Sun Ra in Chronological Order: An Arkestra Listening Thread + Related Solar Sounds

totally, wild shit there but absolutely not from the 1963 era.

secrets of the sun is one of my favorite ra LPs, i just love the crazy reverbed-out psychedelic ambience, such great tunes too, friendly galaxy, space aura, love in outer space, all total standards... is this the first "love in outer space"?

I believe so, yes

1962 (addendum)

Weekend bump: I added some tracks from the Singles compilation that were also recorded in 1962, to wrap that year up. The first one ("Blue One/Orbitration In Blue") is a single that wasn't even discovered until 1997. Then there's a track from the aforementioned Out There A Minute compilation and a single they did backing up R'n'B singer Little Mack Gordon.

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Although not much is for sure with any of these release dates, the next record was at least partly recorded in 1963.

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1962 - When Sun Comes Out

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I was wrong, I think we’re still in 1962 :) The first of the NYC Choreographer’s Workshop (CW henceforth) recordings to be released in more or less a contemporary timeframe, this was recorded in either April or November 1962 (newer sources differ, but Szwed says ’63!! who the fuck knows.) and released as an LP on Saturn later in 1963.

Szwed on that year:

Off and on for the next year the Arkestra found work at pianist Gene Herris’s Playhouse, a MacDougal Street coffeehouse where they often played to an empty room. It was there that Sonny first met Farrell “Little Rock” Sanders, who sometimes was working as a waiter.[…] Sun Ra gave him a place to stay, bought him a new pair of green pants with yellow stripes (which Sanders hated but had to have), encouraged him to use the name “Pharoah,” and gradually worked him into the band. [not until 1964 though] […]The title song [“When Sun Comes Out”] introduced a second alto saxophonist into the band, Danny Davis, a seventeen-year-old from downtown […] saxophone duels would become a nightly showpiece for the Arkestra […] Sun Ra pushed the idea further, having the players mime the battles physically, jumping at each other or rolling on the floor.

As per Bandcamp, again the definitive issue in terms of sonics:

When Sun Comes Out is percussion-centric, and not just as backdrops—on many tracks whatever's being hit with a stick (or palms) is on top of the mix. Sun Ra's piano, some brass, and a quartet of saxophones compete for airspace with an arsenal of drums, congas and bongos, bells and cowbells, shakers and gongs (a good deal of it handled by the reed section). In fact, the mix often defies professional engineering standards, as musical hardware that usually provides the foundation occasionally dominates the lead instruments.

The horns are more aggressive than in the Chicago years, Sunny experiments with atonality on the keyboard, and on many tracks he dispenses with conventional structure. The Arkestra here includes four saxophonists (John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, Pat Patrick, and newcomer Danny Davis, then just 17), who take liberties to extend the instrument's vocabulary, their solos often independent of the rhythm bed. Sun Ra was traversing the universe, and there's a lot of space out there. On this album the explosive drummer Clifford Jarvis makes his recording debut with the Arkestra, a relationship that would extend on and off for a decade and a half. There's also a fun ensemble vocal—identified as having been performed by "Arkestra Unit"—on a remake of "We Travel the Spaceways."

This remastered edition includes a number of sonic treats:

• The complete version of the opening track "Circe" (featuring wordless vocals by Theda Barbara); the Saturn release omitted most of the introductory gong sequence (by Tommy Hunter).

• The LP's side two tracks (here 6 – 9) in stereo from the master tape. All known pressings of the LP were in mono.

• The previously unreleased part two of the percussive composition "The Nile," featuring a haunting flute solo by Marshall Allen.

• The complete "Dimensions in Time," recorded at the Choreographer's Workshop around this time but released only in an abridged version (and titled "Primitive") on the mid-1970s hybrid release Space Probe.

So yeah, parts of this (tracks 6 & 7 especially) are serious skronkfests, but they are held together by new drummer Clifford Jarvis and his urgent, nimble pulse running through it all.

I love the way this records sounds, the semi-ritualistic percussive aspect to it, the opening vocals (presaging June Tyson’s involvement), the overall vibe. Definitely in my top 5 NYC 60’s recordings of his. I was previously unfamiliar with it until I started diving back into Sun Ra as a result of this thread, now over two years old. And don’t miss the rest of the session, which wasn’t released until much later as shown below.

