Search & Destroy: Sun Ra

The reissued and prev unreleased tracks Chusid was introducing on that Sun Ra birthday show I tried to describe way upthread were well-selected. It's not a one-man process, as indicated in that Billboard link I posted. And yeah, he did right by Raymond Scott too.

Would Sun Ras audience be greater among non jazzers than aficionados?

i think that's true.

what qualifies someone as a "non-jazzer"

if you don't swing, daddy-o!

& yeah, we can quibble about the "outsider" label, but i don't know, chusid has exposed me to plenty of good music over the years.

I was unaware that Chusid had any previous relationship with SR, so it seemed a bit weird to me that he now oversees the whole shebang

wasn't really thinking abt his relationship w/ and use of the "outsider" term

"what qualifies someone as a "non-jazzer"

there are people who come in my store and ask if i have any sun ra and if i say no they leave. and then there are people who come in my store and silently go through my entire jazz section and then buy some jazz records and then leave. and then sometimes the mailman comes in the store. i think he drinks too much...

so mailmen are non-jazzers

pretty sure my mailman smokes jazz cigarettes

so, you know how i'm famous for making fun of the younger people who come in my store and ask if i have any sun ra and if i don't they leave and have no interest in any other jazz? i'm famous for that. i said it right here on this thread one week ago. anyway, this guy around 60 years of age dropped off about 6 boxes of his records at the store today and the only jazz records he owned were sun ra records and one copy of kind of blue. it's a time-honored tradition!

He recorded such a wide range of music--incl. the Batman album with 60s folk-speed-rock weirdos Blues Project, and all that stuff on the singles collection, even aside from the wide range o' jazz---could see somebody collecting Ra only. Although you could prob fill that many boxes with the jazz alone.

scott how do you explain the the-only-jazz-i-have-is-sun-ra thing?

was this guy who came to your store pete townshend?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NHvAL5IAf0k/TS5iEqTTNVI/AAAAAAAAAVs/pgSPZQH5fiY/s1600/pete%2Bon%2Bra.jpg

durr
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NHvAL5IAf0k/TS5iEqTTNVI/AAAAAAAAAVs/pgSPZQH5fiY/s1600/pete%2Bon%2Bra.jpg

i guess something about the wackiness of sun ra appeals to rock heads. he kinda posed like a rock star. but so did miles! I guess miles is the /other/ jazz musician who rock fans are likely to have in their collections....

i mean, that is probably why i first checked out sun ra -- "he's totally out there, man, from SATURN!" fortunately he made a ton of really wonderful music, as opposed to a gimmick.

not that the saturn thing is just a gimmick -- that stuff seems well integrated into his overall project/concept.

I can't actually recall where I first heard about Sun Ra - feel like his name was dropped all over the place, it might've been the MC5 connection. and his shit was hard to find so I resorted to the college radio station library, which had some of the Actuel reissues and that stuff totally connected w me. I have always loved bands with overarching concepts guiding them though - P-Funk, Devo, etc. I guess that is kind of a non-jazz thing, Sun Ra's p unique in that regard.

For some reason, Ra was one of the last of that era's musicians I got into, even though he was the first I'd heard of (via the liner notes to the MC5's Babes in Arms). I spent a few years with late-period Coltrane, Ayler, and Cecil before hearing Ra, and even then, it was a few more years until I heard his 60s material (first Ra record I heard was Jazz in Silhouette).

hilariously, the guy who said (something like) "He's totally out there -- he's from SATURN!" (and played me some Sun Ra) also tried to convince me that Red Hot Chili Peppers' One Hot Minute was an utter classic.

full confession - I own a fair amount of jazz LPs but have more of Ra than any other artist primarily because there's so many of them and they've been m/l cheaply available/constantly reissued. whereas finding nice cheap vinyl copies of Freddie Hubbard or whoever is a more challenging prospect.

xp

haha yeah, i have like a 15 sun ra records, which would be a lot for other artists, but i still feel like a neophyte when it comes to him.

I think the first ones I heard were Blue Delight and The Magic City? Can't really remember how I first heard of him, probably Forced Exposure. I still love both of those records.

hilariously, the guy who said (something like) "He's totally out there -- he's from SATURN!" (and played me some Sun Ra) also tried to convince me that Red Hot Chili Peppers' One Hot Minute was an utter classic.

― tylerw, Thursday, June 4, 2015 2:56 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I also can't really recall when I first heard of Sun Ra, but yeah his name was always out there, either via magazines, reissues, Sonic Youth, some one was always talking about him...hearing wise I'm sure I heard him via our local free-from radio station KFAI when I was in high school, which around the time Evidence really started reissuing all those records and they were pretty easy to find.

Similar to Tyler's story I remember a dude in high school being like look what I got and displaying a copy of "Super Sonic Jazz" like it was some crazy thing, but I remember feeling it wasn't "out" enough for me at the time. Ha.

I probably have, I dunno 30+ Sun Ra records? Also feel like I haven't scratched the surface. Sun Ra records are our greatest source of renewable energy!

I remember feeling it wasn't "out" enough for me at the time
honestly, almost none of the free jazzers/out jazz dudes sounded as crazy as I'd built them up in my head to be after reading about them. i remember hearing ornette's early stuff and thinking "this is not insane." i thought it'd just be total atonal freak outs. even ayler didn't really strike me that way.

