “euphonic distortion” and enforced entr’acte; but the CD is cool too. Check out a free mp3 of “Before It Walks” here.

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All are available at better record stores or directly from Rockathon. Or purchase mp3 files at Fina, if that’s your thing.

Sun Ra Sunday

Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra: The Magic City (Evidence ECD 22069)

Recorded somewhere in New York City, NY April/May/September 1965
Originally released as El Saturn LPB 711 in 1966

Sun Ra often claimed he was not from this planet but from Saturn, sent to Earth on a mission to help save humanity from itself. But in 1914, Herman “Sonny” Poole Blount was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Nicknamed “The Magic City” for its booming economic growth at the turn of the century, Birmingham was, of course, also the scene of harsh racial injustices which eventually erupted into violence and protest during the civil rights movement. Sonny left Birmingham for Chicago in 1946, legally changed his name to Sun Ra, and never looked back. Yet Sun Ra retained some affection for his hometown, composing such homages as “Magic City Blues,” “The Place of Five Points,” and “West End Side of Magic City” and regularly performed “Stars Fell on Alabama” and “Alabama” in concert. Sonny admitted to MTV’s Michael Shore that “The Magic City” was indeed about Birmingham and listening to it, one can sense Ra’s conflicted ambivalence towards his subject. At almost thirty minutes, it is Ra’s magnum opus and, while comparable in scope and ambition to Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (Atlantic) (1960) and John Coltrane’s Ascension (Impulse!) (1965), “The Magic City” sounds nothing like either of them. Disavowing the churning rhythms and fire-breathing onslaughts typical of “The New Thing,” “The Magic City” maintains a chamber-music-like intimacy and reserve with horn duos and trios forming and dissolving around Boykins’s arco bass, Ra’s fleet piano work and the reedy whine of the Selmer Clavioline. Only near the end does the full ensemble briefly engage in some full-throated, high-energy group improvisation. Szwed astutely points out that “Sun Ra’s Music often attempts to completely integrate the soloists with the ensemble to make a single statement” (p. 214) and “The Magic City” is a perfect example of this attempt. Gilmore stated that the piece was never performed in concert because it was “unreproduceable, a tapestry of sound” (Id.).

Ra had been working with the material that would become “The Shadow World” at least as far back as “The Outer Heavens” (on Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow) and it appears in rough form on Sun Ra Featuring Pharoah Sanders and Black Harold (there titled, “The World Shadow”). Here, the fiendishly difficult composition gets its first complete performance. A complex unison melody for saxophones is set off against a 7/4 rhythm and Ra’s contrary, angular piano. After a brief series of solos, saxophones return with the melody while trumpet states the counter-melody originally intimated by the piano. Szwed writes: “Sun Ra took considerable pleasure from the agitated difficulty of the piece, and noted that once during a rehearsal for a French TV show the producer was so disturbed by it that he threatened to cancel the show if they insisted on playing it” (p. 215). “The Shadow World” would become a fixture of the Arkestra’s live sets going forward, often performed at impossibly fast tempos.

“Abstract Eye” and “Abstract I” appear to be different takes of the same piece and, according to the discography, there is a twelve-inch test-pressing from Variety Recording Services in existence where the pieces are entitled, “Abstract Experiment Take 1” and “Abstract Experiment Take 2” (Campbell, 2nd ed, p. 119). This reinforces my suspicion that these tracks might be rehearsals for what would become “Heliocentric” and “Outer Nothingness” on Heliocentric Worlds Vol.1. They share the same, bottom-heavy instrumentation of bass, bass marimba, tympani, and braying trombones with piccolo and trumpet providing extreme high-register contrast. The feeling here is a little more extroverted with the saxophones taking a more prominent role in the proceedings, but they are notably similar in structure with flittering solo statements set against rumbling bass marimba, pounding tympani, and singing arco bass. Very interesting.

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Another track from these sessions entitled, “Other Worlds,” is available on the 1989 Blast First compilation, Out There a Minute.

Elizabeth Warren Rocks!