The last track (“Primitive”) is from this era but wasn’t released until much later as part of the Space Probe LP, along with “The Conversation Of J.P.” included here in an abridged version (from the Exotica set) as the digital rights are with Art Yard and the full length 13-minute version is CD-only. The Art Yard CD version has a few additional tracks from these sessions. I love these two “outtakes”, percussion jams with 1 or 2 instruments over the top, mesmerizing.

Here’s the Youtube playlist for those CD-only tracks including the full-length “Conversation”

this was the earliest Ra record I got on vinyl and it definitely feels like the *beginning* of an era

1963 - When Angels Speak Of Love

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One of the rarest Saturn releases (estimated 150 copies pressed), I thought now would be a good time for this Szwed excerpt:

”Early in the 1960s Sun Ra was in Audiosonic, an independent recording studio in the Brill Building near Times Square, when he ran into one of their engineers, Fred Vargas. Vargas was a Costa Rican who had worked his way up from the garment district to a job in the REL labs with General Edwin Howard Armstrong, the inventor of FM radio, and then on to becoming a recording engineer. Shortly after, Audiosonic was turned into Variety Recording Studio on 225 West 46th Street when it was bought out by Vargas and Warren Smith, an English teacher in Connecticut. Vargas and Smith were intrigued by Sun Ra’s music, and they began to record his small groups […] They extended him long-term credit, living with occasional bounced checks, and helped him cut costs (Sonny often saved fifty dollars by sticking his own blank labels on the records, keeping his cost for a 12-inch LP to 99 cents). Vargas and Smith allowed Sonny to press as few as 100 copies of a record at a time, when most recording companies had a minimum of 500. By handprinting the covers they could avoid printing costs altogether […] For the next thirty years (emphasis mine) Vargas recorded much of Sonny’s music, editing the tapes with him, mastering them, and helping him get his records pressed. He introduced Sonny to people on show business, like Gershon Kingsley […] who later helped Sonny program his first Moog.”

Can we get a hand for Fred Vargas, everyone?

This explains a lot about the territory we’re getting into, where some small-press vinyl editions were not rediscovered until years or decades later, and even then sometimes the recordings themselves predate the time of original release. We’ll get further into that later on in 1964, at the end of the CW era, when we discuss the loose ends.

Bandcamp intro:

When Angels Speak of Love, released in 1966 on Sun Ra's Saturn label, is a rarity, there having been limited pressings (150 copies, by one estimate), which were sold thru the mail and at concerts and club dates. The tracks were taped in New York during two 1963 sessions at the Choreographer's Workshop, a rehearsal space/recording den with warehouse acoustics. Ra spent countless hours at the CW from 1961 to 1964 sharpening the Arkestra during exhaustive musical huddles. John Corbett calls this "one of the most continuous, best-documented periods of Ra's work"; much tape from these seminal sessions has survived and been issued on LP, CD and digitally.

This release wasn’t reissued until last year!! I hadn’t listened until now, as I’m writing this up. It’s way more enjoyable and inventive than I was expecting. I though it was gonna be totally out there like we’re gonna get in the near future, but the real excursions are mostly saved for the epic B-side track. The first track in particular grabbed me, again a very sparse and arresting vibe like the beginning of yesterday’s When Sun Comes Out.

The Bandcamp edition has some newly-discovered stereo versions and a Sun-ra-created stereo edit of the 18-minute “Next Stop Mars.”

AMG review as per Bandcamp:

William Ruhlmann at AllMusic observed, "Sun Ra's music is often described as being so far outside the jazz mainstream as to be less a challenge to it than a largely irrelevant curiosity. But When Angels Speak of Love is very much within then-current trends in jazz as performed by such innovators as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Walter Miller's trumpet on 'The Idea of It All,' for example, indicates he'd been listening to Miles Davis, even as John Gilmore's squealing tenor suggests Coltrane; and, on 'Ecstasy of Being,' what John Corbett calls Danny Davis' 'excruciated alto' suggests Coleman. Ra himself plays busy, seemingly formless passages that are reminiscent of Cecil Taylor. This is a Sun Ra album that is more conventionally unconventional than most, with tracks you could program next to those of his 1960s contemporaries and have them fit right in."

cf. Szwed: “The record jacket carried a poem by Sun Ra […]”

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

a lot of "when angels speak of love" was on the blast first "out there a minute" comp, though, right?

no, just the title track and the 12-minute stereo version of "Next Stop Mars" as far as I can see.

Szwed lists the unreleased tracks from that comp in his discography, but I did not actually realize it had previously-released tunes on it!

this is the kind of thing I was expecting to not be available tbh. I have Out There a Minute but am otherwise unfamiliar with these tracks.

