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

the Walt Dickerson and Batman records are great palate cleansers if you're burned out on the skronk :)

Yeah, love hearing anomalies like those or the doo-wop tracks pop up on the Spotify playlist during shuffle.

Been listening to said playlist for days now; it's wonderful hearing a decade's worth of evolution laid out in the proper chronology.

1966 - Monorails And Satellites

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A nice conceptual and musical break here. Sun Ra piano solo albums are quite rare in the overall discography, and this is the first example to surface. Recorded in 1966, the first volume was released as an LP on Saturn in 1973, and the second volume in 1974. Volume Three was only released last year in January (almost 53 years after the original recordings) as part of a complete set.

As per Bandcamp:
A tape of a third, unreleased volume was discovered posthumously by Michael D. Anderson of the Sun Ra Music Archive. Released here for the first time, it consists of five originals and four standards, and was recorded in stereo.

Bandcamp also sez:

The playing here speaks less of a style, and more of a collection of statements. Some of the tunes, with their odd juxtapositions of mood, could be mistaken for silent film scores. Perhaps they were audio notebooks, a way to generate ideas which could be developed with the band ("I think orchestra"). Regardless of any secondary (and admittedly speculative) intent, they serve as compelling standalone works. The fingering reflects Sun Ra's encyclopedic knowledge of piano history as his passages veer from stride to swing, from barrelhouse to post-bop, from march to Cecil Taylor-esque free flights, with a bit of soothing "candelabra" swank thrown in. Sunny's attack is mercurial, his themes unpredictable. His hands can be primitive or playful, then abruptly turn sensitive and elegant. As with the whole of Sun Ra's recorded legacy, you get everything but consistency and predictability.

The listener also experiences something rare in the Sun Ra recorded omniverse: intimacy. His albums, generally populated by the rotating Arkestral cast, are raucous affairs. With the Monorails sessions, we eavesdrop on private moments: the artist, alone with his piano. These are brief audio snapshots of what was surely a substantial part of Sun Ra's life, infinitesimal surviving scraps of 100,000 hours similarly spent, most lost to posterity.

These compositions do seem meandering sometimes, but they have a nice flow. Improvised? Aside from “Easy Street” and the tracks on Volume Three, it would appear so. From “Sun Ra Sundays’:

While Sun Ra is highly regarded as a pioneer of electric keyboards in jazz, his prodigious gifts as a pianist have largely been overlooked, obscured by and subsumed within the Arkestra’s overall musical activities. Monorails and Satellites is one of the very few solo piano recordings Ra ever made and it is a fascinating document of his instrumental technique and singular musical thinking. Ra does not possess a dazzling virtuosity, but he approaches the piano as an immense orchestra, full of vibrant colors and contrasting timbres. Like a child at play, Ra delights in the resonant rumbling of the lowest octaves and the plinking, chattering chimes of the highest notes above. But Ra’s two-hand independence is sometimes truly astonishing: each hand in a different meter, in a different key, ten fingers layering multiple outer and inner melodies to create complex rhythmic/harmonic webs. Ra’s touch is aggressive yet supple, achieving illusionistic “bent” note effects.

https://nuvoid.blogspot.com/2009/07/sun-ra-sunday.html

From that same link:

Ra’s discography gets very confusing at this point, with various albums containing material recorded at different times and places, with a slew of singles thrown in to boot. This sort of confusion continues until well into the nineteen-seventies!

Yep, that will become very clear with the next entry…

Welcome back, earthlings. If your ears are weary of major statements like 2-hour college sets or triple LPs of solo piano, how about some sketchbook collections of “inside” performances harking back to the Chicago era?

1966 - Pictures Of Infinity a.k.a Outer Spaceways Incorporated (referred to here as POI) and Outerspaceways Inc. a.k.a A Tonal View Of Tomorrow Vol. 3 a.k.a. Spaceways (referred to here as “Spaceways”)

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It now becomes clear that full engagement with the Sun Ra discography is like reading the Necronomicon, it drives people to madness. Here’s the “Sun Ra Sunday” entries for these two “albums” (really a collection of random tapes, afaict), I’m including them both, even with repetitive parts, because it gives you the full clusterfuck picture (also, they have different and relevant bits of info). This guy gets really frustrated! I don’t blame him.

for “Pictures Of Infinity”:

This is yet another record with a horribly tortured history. In 1971, Sun Ra sold a stash of tapes to Alan Bates of the German label, Black Lion, who shortly thereafter issued this album under the title, Pictures of Infinity. A 1994 CD reissue added a previously unreleased bonus track (“Intergalactic Motion”) and all cuts were again reissued in 1998 on the three-CD box set, Calling Planet Earth (Freedom 7612), but there the album is stupidly re-titled Outer Spaceways Incorporated. I say stupidly because a 1974 album originally titled Outer Spaceways Incorporated (Saturn 14300A+B) was also re-issued in the same box set and inexplicably re-titled Spaceways, thereby creating all kinds of unnecessary discographical confusion. Be that as it may, this album (whatever its title) is drawn from an excellent stereo recording of a live performance in New York City circa. 1968 and provides a rare, hi-fi glimpse of the newly evolving “cosmo drama.”
https://nuvoid.blogspot.com/2009/09/sun-ra-sunday_27.html