Elizabeth Warren is the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel which oversees TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). She is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard University. She is also the author of The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (Basic 2003) and All Your Worth: The Lifetime Money Plan (Simon & Schuster 2005). Her recent media appearances have been refreshing change from the obfuscation and projection of the past couple of decades. She is smart, frankly outspoken, charming and witty yet deadly serious. Her sparring with the smarmy, self-serving hosts of Tech Ticker is, as John Stewart puts it, “financial chicken soup.” Elizabeth Warren rocks!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Elizabeth Warren Pt. 1
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Elizabeth Warren Pt. 2
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Sun Ra Sunday

Sun Ra: The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra Vol.1 (ESP-Disk’ 1014)

Recorded at RLA Studio, New York, NY on April 20, 1965

By March of 1965, Gilmore was back in the fold and in April the Arkestra headed into RLA Studio to record their first LP for ESP-Disk’. Buoyed by the modest successes of the October Revolution and the prospect of wider recognition offered by the fledgling but ambitious record label, Ra expanded upon the experimentation of the Choreographer’s Workshop period to make Heliocentric Worlds Vol.1 a defining statement.

Consisting mostly of the kinds of conducted improvisations that Ra had been developing over the past year or so, Heliocentric Worlds Vol.1 retains a similarly ultra-modern chamber music feel throughout. Often the highest and lowest registers of the ensemble are emphasized with piercing trumpet and piccolo set off in stark relief against the rumblings of trombone, bass trombone, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, tympani, bass, and Ra himself on bass marimba (!). At other times, Ra plays piano and electric celeste simultaneously with stunning two-handed polyphony or the horns improvise wildly swinging anti-bop figures. But the music is more about contrasting textures than solos and accompaniment and there is a remarkable diversity of material approaches in each piece: densely orchestrated “space chords” rise and fall, percussion pounds or falls back, horn solos come and go in an instant. The music is dissonant and intense one minute, serene and contemplative the next. Even so, the music sustains a consistently mysterious mood, an air of tense expectancy that makes the diverse strains of out-and-out weirdness cohere into a enormously compelling, vibrant whole.

While the music appears to be totally improvised, Ra is clearly in control. Regarding these sessions, Marshall Allen described Ra’s approach to conducted improvisation:

Sun Ra would go to the studio and he would play something, the bass would come in, and if he didn’t like it he’d stop it, and he’d give the drummer a particular rhythm, tell the bass he wanted not a “boom boom boom” but something else, and then he’d begin to try out the horns, we’re all standing therewondering what’s next…

I just picked up the piccolo and worked with what was going on, what moods they set, or what feeling they had. A lot of things we’d be rehearsing and we did the wrong things and Sun Ra stopped the arrangement and changed it. Or he would change the person who was playing the particular solo, so that changes the arrangement. So the one that was soloing would get another part given to him personally. ‘Cos he knew people. He could understand what you could do better so he would fit that with what he would tell you (quoted in Szwed, p. 216).

Despite Gilmore’s brief defection and return, the Arkestra executes Ra’s vision of disciplined freedom with dedication and astonishing precision. As Szwed points out, “[t]he Arkestra at this point had such confidence in what they were doing that the rest of the group could suddenly drop away in the moment to reveal a cymbal solo or a bass and tympani duo” (Id.). Horns resolutely enter and exit with succinct, emphatic statements that move the music inexorably forward (or outward) while the rhythm section ebbs and flows in natural reaction (or in deliberate opposition). Throughout it all, Ra provides deft direction, through his playing and by signaling his intentions to the musicians. No note is wasted. There are no empty gestures or tossed off cliches. The music is not merely episodic as Ra builds complex yet satisfyingly unified edifices upon the accretion of discrete, semi-autonomous events. As many times as I’ve listened to this record, it always sounds fresh, revealing deeper insights with each listen. All of my attempts at a track-by-track analysis have been woefully inadequate to elucidate the elusive magic of The Heliocentric Worlds. The music simply defies my meager descriptions and must be experienced to be even remotely (mis)understood.

Heliocentric Worlds Vol. 1 is rightfully considered a landmark recording and belongs in every serious record collection. It has remained pretty much consistently available (either legitimately or on bootleg editions) since the day it was released and its appearance transformed Sun Ra from the obscure Lower East Side eccentric into his rightful role as the globe-trotting emissary of interplanetary music. Heliocentric Worlds, Vol. 1 is, in a word, a masterpiece, but just one of a series of extraordinary recordings that Ra would make during this period.