1963 - Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy

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Fairly well-known, recorded in late 1963 but not released on Saturn until 1967. Repressed several times in the 60s and again in 1973. Later it was part of the Evidence twofer reissue series of the early 90’s, which is where I first heard it (paired with Art Forms Of Dimensions Tomorrow). This one gets out there, but still stays fairly sparse and restrained for totally free music - Szwed refers to “the chamberlike quality.” The second half was recorded live at 10 in the morning at the Tip Top Club in Brooklyn, where Sun Ra could use their Hammond B-3. cf. Szwed “The acoustics are ad hoc, and on "Adventure Equation" the club's phone can be heard ringing during two passages.”

from the Bandcamp version writeup:

“Arkestra saxophonists John Gilmore and Marshall Allen are present, but playing bass clarinet and oboe respectively, while sax is covered by Pat Patrick and brash newcomer Danny Davis. Sunny plays Clavioline and percussion (as do others), but no piano. The Arkestra rarely plays in ensemble mode, but instead alternately deploys in smaller configurations, almost chamber-style.

Tracks are remastered, but no other extra goodies to speak of this time around. For some reason the Bandcamp version does tack on a bonus track recorded a year later, we’ll get to that at the proper time. On to 1964!

amazing posts, sleeve, thank you.

had this one for ages - the juxtaposition of sparse instrumentation that sounds at once both composed and improvised was not what I expected from "free jazz" when I first heard this record. It's creaky and shambolic and full of space and silences but it also sounds very intimate.

1962-1964 - Choreographer’s Workshop loose ends (excerpts from The Solar Myth Approach)

https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-solar-myth-approach-vol-1

https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-solar-myth-approach-vol-2

These reissues (originally issued as a double LP set) actually came out LAST WEEK, since I started this thread back up, as a definitive new remaster on Bandcamp. I’m going to forego c&p-ing the whole insane BYG/Charly/lack-of-documentation-or-provenance story (which you should all read), and give excerpts below.

BYG/Actual were ill-fated, it seems _ I didn’t know any of this previously:

Since the demise of BYG, the Solar-Myth Approach albums have been reissued without legitimacy in a series of ever worsening-quality packages in various formats. The Charly reissues were inferior to the BYG originals (and displayed different cover art), and a dreadful off-pitch, out-of phase 2-CD bootleg appeared on the Fuel label in 2001.

On a qualitative level, this 2020 Cosmic Myth remastering from best-available sources (tapes and discs) constitutes an upgrade.

With regard to today’s listening, four of the tracks from the double LP set are (by best guess) from this era. Essentially, most people used to think these tracks were contemporary to the 1969-70 era, but current research and deep listening has led people-who-should-know to draw new conclusions, dating four of the tracks on these two 1971 LPs to the CW years, 1962-64. Specifically:

Michael D. Anderson of the Sun Ra Music Archive believes (and we concur) that "They'll Come Back" (from Vol. 1) and "Ancient Ethiopia" (from Vol. 2) were recorded either in Chicago, or at the Choreographer's Workshop in the first years after Ra settled in New York. Compared to everything else on the Solar-Myth Approach, the tight arrangements of "They'll Come Back" and "Ancient Ethiopia" are outliers. They do not sound like anything Sun Ra produced in the late 1960s—but they do sound comparable to his arrangements from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Reconsidering "They'll Come Back" in 2019, Campbell remarked, "I’d say Choreographers Workshop 1963–1965." […]Anderson also believes that "Realm of Lightning" (Vol. 1) and "The Utter Nots" (Vol. 2) originated at Choreographer's, in 1962 and 1964 respectively.

So, like the Out There A Minute release, the Solar Myth albums are grab bags of tapes, best illustrated by this excerpt from the Bandcamp writeup:

In a 2019 conversation, Ra historian/authority John Corbett explained that when Sun Ra and the Arkestra toured in the late 1960s and '70s, the bandleader often lugged along a cumbersome tape deck and a suitcase of open-reel tapes, which he would review during leisure time on the road. These tapes were a smorgasbord of styles, sessions, and band configurations from random periods in Ra's recorded history. According to Corbett, in several highly likely instances during overseas tours, Ra needed funds for return airfare or travel expenses, and would sell such tapes (or copies thereof) to European labels—a quick hand-off deal. Tape documentation could be scarce-to-non-existent, which would prompt labels to guess dates, titles, and personnel, or rely on skimpy (or fabricated) info provided by Ra. It's highly possible that BYG acquired the Solar-Myth tapes in this fashion.