(Keep in mind that these recordings have now been dated to 1966 - this blog entry is from 2009)

for “Outerspaceways Inc.” a.k.a “A Tonal View Of Times Tomorrow Vol. 3” a.k.a. “Spaceways”:

This record certainly has a tortured discographical history! In December, 1971, Sun Ra sold a cache of tapes to the Black Lion label so as to pay the Arkestra’s traveling expenses from Denmark to Egypt. Sadly, much of this music was never released. In 1974, El Saturn released this album as Outer Spaceways Incorporated (143000A+B) – although it was sometimes entitled A Tonal View of Times Tomorrow, Vol.3. Inexplicably, some of this music also appeared on numerous hybrid pressings of later Saturn albums such as Primitone and Invisible Shield among others. Finally, in 1998, the German DA Music label released a three-CD box set entitled Calling Planet Earth (Freedom 7612), containing some (but not all) the Black Lion holdings, wherein this album is stupidly re-titled Spaceways. I say stupidly because another disc in this otherwise fine box set is inanely titled Outer Spaceways Incorporated, making an already confusing discography needlessly opaque. This is the kind of thing that makes Campbell and Trent’s Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra so absolutely necessary!
https://nuvoid.blogspot.com/2009/07/sun-ra-sunday_12.html

The upshot of all of this is that YET ANOTHER hybrid version of these two recordings has been released as the Bandcamp version of Pictures Of Infinity (added to Spotify playlist). This does not have side 1 of the original Pictures Of Infinity LP, but it does have “The Wind Speaks” and “Outer Space (sic) Incorporated/We Travel The Spaceways” from Spaceways (i.e. about half of THAT album).

Confused yet? Me too! I’m not even gonna try to figure out where the other FIVE tracks on the new Bandcamp version came from. They say 1966, that’s good enough for me. Another lovely little curveball I had to sort out is that two of the “Spaceways” tracks have been retitled on the reissue versions (see below).

Regarding the music, the Bandcamp notes cover it pretty well:

In the mid-1960s, Sun Ra's commercial recordings and performances were reflecting new musical directions, many representing extreme departures from his Chicago (1956–1960) and early New York (1961–1963) approaches to jazz. Such albums as Other Planes of There (1964), The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra (volumes 1 & 2; 1965), The Magic City (1965), Strange Strings (1966), and Atlantis (1967) pushed beyond the conventions of structured, beat-driven jazz to challenging frontiers. To many ears, they were no longer "inside" jazz at all. Rather, they were "outside"—groundbreaking musical forms that transcended categories. In jazz circles, this side of Ra sparked controversy, gaining him many allies, while losing others.

The 1966 recordings in this set, however, are largely "inside," and demonstrate that during this period Ra didn't abandon his jazz roots (in fact, he never did). These titles, many dating from his Chicago and early New York years, represent an updating of Sun Ra's early catalog (with some new titles). The playing is loose, but structured, and Sun Ra's featured soloists get ample opportunities to stretch out. Call it "harder bop.”

So at this point, we are missing the first track on side 1 of the original POI, the 15-minute “Somewhere There,” which is inexplicably greyed out on Spotify in the US. It is, however, on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw1zLHflWp4

The 2nd track on POI side 1, yet another version of “Outer Spaceways Incorporated,” has been added to Spotify since it IS available in the US on one of the digital POI reissues.

The “Spaceways” LP has been reissued in its entirety physically, but not digitally aside from the two tracks on this new POI version. I couldn’t find those dual-titled tracks (“Chromatic Shadows” a.k.a. “Prelude And Shadow-Light World” and “The Satellites Are Spinning” a.k.a. “We Sing This Song”) on Youtube (sigh/wtf/shrug).

Aside from one other (very interesting) entry yet to come, this brings us to the end of 1966. The Arkestra was continuing to play at Slug’s every Monday, building their following. I wanted to excerpt this bit from the Szwed book as it provides some context for the globetrotting that was to come (see also: the bit upthread about the radio DJ in Europe).

“…Tam Fiofori, a Nigerian poet-writer who had come to New York in 1965 by way of London […] was beginning to write about the Arkestra in underground or arts publications […] He had attached himself to the Arkestra, and he could often be seen at work at the typewriter in The Sun Palace or traveling with the band. More than anyone else, Fiofori made Sun Ra known internationally. And he ambitiously drew Sun Ra deeper into the world of avant arts.[…] But Sonny was not about to let Fiofori or anyone else be his interpreter: “For three years (Fiofori) wrote down everything I said, publishing it all over the world, but he didn’t hear any of it.”

ZING!

One more note on this time period, as per Szwed, regarding 1966-67:

“Again a great number of records were released that had been previously recorded: Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth, Rocket Number Nine, We Travel The Spaceways, and When Angels Speak Of Love. And along with them […] Sun Ra’s first solo piano recordings.” (i.e. the previous week’s “Monorails” set)

I think the version of "Outer Spaceways Incorporated" on Pictures of Infinity was my first exposure to that song, still probably my favorite. Great set.