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COSMIC EQUATION

Then another tomorrow
They never told me of
Came with the abruptness
Of a fiery dawn
And spoke of Cosmic Equations:
The equations of sight-similarity
The equations of sound-similarity

Subtle Living Equations
Clear only to those
Whose wish is to be attuned
To the vibrations
Of the Outer Cosmic Worlds.

Subtle living equations
Of the outer-realms
Dear only to those
Who wish fervently the greater life.

-- Sun Ra, 1965

Sun Ra Sunday

Sun Ra Featuring Pharoah Sanders & Black Herald (ESP 4054)

Recorded live at Judson Hall in New York, NY on December 31, 1964.
Portions originally released as Saturn JHNY-165 in 1976.

With little paying work for the Arkestra, John Gilmore quit the band in August 1964 to tour the world with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. This could have been a crushing blow to Sun Ra, if not for his involvement in the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild and its predecessors. Trumpeter/composer Bill Dixon had been putting on performances at the Cellar Café on West 91st Street and these efforts developed into the legendary “October Revolution in Jazz.” These concerts drew large crowds to hear the cream of the “New Thing,” including Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Jimmy Giuffre, Andrew Hill, Steve Lacy, and others who would go on to define the cutting edge of avant garde jazz. Shortly thereafter, Dixon and Taylor decided to form a cooperative called the Jazz Composers Guild which would promote the new music while seeking an economic alternative to the exploitive nightclub system. Sun Ra and the Arkestra were quick to join and two months later, the Guild mounted series of concerts at Judson Hall called “Four Nights in December,” the last of which featured Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Portions of that concert are presented on this recently re-issued CD on ESP-Disk.

Sonny had known Farrell “Little Rock” Sanders since 1962, when Sanders was working as a waiter at the Gene Harris Playhouse (where the Arkestra was playing to miniscule audiences). Ra took him in and gave him some clothes and suggested he take on the name, “Pharoah.” By the time Gilmore split, Sanders was ready to join the band and you can hear that he’s already developed the blisteringly intense sound quality that would make him famous with John Coltrane’s band. Not much is known about Black Harold a/k/a Harold Murray a/k/a Sir Harold a/k/a Brother Atu a/k/a Atu Murray, etc. except that he played flute and a big, hand-carved drum with Sun Ra during this brief period. This recording is the only known document of Pharoah’s and Black Harold’s tenure with the Arkestra.

The rest of the personnel for this concert are kind of a mystery. The liner notes to this new CD give the following: Sun Ra: piano, celeste; Pharoah Sanders: tenor sax; Black Harold (Harold Murray): flute, log drum; Al Evans: trumpet; Teddy Nance: trombone; Marshall Allen: alto sax; Pat Patrick: baritone sax; Alan Silva: bass; Ronnie Boykins: bass; Cliff Jarvis: drums; Jimmhi Johnson: drums; and Art Jenkins: space voice. Prof. Campbell (2d ed.) adds Chris Capers on trumpet; Bernard Pettaway on trombone; Robert Northern on French horn; Danny Davis on alto sax, flute, and percussion; and Robert Cummings on bass clarinet but he omits Boykins. It is definitely a largish Arkestra, though they rarely all play at the same time, so it’s hard to tell. I do hear Cummings’s bass clarinet and, after repeated listening, I believe there are two bassists on this gig.

The CD starts out with nearly forty-five minutes of previously unissued material from this New Year’s Eve concert recorded in stereo. The brief “Cosmic Interpretation” opens the proceedings with some frenetic solo piano that outlines a vague tonal center. Ra then moves to the chiming celeste while the arco bass gets increasingly busy. Solo bass plays a jagged ostinato figure to introduce “The Other World” where Pharoah is well into his fire-breathing modus operandi. The first several minutes features some intense “New Thing” styled group improvisation. Pat Patrick takes brilliant accapella baritone sax solo, until trumpet joins in for a duet. After a less-than-convincing return to the pummeling free-jazz feel, things just sort of peter out at about the six minute mark yielding an incredibly lengthy, and rather pointless drum solo. At about the nineteen minute mark (!), trombone leads the horns back in for some honking and shrieking to introduce the space chant, “The Second Stop is Jupiter,” while the bass returns to the jagged ostinato figure. Some one emphatically declaims: “All out for Jupiter!” and the cacophonous horns return with trombone once again leading the way. After a while, all drop out for, yes, more drums! Thankfully, the track fades out after only another minute or so.