This also accounts for the era-jumbled messiness of e.g. the Pictures Of Infinity LP on Black Lion, among others. I’ll try to slot the various tracks from these into the playlist where I can, given the sources available for dating them.

I’ve added the four tracks discussed above to the Spotify playlist. We’ll keep going into 1964 tomorrow, with the major work of the year.

the BYG/Actuel editions of vol 1 and 2 were some of the first vinyl Ra albums I was able to get (after Heliocentric Worlds, which always seemed to be in print) so they shaped my earliest impressions of Ra's ouevre. Had no idea any of these tracks dated from the early 60s though!

love the celeste (?) intro/interludes on "They'll Come Back". just an instrument I always love to hear.

1964 - Other Planes Of There

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In Szwed’s book it refers to the original cover being the pink/blue color scheme above, but none of the early Discogs listings show that. What the hell, I like to imagine this was how it was first issued.

Recorded in early 1964 at the CW, released as an LP on Saturn in 1966. Only repressed once, that same year, and then out of print until the 1992 Evidence CD.

I got this a few years back when I went on an LP buying spree triggered by those newer cheap (bootleg?) Scorpio reissue pressings (they are $12 each new at my local store), but I think I played it once to rip it and then filed it, feeling unimpressed. On probably my second listen, it’s hard for me to see it as anything other than “The Magic City: Take One” as it follows the same format of a side-long 1st track and then a few (mostly long) tracks on the B-side. The 22-minute title track seems kinda unfocused to me, like a collection of solos strung together. Then a long mostly percussive improv, and a small-unit track called “Sketch” that’s really close to the earlier post-bop sounds. There’s a brief respite from the free swirl with the seasick quasi-ballad “Pleasure”, then “Spiral Galaxy,” a long (seemingly latin-influenced? I’m not a theorist) stately march-type thing to round it off - I much prefer the B-side tracks but I might just need more time with the epic. The Bandcamp version is remastered, but no extra tracks or anything. They say:

Rehearsing and recording at the Choreographer's Workshop gave ample time to develop ideas without a nudgy A&R exec watching the clock or chiseling the budget. This self-controlled environment (and the usual ad hoc recording quality) marks Other Planes. The arrangements breathe, they evolve unhurriedly, and there's much open space. This is music by process. In contrast to the muscularity of free jazz, Sun Ra's leader-directed improvisations have an orchestrated feel, a pace that juxtaposes the pastoral with sporadic bursts of frenzy and much rhythmic variety. Sunny's love of percussion permeates these sessions. The works proceed with great deliberation, but they move.

The cover most people know (and the one I have) is this one:

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On June 15, 1964, Sun Ra and a 15-piece band (the largest he had played with since Chicago) were booked at the Cellar Cafe, a coffeehouse on West 91st Street. Per Szwed:

“The crowd which turned out for this concert and one by Archie Shepp encouraged Dixon to stage a four-night festival of “the new thing,” a music still too new to be named or defined, but which was audaciously emerging in the face of a resistant jazz mainstream.”

This results in the formation of the Jazz Composers Guild, and some fortuitous connections will come from that later on.

ha that pink and blue sleeve always makes me think of the eye-bleeding color schemes of early Stereolab sleeves

1964 - Judson Hall, New York, Dec. 31, 1964 (Sun Ra With Pharoah Sanders and Black Harold)

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Recorded as part of the “Four Days In December” concert series put on by the short-lived Jazz Composers’ Guild, released as an LP on Saturn in 1976, after two previous failed attempts to issue it. Some wild piano flourishes lead into a full fledged horn battle, and the music remains mostly free.

The Bandcamp version has what I think is the complete show, or near to it, with a lot of extra material added, as well as exhaustive notes on the gig. I was previously unfamiliar with this one. Clifford Jarvis continues to be a total badass on drums. John Gilmore was working somewhere else during this gig (see Bandcamp writeup) and is not present.

Important side note: In the audience at this gig was ESP label boss Bernard Stollman, and he liked what he heard. Soon he would put out the first non-Saturn LP since 1961.

before the reissues pharaoh sanders and black harold was one of the hardest ra albums to find bootleg copies of - as far as the "free jazz" era is concerned this is one of my favorite documents of it

MONDAY NIGHT INTERLUDE (added to Spotify)

"Twilight" - 1964-65

"Twilight," a previously unreleased recording that might have originated at the Tip-Top Club, is marred by significant noise, possibly from poor storage, tape degradation, or sub-par recording conditions. The track may have appeared on an obscure Saturn release or demo, as the surface noise sounds like a poor vinyl pressing or an acetate cutting. The instrumentation sounds like celeste, oboe, French horn, and percussion. Sunny had just two regular French horn players over the years, and Vincent Chancey wasn’t yet on the scene. That leaves Robert Northern as the only other possibility, which would date the track to late 1964 or early 1965.