1966 - The Ankh And The Ark - Sun Ra and Henry Dumas in conversation

The last thing we have from this year. Recorded at Slug’s Saloom in 1966, a 24-minute conversation between the poet/writer Dumas and Sun Ra. Meandering but fascinating. And what the heck is that background music?

Added to Spotify, available on Bandcamp as well along with detailed and fascinating liner notes:

https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-ankh-and-the-ark

1967 - Atlantis (side 2)

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Another stunner, but this LP is the first of (I assume) several that will be split up since different tracks were recorded at different times. Side 1 isn’t until September of 1968, side 2 (added to the playlist) was recorded at the Olatunji Center of African Culture, 125th Street, New York, August 4, 1967.

In terms of what was happening in Sun Ra world“It took almost seven years for the Village Voice to notice Sun Ra, but in 1967 jazz critic Michael Zwerin dropped into Slug’s to hear his band. […] nothing he had ever heard prepared him for what he saw that night.” (Szwed, followed by a lengthy description of the Arkestra in full freak flower).

Szwed quoting Zwerin’s review: “Sun Ra’s music is pagan, religious, simple, complex, and almost everything else at the same time. There is no pigeon-hole for it. It is ugly and beautiful and terribly interesting. It’s new music, yet I’ve been hearing it for years.”

Earlier in April, the Ihnfinity Inc. corporation was founded by Ra, Alton Abraham, and others as some kind of umbrella organization which I’m still not totally clear on.

The LP itself was released in 1969 on Saturn, and later part of the Evidence CD series. The new Bandcamp version corrects some Side 1 issues (to be covered later) and is remastered. Bandcamp sez:

“Atlantis" is an overpowering—and at times frightful—assault which refuses to coalesce into any conventional structure, and augurs Sun Ra's increasingly adventurous performances in the 1970s. The keyboards used were a Clavioline and a Gibson Kalamazoo Organ (which Ra re-christened the "Solar Sound Organ"). During this performance, according to biographer John Szwed, "Sun Ra rolled his hands on the keys, pressing his forearm along the keyboard, played with his hands upside-down, slashing and beating the keyboard, spinning around and around, his hands windmilling at the keys—a virtual sonic representation of the flooding of Atlantis." It is an uncompromising work by an artist unafraid to challenge his audience. The original 45-minute performance was projected for a full album, running across two sides. However, it was edited to fit onto one side of an LP, and is here presented in its commercially released form. A release of the complete recording is in our project queue.

45 minutes?!?!?

Sun Ra Sundays says:

The side-long title track was recorded live at the Olatunji Center of African Culture sometime after May, 1967 and is essentially one long Ra solo on the other new keyboard in his arsenal: a Gibson Kalamazoo organ. The Kalamazoo was a lower-priced copy of the Farfisa portable organ made famous by rock musicians of the time (think “96 Tears”). Ra attacks the instrument with unrelenting, two-fisted zeal, summoning forth a tsunami of sound that duly evokes the mythical flooding of Atlantis. It is a hair-raisingly terrifying performance and as menacingly psychedelic as any music of the period. After about fifteen assaultive minutes, an eerie calm sets in and the Arkestra plays an aching, moaning, richly voiced ensemble passage while Ra’s screeching organ threatens to overwhelm. The tension continues to mount until it is almost unbearable – then suddenly Ra cues the space chant: “Sun Ra and his band from outer space have entertained you here…” Holy moly! As Michael Shore puts it in his liner notes on the Evidence CD, “Atlantis” is “frightening, fascinating, enthralling, and finally overpowering music…(It) is one of the most monumental achievements of an artist who was always working in super-colossal terms.”

1967 loose ends: “The Invisible Shield” and “The Bridge/Rocket #9” 7” and the unavailable “Cosmo Dance”

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We touched on “The Invisible Shield” previously in this thread:

man the title track is definitely from later, there were no synths like that in the early 60s

― Οὖτις, Friday, February 7, 2020 9:34 AM (three weeks ago)

It’s interesting hearing this in the proper context as it is an appropriate companion piece to Atlantis.

Also recorded this year (there are relatively few recordings available for 1967 compared to most other years) was a rare 45 on Saturn, not released until 1982 (!!!).

“Cosmo Dance”, listed for this year in the Szwed discography and also not released until many years later (1979) on a rare late-period Saturn pressing, was also *probably* recorded this year. The record it appears on, “Song Of The Stargazers”, is otherwise made up of live 70s tracks and has yet to be reissued. The Sun Ra Sundays writeup sounds tasty - unfortunately I couldn’t find the track on Youtube.