& yeah i'm not in a hurry to collect every last sun ra recording, but i like the idea that there'll always be some record i've never heard out there waiting...

I think there's still a few Saturns that have never been reissued (on CD or otherwise).

xxpost

Ayler felt pretty out to me, but I know what you mean.

More Live at Kntting Factoryby Charles Gayle was pretty much my standard bearer for atonal blasts at the time and that was two discs full of it.

haha i might be overstating -- hearing ayler for the first time was pretty wild. but it might not have been quite as mindblowing as i had prepped myself for.

i remember hearing ornette's early stuff and thinking "this is not insane."

oh man yes so true. I first heard "Ornette!" and "This is Our Music" and I was like uhh I guess this is a little weirder sounding than Thelonious Monk or 'Trane but it still has discernible rhythms, melodies, patterns - I was expecting more John Zorn "Naked City"-style abrasion

now when I heard "Free Jazz", that was more what I was expecting

yeah, that and ascension i think are what i was expecting, generally...

i came to free jazz pretty late. i was working my way through the 50's for years. it's weird cuz i fit the profile perfectly of the underground/noise/punk/rock listener who should have gravitated to far out stuff at an early age, but i grew up listening to jazz and i loved bop and post-bop stuff so much. soooo, i guess i could be kind of a jazz snob about people who ONLY listened to free stuff or whatever. i blame my dad. he hated that stuff and i think that rubbed off on me a bit. i love it now though. and there is so much that i discover every day. would have been helpful if i had bought a lot of the records i buy now in the 80's or 90's though...

I *never* heard jazz around my house growing up, but it wasn't like I went straight from rock to Sun Ra - by the end of high school/beginning of college I had seen "Straight No Chaser" and "Let's Get Lost", bought "Kind of Blue" and "A Love Supreme", took a class in the history of jazz, etc. My knowledge of jazz wasn't super-deep by the time I got to the free stuff but my interest in that kinda developed in parallel with other strains of jazz (Blue Note funk, "cool"/post-bop stuff, 70s fusion etc.)

if i had to do it all over again, i'd just start with duke ellington

that guy today had a 60's delmark pressing of sun song and i am totally keeping it. great copy too.

yeah, in retrospect, i was really lucky to have the dad that i had. he totally looked like squaresville but he was dragging me to jazz shows in the village at an early age and i heard SO much stuff and saw so many people live. it's all in my brain somewhere. he played jazz constantly at home.

yeah that is lucky. i play a lot of jazz around the house, but my 5yo has recently started complaining about "all the music with no words!"

is it too late to disown him?

The only jazz record that ever seemed too freaky was Dave Holland's Conference of the Birds---not the gentle title track, of course (which was even covered by a band I roomed with, who played what was then called "The New Acoustic Music," like Oregon, various students of Fahey-Kottke-Lang, that first Grisman Quintet LP). And not the cute "Q&A"---but otherwise, Braxton times Rives=OMG! Despite enjoying both guys/ own records as leaders (also Rivers on Miles Davis Heard Round The World). Usually, if I got lost for a second, just listen to the drummer, but didn't work here---nothing against Altschul; I even liked Circle, his group w Chick Corea, and I'm usually meh on post-Miles Corea. But I finally gave up, put it away for a few decades, tried again, and immediately loved the whole thing.

Wikipedia:
Holland's compositions for the album had been performed at a New York City concert by a group including Randy Brecker on trumpet, Michael Brecker on tenor sax, Ralph Towner on guitar, Holland on bass, and Barry Altschul on percussion; "Braxton and Rivers, however, were chosen for the recording as better able to respond to the opportunist disjunctions offered within Holland's compositions."(No lie, Max Harrison!)
... Stuart Nicholson writes: "Conference of the Birds emerged as a definitive statement of swinging free expression. It was, in essence, a return to the rugged discipline of early 1960s free improvising by working off melodic foundations using the 'time, no changes' principle to achieve greater control over that elusive quarry, freedom."

is it too late to disown him?

eh she's got pretty good taste so far -- this is her favorite record currently
https://igcdn-photos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/t51.2885-15/11101966_1621360338077261_1996988635_n.jpg

"all the music with no words!"

haha THIS why do kids require narrative all the time!

Tylerw that is an amazing photo

haha, yeah i like that they both have bedhead. only one of them is totally hung over though.

yeah the narrative thing -- it might have something to with not quite understanding how music is made, like recognizing instruments, etc (though she's kind of getting there with that). the voice/singing is something to latch on to because she can sing and she knows where that's coming from.

this is maybe for another thread but yeah I had this, well idk if it was an "argument" really, but my daughter was complaining about something I was playing that didn't have words (Chet Baker maybe?) because "what's the point?" Good question! But what's the point of any music really... I guess in her mind the point of music is to relay an idea or a concrete feeling or a story, and she doesn't get how abstract/non-literal music can do that. She does like "Rhapsody in Blue" so there's hope...

(she is also cool w Sun Ra btw - because he is FROM SATURN)

ok, she gets a pass for nilsson schmilsson :)

Ha I have a picture of myself from roughly the same age with my Popeye soundtrack! Kids love Nilsson.

I first heard Ra when there was a wave of ESP (?) reissues and the promos were sitting in the bin of freebies at the store where I worked. I took all of them, gave a few to my friend Rebecca and kept a few, can't remember which. The feeling that something isn't as far out/incomprehensible as I thought it would be is also v familiar. I thought that about jazz, metal, everything.