Bandcamp link (track 6)

this sounds fine to me, and is lovely to boot

hey everyone I'm taking a break today, also I still need to listen to the last half of the Judson Hall concert

thank you! i'm doing some massive catching up

never heard Twilight or the Judson Hall show before

Solar Myth Approach Vol. 1 is an old favorite of mine. Adventures of Bugs Hunter! Great news about the new remasters.

this "Discipline 9" from the Judson Hall show is very pleasing, it's long and spacy. Karl asked earlier what the setlists were like, well this is the earliest example I know of - the next live things come in '66.

forgot to post before I left the house and my post is at home in a text file.

so everyone gets one more day of listening before starting 1965.

"Magic City" not on Spotify :(

Filed under "Sun Ra & His Arkestra"
https://open.spotify.com/album/4hqD5lN02dq75HeiP9TtNf?si=hHoIiEKASWOLMnM90b62LQ

we're not there yet! :D

(Heliocentric comes next, it was completed in April and Magic City wasn't finished until May)

I'm gonna go ahead and post that in an hour or two, still not home.

1965 - The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra

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Szwed:

After meeting Bernard Stollman during the October Revolution, Sun Ra asked him to come and hear the Arkestra at a loft in Newark, and once he did, Stollman quickly agreed to record them.

I don’t think Ra was quite finished with The Magic City when this session took place, so I’m starting 1965 here. I can’t pin down an actual release date for the LP on ESP, but I think it was earlier in 1965.

I was previously unfamiliar with this one, although it is one of the best known as far as I can tell. Again, lots of emphasis on percussion and space.

From the “Sun Ra Sunday” blog:

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.

after my third time through, I finally realized... there isn't really a drummer here! just various members on timpani, bells, wood block, "cymbal [spiral]," and "percussion" (by Jimhmi Johnson on tracks A3 and B1 only). still lots of space, though.

1965 - The Magic City

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A personal side note: Although I think the first Sun Ra I heard was Blue Delight, this was one of the first as well, a friend gifted me the 1973 Impulse reissue back in like 1992 (it turns out that it is more of the reprocessed-stereo garbage that is typical of the Impulse reissue series, see the earlier “Black Beauty” entry). But that 1973 edition still has my favorite cover design, hey why not hotlink them both:

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Recorded in April-May (side 2) and Sept. 24th (side 1) of 1965, released as a mono LP on Saturn in 1966, repressed twice (on Saturn and “subsidiary” label Thoth) in the 60s, reissued as part of the Impulse reissue program of the early 70s, again via the Evidence CD reissues in the 90s, and now finally in a definitive 21st century stereo version (see below).

What this most reminds me of is a symphony. It is so meticulously organized (is it composed? I’m not sure), it has so many moods. Is it jazz? I guess so, but largely because of the instrumentation used to make the music. Basically, what we are hearing in these recordings is musical telepathy by people who had been playing together for years.

Obviously this record is a goddam masterpiece, but all of you absolutely need to listen to the new STEREO remaster that the Bandcamp/Enterplanetary people put out in 2017:

"With supplemental material from the original tapes, the best possible sound and detailed research, this could be the single-disc reissue of the year." — NYC Jazz Record, Oct. 2017

https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-magic-city-cd-lp-digital

In fact, I’m just gonna C&P most of the Bandcamp writeup:

Sun Ra albums like THE MAGIC CITY prove the categorical futility of "File Under: Jazz." When assessing the post-Chicago (1960–on) work of Ra, "jazz" turns out to be less a genre than a journalistic and marketing convenience. Jazz has a glorious tradition. Sun Ra was schooled in it, emerged from it, and grew to transcend it (though he never abandoned it). Even the cheeky term "Space Jazz" cannot frame the extremes to which Ra pushed his art in the mid-1960s. In this regard, THE MAGIC CITY was a pinnacle.

1965 was a turbulent year for the Arkestra and its leader, and many consider THE MAGIC CITY a flashpoint for that upheaval. Arkestra drummer Tommy Hunter, quoted in John Szwed's 1997 Ra bio SPACE IS THE PLACE, describes a typical performance of the period: "It was like a fire storm coming off the bandstand."