Song of the Stargazers (Saturn 487 or sometimes 6161) was released in 1979 and is mostly a hodgepodge of various live recordings from the nineteen-seventies. But one track was obviously recorded much earlier, probably in 1967 or 1968, according to Prof. Campbell. Performed in a large, reverberant space in front of a sizable and enthusiastic audience, “Cosmo Dance” is an interesting quasi-modal composition featuring some evocative flute and oboe. Clacking wooden sticks set up a simple, repetitious rhythm with Boykins's bass and Pat Patrick’s “space lute” plucking out a droning three-note groove. Low horns and bowed bass enter with convulsively heaving whole-note fourths while flute and oboe and bass clarinet dance a medieval round. Flute and then oboe embark on expansive, Middle-Eastern sounding solos over the clacking sticks and throbbing bass/space lute, the audience bursting into spirited applause after each. Finally, the low horn/bowed bass whole-note fourths return, repeating several times before ending to more justifiably hearty ovation. Ra himself is not heard playing on this track, but the murky sound quality makes it hard to clearly make out who is doing what. Campbell says Marshall Allen is playing both flute and oboe, but that is impossible since both instruments are heard simultaneously during the ensemble section. So, is it Danny Davis on flute? It certainly sounds like him. There is also some talking barely audible throughout – is that Sun Ra lecturing the crowd or just random audience noise? In any event, this is a beautiful, prototypical Sun Ra composition of the period, perfectly realized by his Arkestra.

In other 1967 news:

“The Arkestra meanwhile had picked up a part-time manager, Lem Roebuck, who had gotten them concerts in the parks, sometimes with as many as thirty musicians, through Simon Bly, a man who staged musical events […] Roebuck had seen a singer and dancer in Bly’s series of outdoor musicals who, he told Sun Ra, would broaden his appeal. So Roebuck talked June Tyson into coming to a rehearsal […] She helped liberate Sun Ra from the keyboards, and made it easier for him to come to the front of the band[…]”

I’m not gonna quote TOO much more of the Szwed book at this point but suffice to say that June Tyson and her fellow singer/dancer Verta Mae Grosvenor (hired right after June was) brought a whole new dimension to things:

“June Tyson and I integrated the band,” Grosvenor said, “and we had to develop roles which fit the Arkestra. So we decided to be space goddesses.”

1967-68 - Solar Myth Approach (part 2) and A Black Mass

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Most of the Solar Myth Approach tracks are believed to have been recorded in this time frame, and have been added to the Spotify playlist (a few others come later, in 1969 and 1970, you can peek ahead at the detailed Bandcamp notes if you want).

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

We also have a recording of a play that Szwed says was recorded in 1966 with Amiri Baraka, but was released on LP in 1968. I’m not sure of the exact details, info is sketchy.

“A Black Mass” was reissued once on CD but isn’t officially available at the moment. However, it is on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=oi98wfZyqpU&feature=emb_logo

ok, i dug up my copy of "cosmo dance" from the record and it is indeed a very fine thing... here's a quick little temporary sendspace of it:

https://www.sendspace.com/file/mmu55h

thanks!!

1968 (or earlier) - Continuation (Volumes 1 and 2)

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Continuation (Vol. 1) was originally released as a rare LP on Saturn in 1970, and the origins of the tracks have been debated ever since. As usual, Bandcamp has the definitive version, including a 2nd disc of sessions originally released in rough form on the Corbett Vs. Dempsey label as part of a reissue.

The first track (ya gotta love the title “Biosphere Blues”) is a lovely stroll through older stylings, muted trumpets suggesting Louis Armstrong and older motifs, broken up by a more modern rambunctious sax. I don’t think many of these became Sun Ra “standards” so it’s interesting to hear these tracks for the first time (I’m ashamed to admit that I do have a Scorpio reissue of Vol. 1 on LP, but haven’t actually listened to it).

By the next track, “Intergalactic Research”, we are in full freak mode and the agonized groans and zombie shuffle tempo almost reminds me of the Viennese Aktionists. Weird shit. Percussion heavy, again, that’s one of the things I’m coming to appreciate the most as I work through the catalog this way, re-listening or first-listening as appropriate. Even his keyboard playing has a rhythmic surety to it.

Then we have a different version of “Earth Primitive Earth” (covered upthread under the weird Space Probe B-side Art Yard release) and a Bandcamp exclusive complete version of the track “New Planet”.

The B-side is all one track, as per Bandcamp:
The LP side-length "Continuation to Jupiter Festival" was reportedly recorded live at a club called The East, in Brooklyn, but there's no indication of an audience, including during quiet passages and after exciting solos; the constrained ambience of the track indicates a studio setting. Danny Ray Thompson, as reported by Campbell-Trent, "has a recollection ('not 100 percent') of performing this piece at The East." Indeed it could have been performed—but perhaps not recorded—there. Robert Barry is credited as drummer, but the aggressive stickwork (as Campbell and Trent note) sounds like Clifford Jarvis.

Sun Ra Sundays thinks this track is from 1969, but who knows. Also note: “The presence of Tommy Hunter and his echo-echo-echo machine on “Earth Primitive Earth” and “New Planet” makes me think these tracks were recorded prior to 1968. In fact, the overall ambience (and massively increased hiss) sounds like some of the Choreographer’s Workshop recordings (but this might just be wishful thinking).”

https://nuvoid.blogspot.com/search?q=continuation

(added to Spotify)

Bandcamp on Vol. 1:
Several authorities believe studio tracks 1 thru 4 were recorded in 1968, but "Biosphere Blues" sounds as if it were recorded in the early 1960s at the Choreographer's Workshop. That location (and the year 1963) was cited on a limited-pressing Corbett vs. Dempsey CD of the album, linking it with early 1960s recordings which appeared on Secrets of the Sun and Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow. In 2014, Campbell-Trent offered a reconsideration: "normally dated 1968-69, but on stylistic grounds an earlier date is likely for these tracks."