“The Now Tomorrow” begins with a lovely setting for piano and flutes in bittersweet harmony. Bowed bass enters and then things start to get weird when Marshall Allen takes a labyrinthine turn on oboe along with what sounds like a second oboe or soprano saxophone joining in along the way. And perhaps there are two basses sawing away here? I think so! Ra enters with rumbling piano to a smattering of applause. Ra plays intricate, contrasting figures on piano and celeste simultaneously until the horns (including bass clarinet) play fragments of the original harmonies to end. This is a very interesting piece of music.

On “Discipline 9,” Ra starts out with a twisty piano intro for some yearning horn figures that hover and glide over a stumbling ballad tempo. Two altos and bass clarinet twirl around the meandering rhythm while trombone interjects clipped statements here and there. Ra then establishes the brooding three-note vamp of “We Travel the Spaceways” which the rest of the band takes up in song. The horn break in this version is particularly loose, fragile, and hauntingly beautiful. The rhythm section settles into a comfortable groove while Art Jenkins does his “space voice” thing. The rest of the Arkestra takes up percussion instruments before the reprise of the singing and horn break. Someone blows ceremonially into a large conch shell while sleigh bells jingle…some applause…is it over? Then the bass riff returns and the applause dies down. Gentle percussion pitter-patters until a big conducted “space chord” charges in full of honking and wailing and pounding drums. Then the bass riff starts up again with flutes and trumpet dancing around. It sounds like they’re marching off the stage leaving only bass to end.

The original Saturn LP (recorded in mono) follows. “Gods on a Safari” showcases some furious two-handed piano action from Ra and some abstract ensemble figures all which quickly subsides leaving some slip-sliding arco bass(es?) and the quiet tinkling of bells. Ra takes over with some slyly dissonant piano solo that launches into the roiling up-tempo drive of “The World Shadow.” The piano and rhythm section build up the agitated feeling similar to “The Shadow World” with Pharoah approximating the knotty melody, but it sounds tenuous. Eventually, he glides into more of his leather-lunged multi-phonics and extreme over-blowing. Pealing trumpet takes over as the rhythm becomes ever more intense and abstract. Suddenly, there is a relaxation of tension, leaving some polyrhythmic percussion and a droning conch shell. More space voice warblings from Jenkins follow until Ra enters on the toy-like celeste. Bass then sets up the groove for “Rocket Number 9” and off they go. Ra and the bass(es?) outline the skittering chord sequence while the ensemble chants, “Rocket Number 9 take off for the planet Venus! Venus!” A brief drum solo follows until the horns enter in full polyphonic force, culminating a big, blasting “space chord.” Pharoah then wails some more on tenor sax over the scattered, enervated rhythms, Ra stabbing out angular chords on piano. Pharaoh takes one last turn before giving way to some bass and drum grooving that quickly fades out.

A quick edit cuts into “The Voice of Pan.” As befitting the title, Black Harold’s breathy, vocalized flute soars over tippy-tapping percussion and subtle bass figures. This has a similar in feel to some of the Choreographers Workshop material and even shares some of that echo-y ambience – added, perhaps, after the fact. Harold’s schtick is pretty amusing and gets a rise out of the audience. Then, a widely-spaced ensemble chord introduces “Dawn Over Israel,” a lurching ensemble piece with sing-song-y bowed basses, fleeting horn figures and Ra’s convoluted piano. Ra suddenly takes over with a furiously pounding piano solo that eventually breaks up into some really nasty (unintended) distortion. Ra brings things down with some gentle chords to introduce “Space Mates.” Mellow flute melodies float over piano and celeste while bass(es) and percussion murmur in the background until the horns offer some supporting harmonies for a gentle close. Nice.

