Search & Destroy: Sun Ra

I almost bought La Nuits de la Fondation Maeght, last week I guess, but I wanted to try some new things. I mostly like Assif Tsahar/Cooper-Moore's America, one of the things I picked up instead. Also, I'm listening a lot to Borah Bergman's Meditations for Piano, though I'm having trouble making up my mind about it. (It does make good, if brooding, background music, but I'm afraid Bergman wouldn't be thrilled with that observation.)

is the US version of Cosmos a 24-bit remaster? (i'm an audiophile i'm a tool)

i wish they had more band pictures on sun ra albums, i think maybe you can learn things about the album before listening by looking at their costumes, a la the message in herbie's shirts

I don't agree. I don't like it as much as I initially did. (Maybe with Ra it is a bad sign when I immediately like one of his CDs?) But I'm not aware of any other Sun Ra CD with that sound, so to me it seems to justify its own existence by having a distinctive style. If anything, it might be too accessible though, for vahid.

I keep waiting for someone who knows enough about Sun Ra and Miles Davis to do a comparison of their work in the 70's. In a loose way, they were doing something similar--I think. (I'm not really into Miles, so don't know that material.)

Yeah, did he ever! He was a big fan. Only, I can't think of an album that was entirely comprised of that stuff. But on the early records, he often threw in an exotica-styled track or two, like the title cut on Sun Song or "Paradise" on Sound of Joy. All those early 50s records are great, even though some slate them for being too trad big-band like or some nonsense like that. Couldn't be farther from the truth. Actually, you should look for the record called The Futuristic Sound of Sun Ra. I think it has been packaged under a number of titles, but that was the original title. It's on CD on Denon. I think it was a quintet date; it's got a few tracks of cocktail-derived, chill-out kind of sounds that the band of course warps slightly in its way. It doesn't have the guys cawing like tropical birds as on say a Baxter record, but the vibe is there..

Yeah, I think my problem with Cosmos was that after owning like 30 Ra records it just didn't take me someplace strange or anything. But yeah, as I said, certainly not a bad record, just not one I'd start with.

Did ra use the fender rhodes often, or was it just organ, or piano, or synths/moog and so on?

But this has Ra's "Reflex Motion," which I don't think has appeared on any official recording before, and when I've heard it live, it's been great. (Actually, very much from the out end of things but it works for me. Great mix of dynamics, colors, and textures.)

I will probably buy this, but I might wait to by it directly from the Arkestra. I don't know why I'm being so negative, anyway. I've enjoyed the Arkestra a lot the last several times I've seen them (all after Sun Ra's departure).

I can't believe how long it's been since I've seen them. I will have to watch my local weeklies.

i am listening to "the realm of the lightning" from vol. 1 right now and it's very much like black dice. there's long blippy sections where the horns and synths imitate a herd of elephants battling martian invaders which give way to these banging rolling five-minute tribal drum beatdowns. both discs are sort of like that.

it's not so much like the boredoms as it is like the AEC covering EYE's "Rebore vol. 0".

I can't comment on Allen's compositions. I've seen the Allen-led Arkestra once before, and they played some of his pieces, but I don't remember much about them. However, his out blowing is classic, classic, classic. Listening to Allen's playing on some of those 60s and 70s Arkestra albums you can really hear where John Zorn got a lot of his ideas from.

I whole-heartedly agree with this. I love the 50s Arkestra records that I've heard. In some ways I find that era of the band even weirder than the later, more definitively "out" stuff. I think that's because the whole Fletcher Henderson-style swing band has disappeared from the culture and to hear a band playing in a style like that, but with Sun Ra's exotic flourishes and odd harmonizations peeking through the surface is a real time warp. Nowadays, the really "out" stuff has become paradoxically more normal sounding.

(Uh oh the Marxist puritan who disapproves of people communicating on the internet (or something) from the department next door just walked through.)

Live:

Angels and Demons at Play
Spontaneous Simplicity
Space Aura
'S Wonderful
It Ain't Necessarily So
How High the Moon
China Gate

Studio:

Majestic 1
Ankhnaton
Posession
Tapestry From an Asteroid
Majestic 2
Majestic 3
Majestic 4
Velvet
A Call for All Demons
Interstellar Lo-Ways

Since "El Viaje" is going to be on at 9:00.

(I could go hear Charles Ellerbee tonight at the Tritone, but I'm too tired and that place gets very smokey.)

I listened to We Travel the Spaceways/Bad & Beautiful on the way to work.

Anyone wanna do a POX sonny tunes?

Heliocentric Worlds, Vol. 3

Is the soundtrack available anywhere or am I about to record this off the DVD? I think I'm about to record this off the DVD. It's one of the best things I've ever heard from them.