The personnel listed below contains a slew of maybes. Based on the knowns and probables, as well as the sounds and instrumentation, Continuation closely reflects Sun Ra's album Atlantis, which was recorded in September 1968. In fact the Gibson Kalamazoo ("space") organ and the Hohner clavinet on "Intergalactic Research" are also heard on Atlantis, and Sun Ra did not use either in the early 1960s (the Hohner wasn't introduced until 1964).

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0507721803_10.jpg

Bandcamp on Vol. 2:
Continuation 2 would surprise Sun Ra, because he never released any such album. Around 1970 he did release Continuation, a limited-pressing LP of recordings whose origins have confounded experts. The Robert Campbell-Christopher Trent discographic atlas, The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra (2nd edition, pub. 2000), provides some guidance on personnel, but the citations contain many question marks. Several authorities believe these sessions date from 1968 or '69, yet they echo recordings made in the early 1960s at the Choreographer's Workshop. That location (and the year 1963) was cited on a limited-pressing Corbett vs. Dempsey 2CD set of Continuation, linking it with early '60s recordings on Secrets of the Sun and Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow. In 2014, Campbell-Trent offered a reconsideration: "normally dated 1968-69, but on stylistic grounds an earlier date is likely for these tracks."

Sun Ra Archives Executive Director Michael D. Anderson, who transferred these tracks from undated master tapes, insists they originate from '63 and were recorded at CW. That venue was a longtime Arkestra rehearsal space and ad hoc recording studio, a residency that began shortly after their 1961 arrival in NYC following the formative Chicago years.

The recordings on Continuation Vol. 2 (all in full stereo) feature small ensembles of between six and eight players, typical of CW recordings from the early '60s. At the time, Sun Ra was working largely with musicians who had come east with him, along with a handful of New York recruits. One of the few clues that argues against CW is the absence of the harsh warehouse acoustics characteristic of the Workshop basement. These recordings have a warmer studio feel, though they still reflect a low-rent setting.

So, I’m convinced. It seems that a lot of these tracks (especially the Vol. 2 ones) should have come earlier in the playlist, in the CW era, but I’ll leave them here. The record starts out normal with “Blue York” (I love it), and then gets seriously out on the next two tracks, swerving back into sedate cocktail hour with “Ihnfinity”, then percussive cosmic weirdness for a couple of tracks, then an early version of “Next Stop Mars”.

Please chime in if you have any thoughts on this music. I’m gonna start assuming that everyone here has read John Swzed’s “Space Is The Place” and go from there.

never even heard of these before!

1968 - Atlantis (side 1) and the “Blues On Planet Mars” 7”

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Side 1 of Atlantis and the two tracks on this single were all apparently recorded in September 1968. The LP (including side 2 discussed earlier) was released on Saturn in 1969. Then it was reissued in 1973 as part of the ill-fated Impulse program (with a truncated “Part 2” of the track “Yucatan” called “Yucatan II” substituted for the original Part 1), later reissued in original form as part of the Evidence series. The single itself is extremely rare, although a 1-sided version with just the A-side is more common (and released much later).

A lot of this is percussion-centered, percussion-only, or electric keyboard & percussion duets. Good stuff. The definitive Bandcamp version includes both parts of “Yucatan”:

https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/atlantis

Could there be a better time than "strictly enforced social distancing" to bone up on my Sun Ra?!?! Whenever we go back to classes, I need to start my unit on jazz so heeeeeeyo -- thanks for the monumental effort of this thread!

I have read parts of Space is the Place (and have it) and know this-and-that about Sun Ra, but haven't ever focused super intently on his output. I saw the Arkestra on NYE a few years ago.

Hi LL! Nice to see you in here, please enjoy the amazing tunes!

Atlantis is epic but not one of my favorites tbh

apparently Danny Ray Thompson just passed :( RIP

Saw that. He had also played in DC funk/ proto-go-go band Black Heat

1968 - loose ends

STOP THE PRESSES! We have something to add in that we missed, released on vinyl by the US label Roaratorio. A set from May 1965 (!!):

https://www.discogs.com/Sun-Ra-His-Astro-Infinity-Arkestra-Other-Strange-Worlds/release/5457402

Not on Spotify, but the album is on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxxnXYC8iLw

There’s also track from Spaceways with June Tyson, mentioned earlier, recorded around ’68 that fits in here.

And then we have the first five tracks from Roaratorio’s album “Sun Embassy”:

https://www.discogs.com/Sun-Ra-And-His-Astro-Ihnfinity-Arkestra-Sun-Embassy/release/11599231

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These were recorded at various times in 1968, and have been added to the Spotify playlist. The last two will come in ’69.

This closes out 1968. As mentioned, Danny Thompson just died, at this point in the Szwed book it is noted that he had become the Arkestra’s de facto manager around this time.