The Jazz Composers Guild shortly disintegrated due to the inevitable bitterness and acrimony that arises in such leaderless, ad hoc groupings of ambitious people. Dixon himself would be the first to leave and Ra abandoned ship shortly thereafter, complaining that the Arkestra was doing all the work. Despite its failings, the Guild’s efforts continued to resonate throughout the sixties and seventies with the Jazz Composers Orchestra, the Black Artists Group, the AACM and others. More immediately, Bernard Stollman, a local attorney who represented musicians, was inspired enough by the music he heard at these Guild-sponsored concerts to sign many of the performers, including Ra, to his ESP-Disk label. Stollman had previously established ESP-Disk to promote his other obsession, the “universal language” of Esperanto, so he knew how to make records with minimal expense. Stollman gave the musicians free reign (if limited budgets) to produce their music: “The artists alone decide what you will hear on their ESP-Disk” was the motto. These records became exemplary documents of the era and the label helped to establish Ra’s reputation as the cosmic messenger of out jazz. This expanded re-issue of an obscure Saturn LP is definitely a welcome addition to the Ra discography.

Como Hacer un Bebe/How to Make a Baby

More time-lapse hilarity via Boing Boing!

Sun Ra Sunday

Roz Croney, Queen of the Limbo: How Low Can You Go? (Dauntless DM 6309)

Recorded at Mastertone Studio, New York City, January or February, 1963.
Released as Dauntless DM 4039 (mono) and 6309 (stereo) in 1963.

While Sun Ra was extensively recording Arkestra rehearsals at the Choreographer’s Workshop and exploring the outer realms of (im)possible music, there was little actual paying work in New York. Fortunately, Ra had developed two important connections over the years: filmmaker/auteur Edward O. Bland and (soon to become) legendary producer Tom Wilson, both of whom had worked with Sonny in Chicago. As soon as Ra found himself stranded in the big city, Bland and Wilson helped him out, resulting in the Savoy LP, The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra (1961). Often working in tandem, Bland and Wilson continued to throw commercial work the Arkestra’s way during this crucial period – like, for instance, this limbo fad cash-in attempt rush-released in 1963.

Upon graduating from Harvard in 1954, Tom Wilson borrowed $900.00 to start the Transition record label which was devoted exclusively to the most progressive jazz. In 1956, Wilson released Cecil Taylor’s first record, Jazz Advance (CD on Blue Note 84462) along with Sun Ra’s first LP under his newly assumed name, Jazz by Sun Ra Vol.1 (later titled Sun Song) (Delmark DD-411). A second volume was also recorded and released as Sound of Joy (Delmark DD-414). As the nineteen-sixties progressed, Wilson eventually abandoned jazz for rock music went on to produce landmark albums by Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, Simon & Garfunkel, The Velvet Underground, Soft Machine and others. Wilson was one of the first and most successful African-American record producers but died tragically young at 47 in 1978.

Edward O. Bland was a radical young Chicago disc jockey and early supporter of Sun Ra who enlisted the Arkestra to participate in a short experimental film entitled, The Cry of Jazz (Atavistic DVD). Bland shrewdly convinced the band to work for free in exchange for whatever publicity the film might generate. The Cry of Jazz premiered at Roosevelt University in early 1959 and remains a crucial document of black cinema. By 1961, Bland had relocated to New York City and was working as a journeyman composer and arranger, sometimes (as here) in association with Tom Wilson.

Honestly, How Low Can You Go? is an example of the kind of imminently disposable, fashion-driven product that would appear to be the antithesis of Ra’s own (mostly unheard) music of the time: it is simply work-for-hire without any artistic pretentions whatsoever. But what is remarkable about the Arkestra’s (uncredited) performance is the complete lack of irony or condescension; it is professional to the point of anonymity. And upon close listening, one can confirm Gilmore’s raspy bass clarinet on “It’s Limbo Time” and Ra’s slinky organ work on “Bossa Nova Limbo” and “Whole Lotta Shaking Going On.” Of course, the limbo originates from a Trinidadian funeral ritual where the dancer moves to the rhythm under a stick held up by two persons without knocking or touching the stick; if successful, the dancer repeats the maneuver again and again with the bar being lowered each time. The symbolism of this triumphant dance of life over death surely appealed to Ra’s sensibilities, even if this LP was ultimately destined for the trend-conscious cocktail parties of the “space-age bachelor pad.” Sadly, little else is known about Roz Croney, Queen of the Limbo, beyond this obscure recording and the limbo conceit is fleshed out to album-length proportions with some truly dreadful material, including a limbo-ized take on “How Much Is that Doggie In The Window?” Needless to say, How Low Can You Go? has never been (and never will be) released on CD and is not really worth seeking out unless you’re a totally committed Ra-fanatic.