On the original 1965 THE MAGIC CITY LP, issued on Saturn, the monster 27-1/2 minute title track sprawled across side A. The "Magic City" to which Ra refers was his birthplace—Birmingham, Alabama. The term was the town's motto, emblazoned on a billboard by the train station near Sunny's childhood home, intended to reflect the city's explosive growth as a Southern industrial epicenter after the discovery of iron ore, coal, and limestone deposits. Birmingham was a place about which Sun Ra felt and expressed ambivalence: an outpost of racial segregation and grim smokestack-pocked landscapes, yet a city for which he felt twinges of nostalgia and affection. (His heirs still live in the area.)

Ra customarily supervised the Arkestra's improvisational process via keyboard cues or hand signals. He was always in charge—hence critic Simon Adams describing the title track as "27 minutes of controlled freedom." "The Magic City" was never performed in concert; saxophonist John Gilmore said it was "unreproducible, a tapestry of sound."

Although shorter in scope than side A's magnum opus, the four works on THE MAGIC CITY's flip side reflect the same improvisational approach, spatiality, and lack of structure. One session outtake, "Other Worlds," an alternate version of "Shadow World," is included as a bonus track. Also included are the final 90 seconds of the mono version, which were curiously omitted from Ra's own stereo version. .

-- THE MAGIC CITY: THE DEFINITIVE STEREO EDITION --

First-generation Saturn pressings of The Magic City were monophonic. The album was reissued on CD by Evidence in 1993 with the title track in mono and the LP side B tracks in stereo. A full stereo version had been issued on Sun Ra's Thoth subsidiary label sometime after 1969; however, it suffered from a technical flaw that prevented many copies of the LP from tracking cleanly through the first cut on side B. A 1973 gatefold LP reissue on Impulse featured reprocessed stereo, and a cheap, terrible-sounding bootleg LP—on a badly replicated "Saturn" label—has circulated in recent years. For this definitive reissue, Cosmic Myth Records used stereo sources which are superior to the Thoth pressing.

The “Sun Ra Sundays” blog (recommended reading, I’m gonna try to link/excerpt going forward) also has some good notes:

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.

for some reason Magic City is one I never got around to before. Heliocentric Worlds I know v well, in contrast.

Thanks for the Magic City spotify link upthread; I was searching for the studio "Shadow World" last month but could only find the College Tour live version...? I see the 2017 version has an alternate take of "Other Worlds", from the Heliocentric sessions.

Very enjoyable thread btw, valuable info.

thank you! nice to see you in here.

also Myonga there is a Spotify playlist for the whole thread:

https://open.spotify.com/user/weinventyou/playlist/4dAK9bNAV6C8zrf9twZpk3

Thanks sleeve!

1965 - The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra Vol. 2 (and Vol. 3, and The Sun Myths)

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Moving on into 1965, remember that The Magic City hadn’t been released yet. Also, everyone should listen to it! But at this time, Heliocentric Vol. 1 had just come out and was making waves.

Recorded in November, I assume this was a followup to the relative success of the first? From the Szwed book:

As soon as the ESPs were issued, Willis Conover, a Voice of America disc jockey, began to play them nightly on his jazz show aimed at Europe, where an intensely loyal following began to develop. […]And then out of the blue Alton Abraham suddenly released a flood of Saturn records which had been recorded over the last few years - Angels and Demons at Play, Fate in a Pleasant Mood, Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow, and Secrets of the Sun.

To go along with that, here is a flood of material, three albums worth (with one long track in different versions). I am gonna dive into this stuff over the weekend.

Detailed “Sun Ra Sundays” notes on Vol. 2 are here:

https://nuvoid.blogspot.com/2009/05/sun-ra-sunday_17.html

and regarding Heliocentric Worlds Vol. 3:

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.[…]

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? NARRATOR: I don’t think so 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.

https://nuvoid.blogspot.com/2009/05/sun-ra-sunday_31.html

Then we have the alternate takes and outtakes collected on the Bandcamp release “Sun Myth (African Chant)”:

A quartet of rare 1965 tracks from the Sun Ra Music Archive. The early version of "The Sun Myth," featuring a soundtrack of African chanting underneath the Arkestra's studio performance, appeared on the first pressing of The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 2. However, the chant is absent from the more commonly known commercial mix of the title. In fact, before it was removed from the mix entirely, the chant was mixed lower on the album's second pressing; it could be heard, but distantly. On the third pressing — no chant! How it came to be included in the first place was presumably Sun Ra's decision, and anybody's guess why. The origins of the recording are unknown, and as to why it was removed — see previous sentence. No documentation has been found explaining the evolution of the respective mixes.

https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-sun-myth-african-chant

Also note:

After the digital release of Sun Myth (African Chant) in 2016, further research affirmed that "Interplanetary Travelers" had originated from the sessions for the album The Magic City, and the track was included on the definitive Cosmic Myth Records 2017 LP/CD reissue of that classic 1965 Sun Ra title.

