Search & Destroy: Sun Ra

According to the site, this is Vol. 2 (of the series on the Transparency label, dunno if anybody else put 'em out).

So, despite having 23 Sun Ra albums / 122 songs in my iTunes (and more on vinyl), I need some assistance here. I'm in agreement with those of you (on this thread or another, I forget) that the new Marshall Allen-curated comp is a really great, smooth comp despite the odds. This is the first time I've heard "Spontaneous Simplicity," and I just love it: the trance-inducing basslines, the funky flutes straight off a good Roy Ayers LP, an extremely far out, stoned-sounding piano solo, clattering group percussion; it's some of my favorite Sun Ra I've heard (and I've heard my share). I went to Discogs to see what album the song appears on, and it seems to appear on two albums with identical track titles and sequence. So, can I assume that Pictures of Infinity and Outer Spaceways, Inc are the same record, repackaged? But the plot thickens: the version of "Spontaneous Simplicity" on this In The Orbit Or Ra comp ends with applause. Could it be from a live album? Ugh, it's so difficult navigating this crazy discography! (Fun, though!)

Also, has anyone heard this / these LPs? Are they generally in the vein of "Spontaneous Simplicity?"

Oh, an as a side note, I'm bummed that this track appears on the CD version of Allen's comp, but not the LP version. D'oh! Surely we could have subbed out "Somebody Else's World" for this one!

Pictures of Infinity/Outer Spaceways Inc. is a live album from '71- I think that version is the one on the comp based on track length. Looking at my iTunes (198 Sun Ra songs from about 13 albums) it looks like I have three different versions. I have one, four minutes long, on a comp of Warner free jazz- probably late sixties. Another is from the reissue of the 1978 "Disco 3000" live record- it's fourteen minutes. The last is from an archival release called "Music From Tomorrow's World" dating to the Chicago days, so Spontaneous Simplicity was kicking around for a while. Anyway my memory is that Pictures of Infinity has a fair amount of free stuff on there as well- a live record from this period I like is "College Tour Vol. 1", which has a bunch of stuff from his '66 college tour. I get a kick out of Heliocentric Worlds-era Ra doing old Chicago hard bop tunes like "Velvet".

And I won't have you talking trash about "Somebody Else's World"!

yeah! that's my favourite from the recent comp!!

Whoa, thanks for the info. I'll have to track down those other versions you speak of. Perfect thing to do on a snow day like today. Take that, gainful employment!

And I like "Somebody Else's World" just fine, though I frequently (maybe generally) find the chant-y, June Tyson stuff a little goofy; often seems to break whatever spell has been cast by the instrumentals.

I have Pictures of Infinity (on vinyl for some reason, Black Lion is the label iirc), it's great, get the whole thing

the new(ish) comp is great, simply because although i own probably 20 sun ra records, it's helpful to be reminded of some of the highlights, and to be given a kind of tour of all his modes and periods.

Yeah, it's really great. It's definitely responsible for the 'kick' I'm on right now. Man, "Ancient Aethiopia" is just incredible.

Art Yard is getting ready to reissue Pat Patrick's solo LP!
https://www.facebook.com/ArtYardRecords/posts/1095604917132453

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Source:

Sun Ra Arkestra ‏@SunRaUniverse 9m9 minutes ago

Sun Ra and Arkestra - Hot Hits fresh from the Sun.
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Ha, that is so cool.

I remember Phil Schaap in the BBC doc on Ra saying, "You'd send your $6, and maybe two years later, you'd get your records. Of course, they cashed the check two years earlier."

ah nice (*some* of this is from the xpost iTunes stash, but)
http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6575766/new-sun-ra-recordings-fall-2015-exclusive

Irwin Chusid, the administrator for Sun Ra LLC

how did he get to be in charge?

yeah, i did a double take at that

deeply suspicious of the whole :outsider music: concept, and as strange as he was (not always in healthy ways), i think it's a bit of an insult to apply it to sun ra.

wasn't the whole point of the "afrofuturist" thing – sun ra, scratch perry, george clinton – a deliberate attempt to be outsiders, though? to place themselves outside of the world's shit constraints on black people by way of an aesthetic vehicle that proclaimed otherworldliness?

though i get that they're not "outsider art" in the way daniel johnston or wesley willis is said to be, true

right but i think the "outsider art" tag inevitably trivializes/reduces them as it does most folks.

Trivialize vs formulating shorthands for things you are seeing. I know "outsider music" expert is funny but still.

How can you be strange in a healthy way?

people are healthily strange all the time!

i dunno the 'outsider art' tag tends to collapse a lot of different and varied phenomena into a category that doesn't do any of them justice.

usually it's something like 'art brut', implying a lack of formal training. but i don't really know what that mean in the jazz world. sun ra had about as much training as any other jazz musician of his generation. and all the space-age trappings aside (not that they are trivial!), the shifts in his music track broadly (ok, very broadly) with changes in the forms of jazz over the mid-20th century. he was paying attention to what was going on and folks were paying attention to him.

otm. not excited about Chusid's involvement

well for all we know he's an excellent steward of the music.

Chusid's "outsider music" stuff is only one small part of what he does. He also worked on this compilation, for example, and put together a bunch of great compilations of Raymond Scott's music in the '90s.

I don't think 'outsider' dilutes but concentrates a few things that could be simply deemed unclassifiable and not thought about. Brings a few things into focus. Didn't like the way it was used so probably not the best time to talk about this.

re: music and our distance to the person and/or groups means that it can be a hard call to say what is/isn't strange in a healthy way.

if you figure most people on earth don't listen to much or any jazz and most of the people who do listen to jazz don't listen to much or any sun ra...that's pretty outsider-y!

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.