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Again in 1963, Wilson and Bland hired the Arkestra for a pop/R&B session backing the (otherwise unknown) singer Richard “Popcorn” Wylie. “Marlene” b/w “Do You Still Care for Me” was released as a 45-RPM single on Epic Records (5-9663). According to Bland’s recollections at the Jazz Institute of Chicago:

I was notified by his office only 24 hours before the session was scheduled to hit. I had to transcribe 4 lead sheets from Wylie (who was musically illiterate) arrange and copy the 4 charts, and contract the musicians.

While I was working with Wylie (who was drunk) trying to transcribe the lead sheets, he vomited on me in the apartment of the Jazz trombonist / arranger / composer Tom McIntosh (who came to additional fame with the Jazztet, James Moody and the Shaft [motion] pictures). [McIntosh (along with Bland and Wilson) was also involved with the infamous Batman & Robin LP in 1966.]

Bland portrays Wylie as a helpless drunkard while Prof. Campbell describes Wylie as a “Sam Cooke wannabe” but the session isn’t quite as bad as all that. “Marlene” is a pleasant mid-tempo soul groove complete with crooning backup singers and Wylie’s own pleading vocals. Gilmore turns in an inimitably pithy solo on bass clarinet during the break making this worth a listen. On the other hand, “Do You Still Care For Me?” is a more pedestrian shuffle with some unremarkable horn parts honking away in the background. Someone (is it Popcorn?) whistles aimlessly at the end. Another curiosity in the discography!

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Finally, another single was recorded in 1962 and eventually released by El Saturn sometime in the mid-sixties. The label of El Saturn 144M reads: “Presenting Little Mack” with “Le Sun Ra: Music Director.” According to Gilmore, Little Mack was an R&B singer who liked the Arkestra and financed this recording session which can be found on The Singles (Evidence ECD 22164). “Tell Her to Come On Home” is a plaintive blues with an unsteady rumba beat. Gilmore and Ra conjure up some cool riffing in support of Little Mack’s quirky but sincere vocals. On the other side, “I’m Making Believe” is an old fashioned torch song full of maudlin emotion foreign to Ra’s usual vibe. Even so, it’s a touching performance with Ra leading the way with some ornate piano, Gilmore filling in orchestrally on saxophone. According to Ra, Little Mack was a virtuosic singer, who would sing in different keys depending on the acoustic properties of the concert hall; but nobody seems to know what happened to him. Too bad.

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It’s hard to imagine that any of these records made much money for Ra or his musicians beyond a minimal payment upon performance. It was perhaps enough to buy some groceries. 1964 would be an especially difficult year with several key band members leaving the Arkestra (if only temporarily) for greener pastures. The Arkestra would continue to perform commercial work here and there through the nineteen-sixties in order to survive. But Sun Ra was also active within the short-lived but crucial Jazz Composers Guild. The Guild, which included Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor among others, mounted a series high profile concerts in New York which planted the seed for the Arkestra’s future. Attorney Bernard Stollman was in the audience in 1964 and he would shortly thereafter sign Ra to his boutique label, ESP-Disk. Suddenly, things were looking up.

Happy Record Store Day!

As excited as a kid on Christmas, I got up this morning and made my way over to my favorite local indie record store, Grimey’s New & Preloved Music, just a few minutes after they opened at 10:00 a.m. -- but already there was a huge line of customers bearing armloads of records snaking through the store! I almost wept! Too bad for me, the Pavement live LP and the Sonic Youth/Beck 7” were completely sold out. Early bird gets the worm and all that, I suppose. I did manage to grab Wilco’s Ashes of American Flags DVD, some of which was recorded here last year at the Ryman Auditorium; we attended that (incredibly awesome) concert and we’re really looking forward to watching this DVD. Wilco rules! I also took advantage of the 10% off sale and picked up some the recent ESP Disk CD reissues along with some other cool stuff. Out back were bands, barbeque, beer and more records. As you can see, it was a beautiful day, the joint was jumping, and everyone was having a grand old time. The staff at Grimey’s are super nice folks who know records and know how to throw a party. But being something of an old fart myself, the crowds actually started to get to me so I split. I spent the rest of the afternoon listening to my new records…which was blissful. They say the CD/LP is dead but it sure didn’t look that way to me today. Happy Record Store Day!