Over the weekend I’m gonna try and write something more about late 1965 to early 1966, there’s a lot of stuff that happened during this time frame, plus some side projects.

some listening thoughts on the last batch:

I used to have Heliocentric 2 on vinyl, but I sold it. I don't regret that after re-listening, it's a little unfocused to my ears. On the other hand, the 1st-press "Sun Myth" mix with the African chant works perfectly as an epic side-long track. Go figure. I have no idea why it was removed.

I had to skip my first track in this project, the lead track on Heliocentric 3. Horns squeal, drums flail, I get bored. But I was then rewarded with some really phenomenal small-unit tracks for the rest of the record, I actually prefer this to Vol. 2 by a wide margin.

The other outtakes from The Sun Myth are enjoyable as well, big band tracks but coherent and integrated, definitely composed, and of a piece with the Magic City sound.

My offhand top ten of the 1961-1965 NYC era would be:

Futuristic Sounds
Invisible Shield/What's New
Magic City
When Sun Comes Out
Bad And Beautiful
Heliocentric 1
Judson Hall
Other Planes Of There
Secrets Of The Sun
The Sun Myth (African Chant)

Am I going too fast for people? Let me know. I've been able to listen to everything so far at this pace. Jamming Heliocentric 3 in the hot tub with a beer is a special kind of relaxation.

"The Shadow World" is one of the most difficult Ra compositions for me to understand; it's like one of those old Magic Eye photos - I just cannot hear the melody in there unless I'm listening to the right version with the right star alignment. Honestly, about this point Ra sort of loses me until June Tyson comes onboard.

1965 - Strange Strings

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Another staggering achievement. Generally thought to have been recorded in 1966 but the newest sources say 1965 (I don’t know why, and the Bandcamp page doesn’t say, conventional wisdom was that the instruments were bought during the 1966 college tour of upstate NY and the page even repeats that detail). Again, who the fuck knows, we’re doing our best with dates here and it feels kinda right to revise this particular release in the timeline. It sure sounds more like The Magic City than it sounds like Nothing Is (from May 1966).

Released as an LP on Saturn in 1967, then languishing in relative neglect for 40 years (skipped by the 90s Evidence CD series) until a 2007 Atavistic CD reissue.

The definitive new 2014 version on Bandcamp and Spotify features an entire album’s worth of additional material. The album seems to have made quite the comeback buzz-wise from my admittedly limited vantage point. This is another sui generis exercise like the title track of Magic City, it has more in common with AMM than jazz imo.

After a series of concerts at upstate New York colleges (sic), Sun Ra purchased an arsenal of stringed instruments from curio shops and music stores on the road: ukulele, mandolin, koto, kora, Chinese lutes, and what he termed "Moon Guitars." In the studio, these were handed out to his reed and horn players in the belief that "strings could touch people in a special way." That the Arkestra members didn't know how to play these instruments was not beside the point—it was the point. Sun Ra called it "A study in ignorance." To this unconventional "string section" he added several prepared homemade instruments, including a large piece of tempered sheet metal on which was chiseled the letter "X." Art Jenkins was assigned intermittent improvised vocals.

Biographer John Szwed explains what happened next: "Marshall Allen said that when they began to record, the musicians asked Sun Ra what they should play, and he answered only that he would point to them when he wanted them to start. The result is an astonishing achievement, a musical event which seems independent of all other musical traditions and histories. The music was recorded at high volume, laden with selectively applied echo, so that all of the instruments bleed together and the stringed instruments sound as if they, too, were made of sheet metal. The piece is all texture, with no sense of tonality except where Art Jenkins sings through a metal megaphone with a tunnel voice. But to say that the instruments seem out of tune misses the point, since there is no 'tune,' and in any case the Arkestra did not know how to tune most of the instruments."

Check the extensive Bandcamp notes, apparently a double album was planned for 2018 release with even more material.

this era's all very familiar to me. Re-listened to Heliocentric World V. 2 last night - was unaware that there were so many versions of The Sun Myth (I've never heard the African chant one). Album is okay in general but nothing special.

