Search & Destroy: Sun Ra

i picked up both and i'm happy i did!

right now very much enjoying the sun ra and merzbow cd

Bunch of great liner notes/things I haven't heard here: https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/

yeah I just got turned on to that Bandcamp stuff via this

https://daily.bandcamp.com/2017/10/13/sun-ra-album-guide/

I know how I'm spending my weekend

this year i choose to listen to all sun ra, chronologically.

really been digging The Nubians of Plutonia recently.

i'm only 21 albums away from it!

that journey covers a lot of astronomical units!

is that including "the eternal myth, revealed"?

one year i decided i was going to listen to all of duke ellington's recordings chronologically. i think i got up to 1932?

is that including "the eternal myth, revealed"?

not at the moment, i don't think! i'm starting off with this as my guide: https://www.discogs.com/artist/2219395-The-Sun-Ra-Arkestra?sort=year%2Casc&limit=250&page=1

My friend saw one of the four Arkestra shows this past weekend. Marshall Allen is 93! Apparently he was supposed to sit some of it out, but I guess he played the entire time.

http://campber.people.clemson.edu/earthlies.jpg

has anyone ever owned or even SEEN a copy of hartmut geerken's discography?

you mean the book titles “sun ra omniverse”? or something else?

"omniverse" yeah, that's the one. looks like it was reprinted in 2015, but probably it was also revised / updated?

i can't find much about it except for a long and glowing review of the 1994 ed. on amazon.

geerken's own website doesn't help much, although it looks like the guy has written a LOT about SR (and in a number of languages).

http://www.hartmutgeerken.com/26.html

nevermind, this is the info i was looking for. among many other things, it includes a revised discography co-authored by christopher trent (who did "earthly recordings"). also the photographs look amazing.

http://artyardrecords.co.uk/omniverse-sun-ra/

from the art yard website:

The new, completely revised edition features:

Unpublished photographs of Sun Ra and the Arkestra by Hartmut Geerken and Val Wilmer.

Fully revised discography by Chris Trent, co-author of The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra.

Articles by Geerken, Amiri Baraka, Chris Cutler, Robert L. Campbell, Salah Ragab, Gabi Geist and others.

New full colour images of hundreds of Sun Ra album covers, posters, handbills and ephemera, including reproductions of rare hand drawn and coloured LP sleeves.

I have the 2015 Art Yard edition. Worth it for the photos alone, nicely printed, and the discography is great to have.

that looks amazing. $72 via forced exposure

I have been sloooowly making my way through in roughly chronological order over the past few years but using this as a guide, which lists everything in chronological order by the oldest track on each record.

I have a copy of “omniverse”, I rarely look at it because (like most of the books i own) it’s simply faster and easier to look up info on the internet. but yeah, it’s a nice book for sure!

i have a small collection of ra related books

my favorites are “this planet is doomed” (edited collection of spoken word transcripts) and “space, interiors and exteriors” (poems, aye aton’s art, his photos of the murals in the philadelphia arkestra commune, production stills from space is the place, etc)

if anyone here hasn't already read the "Space Is The Place" bio, that's very good as well

Art Yard's been doing some cool releases too, I have a double 10" of "lost archive" recordings that's pretty damn good

the pink one? i have a pink double 10” that’s amazing!!

yes, that one!

is anyone interested in doing a sun-ra-in-chronological-order listening thread?

i'd be interested in following along for sure

sure

yeah, I'd give it a shot!

okay, great.

it's my feeling that, after a brief look at sonny's work as a sideman in the 1940s + one of the singles compilations, it would be best just to move right through the arkestra records by release date (going by discogs as KM has been). when material is repackaged for a later release, or when the recording date(s) precede the release date by a significant amount, we can just address it in the thread. and, well, unless there's any objection to that i'll get this thread started in the next couple of days.

My friend saw one of the four Arkestra shows this past weekend. Marshall Allen is 93! Apparently he was supposed to sit some of it out, but I guess he played the entire time.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, January 1, 2018 4:42 PM (yesterday) Bookmark

i am not your friend (well, i would be if we met but I'm not the friend you're talking about) BUT i also saw one of these shows and he was scooting around the whole time, seemed energetic for a person of his age and his final note of the concert (on that weird electronic voice thing) was the final note i heard played in 2017. i liked that.