Sun Ra Sunday

Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra:
When Angels Speak of Love (Evidence ECD 22216)

When Angels Speak of Love is one of the very rarest of the already exceedingly rare Saturn LPs. Prof. Campbell estimates that two lots of seventy-five were pressed for a grand total of 150 LPs circulated (p.108). Therefore, this music was virtually unheard by anyone but the most obsessed (and well-heeled) when Evidence released it as part of their final installment of Saturn reissues back in 2000. Recorded in full-blown, down-home Saturn Sound at the Choreographer’s Workshop in 1963, it is one of Ra’s most expansive, downright out-there recordings. Not surprisingly, it was not released until 1966, at the height of the free-jazz Afrocentric radicalism that was, for a time, willing to accept Ra’s most avant garde inclinations. Conceived way ahead of its time, When Angels Speak of Love points the way forward to Heliocentric Worlds and beyond.

John Szwed singles out this album in his biography of Ra, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Pantheon, 1997):

It was considered a bizarre record when it was [released]…made more bizarre by
extreme echo, horns straining for the shrillest notes possible, rhythms layered, their polyhythmic effect exaggerated by massive reverberation (which was abruptly turned off and on). “Next Stop Mars” is the centerpiece of the album, a very long work which opens with a space chant, followed by Allen and Gilmore taking chances on their horns beyond what almost any other musician would dare at that time. Sun Ra played behind them, again relentlessly spinning around a single tonal center with two-handed independence, then rumbling thunderously at the bottom of the keyboard against Boykins’s bass, a clangor made heavier by electronic enhancement. (p. 199)

In the liner notes to this Evidence CD, the ever-astute John Corbett discusses how Tommy Hunter’s fortuitous feedback discovery was as radically prescient as Ra’s music itself:

Ra’s space…was alienated, de-naturalized, his use of echo more in common with
pioneers of experimental electronic music, and he anticipated much later developments in interactivity ranging from dub reggae to the live-electronics and computer improvisation projects of George Lewis, Phil Wachsmann and Evan Parker. At that time, as a recording art, free jazz was still totally ensconced in the naturalizing concept (still really is), and the extreme use of echo on these tracks is a significant indicator of how far Ra was willing to push the sonic envelope (to make a bad resonance joke) in his own, unique electronic jazz maneuvers.

Szwed elaborates further on this aspect of Ra’s genius:

By the 1950s, commercial recording companies had developed a classical style of recording which assured that the recording process itself would be invisible,the machinery of recording being used like a picture window through which an illusion was created of “being there” with the musicians. But Sun Ra began to regularly violate this convention on the Saturn releases by recording live at strange sites, by using feedback, distortion, high delay or reverb, unusual microphone placement, abrupt fades or edits, and any number of other effects or noises which called attention to the recording process. On some recordings you could hear a phone ringing, or someone walking near the microphone. It was a rough style of production, an antistyle, a self-reflexive approach which anticipated both free jazz recording conventions and punk production to come. (p.188)

All of this is wholly correct, even though this is not the first appearance of Hunter’s reverb effect and, with the exception of “Celestial Fantasy” and “Next Stop Mars,” the rest of the album eschews the radical displacements of the echo-machine for a (somewhat more) “naturalistic” recorded space. But even where the echo and reverb effects are absent, this album is swathed with that charmingly de-centered “Saturn Sound” that epitomizes the period. Significantly, both Corbett and Szwed touch on the importance of Ra’s use of new technologies as musical instruments and Ra’s visionary engagement with the record-making process, despite near-zero budgets and ultra-limited distribution. Ra embraced mediation on its own terms and deliberately created sonic objects which transcend the mere representation of some ideal performance. Imbued with a do-it-yourself, hand-made authenticity, El Saturn LPs were works of art unto themselves.

“Celestial Fantasy” opens the album with gentle gongs and cymbals to introduce Walter Miller’s jarring, high-register trumpet squeals. Marshall Allen then commences with a densely echoing, wildly inventive oboe peroration while Boykins enters with plucked bass throbs. After Allen concludes his “fantasy,” Miller resumes his high-wire screeching before dropping down to the mellowest, lowest-registers to spar with the increasingly busy bass and drums, all of them echo-echo-echoing in the lushly reverberant space. Miller is sadly underrated; yet he was such a thoughtful and thoroughly “complete” trumpeter, putting him in the category of a very select few. Anyway, the instruments drift off to a pregnant moment of echoing near-silence before Miller and Allen return for further exploration of their highest tessituras to end. This is a very intense beginning to a very intense album! Thankfully, the next piece, “The Idea of it All,” is another patented Ra original: a crazy, atonal bebop number driven by the madly swinging Clifford Jarvis on drums and which provides for yet another killer Gilmore solo on tenor saxophone. What more needs to be said?