Strange Strings otoh is something of a bizarre anomaly, just in the instrumentation. I have to be in a certain mood for that one.

1965-66 side project interlude

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Two minor side projects added to the Spotify playlist. First, the late-1965 LP by the Walt Dickerson Quartet featuring Ra on piano (and arrangements I think). Nice mellow vibraphone cocktail jazz. Then we have some excerpts from the infamous Batman cash-in LP done in January 1966 with Tom Wilson producing and including Blues Project folks, weirdly only three tracks are on Spotify but the whole album is on Bandcamp.

Ra plays organ, replacing Al Kooper himself who turned it down (the rest of his band was happy to get a check). Ra brought along Gilmore and Patrick to play sax. I love this record! It has been widely bootlegged and I have a shitty vinyl copy. NANANANANANANANA BATMAAAAAAN.

This moves us into 1966, and one of the most important things that happens in this timeframe is that the Arkestra gets a weekly gig (on Mondays) at Slug’s Saloon starting in March 1966 that would continue every Monday for the next 18 months, and on and off until 1972, resulting in ever-increasing exposure.

from Szwed:

”And the musicians came. Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Heath, Philly Joe Jones, and Art Blakey showed up. Dizzy Gillespie came (and as Sun Ra walked past, Dizzy leaned toward him and was heard to say, “Keep it up, Sonny, they tried to do the same shit to me”). One night Art Farmer, Mingus, Coltrane, and Monk all showed up. In fact Monk came a number of times, sometimes in the company of the Baroness Nica, who continued to be a doubter.”

1966 - Nothing Is (and associated tour)

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Recorded in May 1966, released (as an edited version of a long 2-set evening) that same year as an LP on the ESP label. Reissued many times since then with ever-increasing amounts of bonus material, ending up with a double CD’s worth.

The ”1966 St. Lawrence” release on Bandcamp is, as I understand it, the first set of two, and the 2nd set was edited into Nothing Is - which is, confusingly not available via Bandcamp (the whole thing is on Spotify). It’s probably some weird rights thing with ESP, whatever. These recordings provide the most exhaustive live document of the band so far. I added the full double CD version to the Spotify playlist.

As per the Bandcamp writeup:

In Spring 1966 Sun Ra and his Arkestra embarked on a tour of five upstate New York colleges. Recorded on May 18, 1966, at St. Lawrence University, in Potsdam, NY, this illuminating collection presents the full 70-minute first set, a partial recording of the evening's second set, and some pre-concert, soundcheck rehearsal takes.

The nature of the somewhat ad hoc 1966 engineering setup prevented a best-quality audio capture, and there are technical shortcomings in these recordings. Nonetheless, this historic set offers a spectrum of the band's repertoire, arrangements, and stage virtuosity over almost an entire evening. The performance roughly coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Arkestra's debut studio sessions in Chicago, 1956. The sets include the rarely performed "State Street," as well as alternate versions of "Theme of the Stargazers," "The Exotic Forest," "Velvet," and "The Second Stop Is Jupiter." The tour reportedly included SUNY Buffalo, Syracuse University, and several other unidentified colleges.

According to longtime Ra percussionist Tommy Hunter, the Arkestra often worked with two drummers during this period. A second drummer is audible on these recordings, but he is not identified in existing tour recording documentation. Saxophonist John Gilmore suggested Roger Blank or Jimmy Johnson as the second drummer.

This is the first known live recording since the Judson Hall/Black Harold show almost 18 months earlier. There may be even more recordings from this tour (Syracuse is mentioned) but only two nights have surfaced so far - the St. Lawrence College shows (early and late) that were edited into Nothing Is, and a show in Buffalo that is partially available in physical form only (no digital anywhere that I could find) on (again) the UK-only Art Yard label - in this case a 10” vinyl record.

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This is a big chunk of sound, so I’m gonna take a break for a day or two as I only just got through re-listening to Strange Strings (which reminded me of some early Nurse With Wound and Anima as well as AMM this time around). Feel free to weigh in! We have around 125 records to go, by my rough count. So posting every few days will result in over a year of listening.

welp, that's my year, scheduled!

the year of the ear: sun ra 2020

i am enjoying the pace but am floundering a little bit. after spending so much time in the 1950-62 years, it's taking me a while to adjust to the new sounds. this thread is pretty much the #1 resource in the world (imo), a godsend