Compared to when I saw Pharaoh Sanders with the Underground Duo a bit back, and Sanders barely played anything of note (no pun intended) and merely shuffled around in oversized beat up sneakers like a dude who had seen better days. And Sanders is almost 20 years younger than Marshall Allen!

I got the Live At Montreux set finally cos I was in HonestJohn's just before Xmas.
I think it was the second thing I heard by them. So been meaning to pick it up for years.
I was looking at the 2cd compilation of the Detroit Jazz festival sets which I think had been released individually on Total Energy. Are they good.

one of those sets (Life Is Splendid) might be the best live gig I've heard of theirs

we have the Detroit Jazz Center residency set. maybe i will join by listening to all 26 hours, 13 minutes, and 16 seconds of it along with you all.

btw Lech, pick a day, gather the troops and let's all have a Chicago get together. At the least I'll be at Constellation this Saturday.

only if you promise to never call me that again ;)

gathering the troops is not my forte but i will deliver the message

we have probably already been in the same place at the same time a bunch of times!

I said Detroit Jazz Festival and meant Ann Arbor, getting bits of Michigan confused.I have a version of the Detroit Jazz centre as flacs. Think some of it is pretty good. I think the version i have may be one that repeats and I haven't gone through all the folders or discs yet.

there are 28 CDs!

I was thinking it was 26 or s but couldn't remember exactly.
Think i did hear taht the semi legal version did accientally repeat bits across a few discs.

THe Ann Arbor festival thing is called Wake Up Angels in its compiled form and has a bandcamp page here
https://sunrastrut.bandcamp.com/album/wake-up-angels

you all probably already saw this but:

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

I got myself the Exotica comp for christmas and it's been a blast. It's really nicely put together and great sounding. I'd like to know more about who's in control of Ra's estate now as it seems like all of a sudden there are zillions of new releases & reissues.

Irwin is!

http://sunraarkive.blogspot.com/2014/09/exclusive-complete-interview-with-irwin.html

i too got a copy of exotica! so great. it’s been obvious for awhile that exotica is a big influence on his work but it’s really fun to hear it all compiled in one place.

i wonder how much of the influence was exotica-via-big-band (duke ellington's "caravan" e.g.)

or even this, from 1957:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTEmX1tHOVY

Irwin is!

― kurt schwitterz, Tuesday, January 2, 2018 4:20 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

at first i was like, bob irwin? that can't be right. and then i remembered irwin chusid, hence the interview link.

but then i was on the sun ra website (http://www.sunra.com/) and bob irwin gets a "thank you" at the bottom, so:

1. bob irwin is alive?

2. sundazed is involved w/ sun ra reissues?

ohhh i see. sundazed is the parent company of modern harmonic. huh.

thanks for the links- really cool. I'm so fascinated by how his music got preserved, maintained, and cared for. For someone so DIY and all over the place through every phase of his career, it seems like there should be hardly anything left, but instead there's scads of recordings & ephemera. It makes the sum total of Ra's work seem like all the more of a miraculous gift.

Speaking of xpost Art Yard, they've got a previously unreleased radio set, all of it posted here, and note other Ra linked from this same page:
https://sunrastrut.bandcamp.com/album/of-abstract-dreams

press release:
http://r.k7musicnews.com/7t3exsp9g7e.jp

UN RA - OF ABSTRACT DREAMS

Strut and Art Yard present another exclusive from Sun Ra: a previously unreleased radio session most likely recorded at the WXPN FM radio studios in Philadelphia, 1974-5.

This newly discovered session features a new version of Ra's earlier ‘Island In The Sun', a raucous rendition of ‘Unmask The Batman' and the first studio recording of ‘I'll Wait For You' There is no bass player on the sessions and Ra's left hand beats out a rhythmic bass pattern on the piano. All tracks are remastered directly from the original tapes. The album package features a cover photo by photographer Alan Nahigian and new sleeve notes by Paul Griffiths.

it is in fact credited to Sun Ra, not Un Ra (a name somebody might wanta risk litigation for, but his executors have to be cool, right?