Things take a (re)turn for the strange on “Ecstasy of Being.” Opening with a meditation on the paradiddles of marching drums, Jarvis leads the Arkestra’s parade of joyously honking carryings-on. After a while, the instruments drop out to allow for a shift to more subtle, sensuous rhythms -- an erotic dance between bass and percussion. The horns return with more ecstatic wailing until about the nine minute mark when Ra signals a complexly-voiced, fortissimo “space chord” to end the piece. It would perhaps be too easy to interpret this piece as: ecstasy = being at war and being in love. Nonetheless, it is interesting to ponder the wealth of symbolism in Ra’s oeuvre.

“When Angels Speak of Love” is a quirky, slow-tempo ballad featuring Pat Patrick’s most romantic bari-sax crooning over Boykins’s half-time bass. Miller takes a graceful turn on trumpet, including some precariously high, yet perfectly pitched notes. Meanwhile, Ra’s piano meanders while click-clackety percussion outlines a shaky beat. Gilmore and Robert Cummings (on bass clarinet) take brief, somewhat tentative solos until Miller and Patrick return to restate the minimalist, dissonant theme. The album closes with the epic “Next Stop Mars.” At almost eighteen minutes, this is by far the longest recording of the Choreographer’s Workshop period. It is, as Szwed describes, full of extended horn techniques producing “the shrillest notes possible” with Ra “relentlessly spinning around a single tonal center with two-handed independence, then rumbling thunderously at the bottom of the keyboard.” Here and there, ticking and tapping percussion rise and fall but the texture is chamber-like: piano, bass and horns. As Gilmore, Allen and Davis shriek and honk, Robert Cummings weaves winding threads of virtuosic bass clarinet while Walter Miller punches holes in space and glides effortlessly on his silvery trumpet. Ra’s piano is uncharacteristically voluble and aggressive. At first listen, the piece appears to be an anarchic free-for-all -- but that is hardly the case. As Ra explains in the liner notes, “I can write something so chaotic you would say you know it’s not written. But the reason it’s chaotic is because it’s written to be. It’s further out than anything they would be doing if they were just improvising.”

In fact, there is a two-page score entitled, “When Angels Speak of Love,” deposited in the Library of Congress that contains sketches for the title track, “Next Stop Mars” and “Ecstasy of Being.” They are, alas, but sketches – perhaps hasty transcriptions at that – and they tell us little about the final result as evidenced by the recording, although they are full of curious details (e.g. the cryptic instruction to “play celestially”). Even so, the presence of such a manuscript is indicative of Ra’s fierce control over the musical material, despite its surface aural appearance. Even though his music sometimes sounded “free,” it was not about freedom, it was about discipline.

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This concludes our examination of the known Choreographer’s Workshop recordings. In sequence, these albums include: Bad & Beautiful, Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow, Secrets of the Sun, Out There a Minute, "A Blue One (single), What’s New/The Invisible Shield, and When Sun Comes Out. After When Angels Speak of Love, Ra recorded Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy and, finally, Other Planes of There. We will continue moving forward chronologically up through Heliocentric Worlds and on into The Magic City in the coming weeks. But first we’ll take a listen to some other super-obscure recordings Ra and the Arkestra made as unlikely sidemen in 1962-1963. Until then, here’s a poem by Sun Ra found in the liner notes to When Angels Speak of Love:

WHEN ANGELS SPEAK

When angels speak
They speak of cosmic waves of sound
Wavelength infinity
Always touching planets
In opposition outward bound

When angels speak
They speak on wavelength infinity
Beam cosmos
Synchronizing the rays of darkness
Into visible being
Blackout!
Dark Living Myth-world of being

NYC 4/5/09: Crosstown and Back

NYC 4/4/09: Union Square

NYC 4/4/09: Seaport to Chinatown

NYC 4/4/09: Staten Island Ferry