Never even heard of these

they're new! Roaratorio released four albums in the last 5-6 years, all previously unreleased stuff.

so hard to catch up with this stuff! didn't get far with "other strange worlds", just sounded like a "strange strings" variation to me. i'm enjoying "cosmic strut", sounds sort of a ra-ified take on the "sanford and son" theme!

1969 - My Brother The Wind (Vol. 1)

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Blasting off to outer space on the Moog rocket, these tracks were all recorded on the new instrument in 1969, and released as an LP on Saturn in 1970. It was repressed a couple of times in the 70s, then ignored for almost 30 years, then there were two Scorpio LP pressings in the 00s, and finally a definitive 2017 Bandcamp version (added to Spotify).

From the Bandcamp page:

The original My Brother the Wind LP on Saturn (catalog 521) featured four tracks, properly sequenced here on as tracks 1–4. For this expanded release, tracks 5–7 feature three complete session takes of "The Perfect Man." The third and final complete take was issued in 1974 on Side B of Saturn 45 rpm single ES 537, reissued in 1983 on Saturn 9/7474, and included on the Evidence 2-CD set The Singles in September 1996. The alternate takes have not been previously issued.

Track 8 features the monumental "Space Probe," a solo Moog work recorded around the same time—and possibly performed on a Minimoog. This track was originally released in 1974 on the Saturn LP Space Probe, which appeared in a number of hybrid configurations during the 1970s. On at least one iteration, taped to the generic back cover was a typewritten card which claimed "Space Probe," described as a "moog (sic) solo," had been "recorded in Chicago, 1960's"—a fanciful claim at best.

The Sun Ra Sundays writeup is here:

https://nuvoid.blogspot.com/2009/08/sun-ra-sunday_16.html

This one is, uh… not really my thing, although it sure is adventurous.

I forgot one thing from 1968 - at the end of the year, the Arkestra moved to Philadelphia, where they would remain (more or less) for the rest of Sun Ra’s life.

1969 - Solar Myth Approach (two* tracks), Sun Embassy, The Intergalactic Thing
* - see below

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Welcome back, my distanced friends. The perfect antidote for boredom and isolation, more Sun Ra!

I fixed the end of the playlist, some of the Solar Myth Approach and Sun Embassy tracks got out of order. Regarding the Solar Myth Approach tracks, please allow me this long Bandcamp excerpt:

The historical context of two other tracks merit reevaluation. The solo Moog synthesizer tracks "Seen III, Took 4" (Vol. 1) and "Scene 1, Take 1" (Vol. 2) are listed in The Earthly Recordings as being performed on a Minimoog. Ra acquired a Mini prototype in 1970—the year the instrument was developed—from Bob Moog himself and took it on tour. The prior year Ra had visited Gershon Kingsley's New York studio and recorded on Kingsley's modular Moog; those recordings were issued on Saturn in 1970 as the album My Brother the Wind. We asked Brian Kehew, a Moog historian (who wrote liner notes for the 2017 deluxe reissue of My Brother the Wind), to review the two Solar-Myth tracks and identify which instrument Ra played. His reply: "Sure sounds UN-like a Minimoog and VERY like the modular system. Ra plays a wider range on the keyboard than you could on a Minimoog. It's the longer keyboard of the modular system." As it turns out, on both volumes of Solar-Myth, Ra credits himself with playing "Moog synthesizer" — not the Mini. So in this one instance, it seems Ra was on the level.

But that's not all. According to Anderson, "Scene 1, Take 1" was recorded at the tape speed of 3-3/4ips, but for the original BYG LP it was—for reasons unknown—played back at 7-1/2ips. Hence, that track has always been heard at double speed. If you listen closely, at two seconds in there's a momentary voice which is clearly sped-up. The 3-3/4ips tape is too fragile for Anderson to run, but Kehew was able to convert the digital file to true speed. On this version, at four seconds in, you can hear the voice of Sun Ra at normal pitch. It's conceivable that Ra made the creative decision to speed up the piece for the album—although we cannot rule out engineer error. At any rate, here the original LP version remains as track #3 in the Vol. 2 sequence, and the true-speed version, which reflects what Ra's hands actually played, has been included on this remastered digital edition of Vol. 2 as a bonus track. (The way BMG acquired the tapes (covered previously)…) increases the likelihood of "engineer error" causing the incorrect speed of "Scene 1, Take 1," as well as explaining the incongruous stylistic mix of these two albums.

So far, aside from the newly-unearthed Sun Embassy tracks, all we’ve heard so far this year is Moog solos. The “slower” i.e. correct-speed version of “Scene 1 Take 1” is kind of a revelation, I think I prefer it to “Space Probe.”

The other major revelation of this sparsely-documented year isn’t available online at all that I could find, another Roaratorio vinyl-only release (a double LP) of previously-unreleased studio sessions from Philly called The Intergalactic Thing.

https://www.discogs.com/Sun-Ra-His-Astro-Ihnfinity-Arkestra-The-Intergalactic-Thing/release/8493754

This seems like the first truly major thing we’ve encountered that isn’t available for listening! I wanna hear it! The 1969 Sun Embassy tracks are quite good, particularly the funky keyboard workout on “Cosmic Strut.”

Notably, although The Intergalactic Thing says “Recorded August - November 1969, Sun Studios, Philadelphia, PA,” June Tyson is not credited. That will change very soon.

i gotta say i'm really enjoying "the intergalactic thing", absolutely my jam. there's another version of "saturn moon" which is a b-side of his i love, not to be confused with "moon over saturn" which is a different piece. this is a recording of the arkestra at their best, worth seeking out, thank you for bringing it to wider attention!

wait where did you find it? link?

oh nm you probably went to slsk or something

slsk it was!

Hi folks, taking a brief break today but I'll be back tomorrow to start the 70s!

i have so much catching up to do

GET ON IT, KARL

I expect a written paragraph on each record you've missed so far, 4 sentences minimum, due Wednesday

i will respond experimentally and intuitively, out of respect to the music

<3

Atlantis is the only Sun Ra I’ve ever heard, but it’s ace. A full-length 40-minute version of side two would be amazing.

xxxp i’m actually planning on something similar, to process my responses but i’ll probably post it here, soon as i get a computer so i can do some typing.

gonna make ya proud sleeve. real proud.

awww <3

oh hey I found a Youtube link for the live 1966 recordings released as "Spaceways" a.k.a. "Outerspaceways Inc." a.k.a. "A Tonal View Of Times Tomorrow Vol. 3", covered upthread:

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

1970 - My Brother The Wind Vol. 2 plus “Journey To Saturn” 7”

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Enter June Tyson, her first appearance on record! Added to the Spotify playlist. Recorded in 1969 (the Moog side) and 1970 (the A-side), released as an LP on Saturn in 1971. A few Scorpio pressings, I assume from the 2000s, but other than that there was no reissue of this at all until the Bandcamp version in 2014.

The Bandcamp/Spotify version is remastered, but no extra goodies. One side of genius, one side of full blast Moog madness. As per their writeup:

The ensemble pieces (1-6) were recorded at Variety Studios, probably in early 1970. This is a tight band, and with the exception of "Contrast," these tracks feature something not found on many studio recordings by Ra in the 1960s—a groove, one closer to roadhouse R&B than jazz. There's a bit of Memphis blues, a touch of Booker T & the MGs, albeit with Sun Ra's usual disregard for Top 40 niceties. The horns contribute some characteristically spirited solos.

However, nothing foreshadowed what awaited the listener who flipped the platter.

As per the Sun Ra Sundays writeup:

The remainder of the album is taken up with five brief synthesizer experiments, Ra having purchased a brand new Minimoog of his own. “The Wind Speaks” explores white noise and fluttering filter effects while “Sun Thoughts” focuses on sour intervals and swooping, sea-sick portamentos. “Journey to the Stars” uses the ADSR envelope filter to create wah-wah-ing attacks and swelling sustained notes while “World of Myth ‘I’” consists of knob-turning pitch-shifting. Finally, “The Design – Cosmos II” conjures up some resonant, bell-tone sounds, with increasingly busy atonal melodies scattered over a repeating bass note. While these tracks may sound a bit tentative, the Minimoog would become a fixture of Ra’s keyboard arsenal in the nineteen-seventies and most concerts would feature a lengthy synthesizer solo full of apocalyptic bombast. Unfortunately, My Brother the Wind, Vol. II comes across as kind of schizophrenic: some of this material is the most toe-tappingly accessible in all of the discography, but the Moog experiments are tough-going for even the most committed fan. Even so, this is an essential album and a necessary companion to Vol. I.

And a side note from the same blog entry:

…another track found on Out There A Minute (Blast First CD) which was likely recorded at this session (or shortly thereafter). Entitled, “Jazz and Romantic Sounds,” it fits right in, with Ra’s bluesy, juke-joint organ, Marshall Allen’s impassioned solo and Patrick interjecting a honking riff here and there.

The link for that CD is upthread if u want to listen.

Lastly, we have the 7” single “Journey To Saturn”/“Enlightenment”, released in 1973 but probably recorded around this time.

1970 is gonna be a busy year, I count around ten entries from it!

weirdly, the first "My Brother The Wind" has vanished from Spotify since I added it last week!

you can still listen through the Bandcamp link above

1970 - The Night Of The Purple Moon

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Another great one, well worth your time, the Sun Ra Sundays blog gets it:

In mid-1970, Sun Ra reentered Variety Recording Studio, this time with a bare-bone Arkestra and yet another new electronic keyboard in tow, the RMI Rocksichord. In his perceptive liner notes to this CD, John Corbett describes the sound of the Rocksichord as an “unforgettable nasal quack,” and that’s a pretty accurate description of this primitive, transistorized electric piano. In another person’s hands, this would sound cheesy and (now) hopelessly out of date. But Ra builds solid, evocative compositions around the instrument and it is, inexplicably, just exactly perfect. Unfortunately, the original tapes were unsalvageable, so this reissue had to be sourced from a clean LP. There’s plenty of surface noise present, so at least we can be thankful the producers didn’t get carried away with the noise reduction and de-clicking, which can often just make things worse. Although Impulse! was prepared to reissue this album in late-seventies, it has remained an ultra-rare artifact until Atavistic released this CD in 2007. Despite the less-than-perfect sound-quality, The Night of the Purple Moon is one of the great Sun Ra albums – and one of my favorite albums of all time.

Contrary to the decade-old notes above, the 2014 Bandcamp version says they salvaged and remastered the tapes, and includes some alternate tracks and *cough* a 1975 version of one track. An intimate, fun, beautiful record.

This LP was repressed three times in the 70s, unlike many of the Saturn LPs we’ve covered so far. And it’s also unusual in being originally released right around the time it was actually recorded, in mid-1970.

a fave of mine, i gave it a relisten lately to pick out my favorite tracks (one of my challenges with ra is to listen critically without being overwhelmed by volume). in this case my picks were "the all of everything" and "narrative". (in fairness to the '75 version, isn't that just a vocal overdub on the '70 recording?)

haha I believe you are correct, good point

1970 - Nuits de la Fondation Maeght Vols 1 & 2, etc.

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Starting in October 1970, the Arkestra embarked on their first European tour. But before that, in August, they played a few nights in France to test the waters. As per Bandcamp: “Ra's Fondation Maeght dates were not part of a tour. The Arkestra’s first European tour began on October 9, 1970, at Les Halles, in Paris. The Maeght gigs qualify as exploratory visits. Despite much controversy (see below), they were successful and led to the increased use of Ra's Earthly passport over the next two decades—to Europe and beyond. “

Sun Ra Sundays helpfully excerpts a relevant Szwed passage regarding said passport:

When they filled out the forms at the passport office in New York City, the clerk at the desk said to Sun Ra, “Sir, you’re going to have to give us better information that this. We need your parents’ names, your birth date…” [Dancer] Verta Mae Grosvenor recalled that Sun Ra said, “‘That *is* the correct information.’ After a few minutes, the clerk went back to speak with her supervisor. The supervisor was no-nonsense, but after talking to Sun Ra she said, ‘Sir, why don’t you come back in a few hours.’ When we came back there was another person there and he knew about it, and he said, ‘We’ll just give you the passport.’ It just got so out that they just gave it to him!”

That passport gained talismanic force over the years, and musicians shook their heads when they saw it. Talvin Singh, an English tabla player, said: “His philosophy was that either you be part of the society or you don’t. And he wasn’t part of it. He created his own. I mean, I actually saw his passport and there was some weird shit on it. It had some different stuff.” (p.278)

We’re starting to get into that weird period of the 70s where some of these live recordings clearly have a lot of visual elements as well, that don’t come through in the audio. At any rate, this is a solid set and probably my favorite version of “Enlightenment.”

Szwed again:
The audience had little or no knowledge of Sun Ra’s music, since his records weren’t widely distributed in France, and when they arrived they saw the Arkestra spread out before them like elaborate décor: musicians in red tunics, seated in a forest of instruments on stage, dancers in red dresses. On a screen behind them was projected a sky full of stars, then planets, children in Harlem, Indians on hunting trips, and newsreel footage of protests; a ball of “magic fire” rose slowly up to the ceiling; saxophonists began to battle like Samurai, then came together like brothers; and in the still center of it all, Sun Ra sat behind the Moog, creating the sounds of gales, storms, and waves crashing. From the very first note, an agitated woman stood up and cried out, “What is this?” Afterwards, she came up and insisted on seeing the written music. Europeans seemed to want to know whether there was music behind what they were hearing, as if it would assure them that this was rational activity, and Sonny was always happy to show them the scores. A man once blurted out that his “five-year-old daughter could play that!” Sun Ra readily agreed: “She could play it, but could she write it?” (p.279)

These recordings were originally released on the French label Shandar in 1971, and have been reissued and bootlegged numerous times. The brand new Bandcamp “remasters” are actually needledrops, as the original tapes are “unavailable.”

https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/nuits-de-la-fondation-maeght-vol-1

https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/nuits-de-la-fondation-maeght-vol-2

Tapes of these performances are currently unavailable. Transfers from first edition vinyl and digital restoration by Irwin Chusid

Sun Ra Sundays writeups are here for the curious:

https://nuvoid.blogspot.com/2009/11/sun-ra-sunday_29.html

https://nuvoid.blogspot.com/2009/11/sun-ra-sunday_22.html

Lastly, one stray track from The Solar Myth Approach is also from the Fondation gigs, and has also been added to the Spotify playlist.

oh man, love these records, some of my favorite Ra live sets

amazing cover photo of ra at the organ !

1970 - It’s After The End Of The World (Black Myth/Out In Space)

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Moving on to the 1970 European tour proper, this was originally released as a single LP on the MPS/BASF label, with parts of the Oct. 17th and Nov. 7th shows included. It was reissued as a double CD in 1998 under the title “Black Myth/Out In Space,” including (I believe) all of both shows. This record is NOT on Bandcamp, must be a rights thing again. But, the original abridged version is on Spotify and has been added to our playlist.

The full double CD is on Youtube is you want to listen:

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

yes !!

this one is pretty rough going so far, lots of squealing