Sun Ra: The Living Future
published in The Village Voice, July 4, 1989
In the foggy dawn last Wednesday at Battery Park, the very tip of Manhattan, no musician could have been better suited to welcome the summer solstice than Sun Ra. Dressed in his pharaoh’s hat and bright apricot robe, accompanied by five members of his stellar Arkestra plus Don Cherry, Ra played for nearly 200 people in the 17th annual celebration organized by Charlie Morrow and the New Wilderness Foundation. While the city slept, Ra steered the island through the harbor, standing at his keyboards, the cool captain of a mighty ship.
A patriarch of avant-garde jazz, Ra came up through the big band era. His Arkestra, founded in mid-1950s Chicago and now based in Philadelphia, pioneered collective improvisation in a large group setting while seeking always to have fun, with their dazzling costumes and onstage antics. Once dismissed as a space case, then revered as a prophet, Ra’s renown has steadily grown. Yet, despite more than a hundred records to his credit, his new album Blue Delight (A&M), with the Arkestra at 19 pieces strong, is his first major American label release. That’s a curious distinction for a man in his late seventies, and pop indicators like airplay suggest that A&M has a hit on its hands.
The Arkestra swings hard, with tight arrangements, rich sweeping harmonies, and solos that really do reach into space. As the title tune of the album amply shows, Sun Ra himself sends it all into motion with the walloping yet subdued way he voices the piano. The power of the band rises and softens according to his sparest inflections. What emerges time and again is 1001 ways of reading the blues. Even when playing synthesizer, where he has carved his own highly unique sound for 30 years, as in Blue Delight’s “They Dwell on Other Planes,” the angular shimmering effects serve to enhance a lyric gesture. Ra likes to sing, but the new album showcases the mastery of his musicianship.
Through the last decade, Ra has returned with a bounding joy to the music of his youth, embracing clear romantic melodies and a more cohesive group sound. The band pays full respect to the standards it plays, as on “Out of Nowhere” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” while bouncing fresh light off them. Ra expands the harmonic colors of the original, elaborating on its rhythms. When the Arkestra performs Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson material, or its set of music from Disney films, they bring down the house in romping recognition of something old being made new again. Ra appears perennially serene, his music and manner pointing the way beyond, assured of his place in the cosmos (he says he comes from Saturn). He has had the wisdom to endure, to celebrate the spirits that abide in him.
*
[NB: Check out the phenomenal 14-CD set that Michael D. Anderson put together---Sun Ra, The Eternal Myth Revealed, Vol.1 (1941-1959) (Transparency, 2011)---a comprehensive and very revealing account of Sun Ra's early career, full of terrific interviews, analysis, and rare period recordings. Out of this world!]
published in The Village Voice, July 4, 1989
In the foggy dawn last Wednesday at Battery Park, the very tip of Manhattan, no musician could have been better suited to welcome the summer solstice than Sun Ra. Dressed in his pharaoh’s hat and bright apricot robe, accompanied by five members of his stellar Arkestra plus Don Cherry, Ra played for nearly 200 people in the 17th annual celebration organized by Charlie Morrow and the New Wilderness Foundation. While the city slept, Ra steered the island through the harbor, standing at his keyboards, the cool captain of a mighty ship.
A patriarch of avant-garde jazz, Ra came up through the big band era. His Arkestra, founded in mid-1950s Chicago and now based in Philadelphia, pioneered collective improvisation in a large group setting while seeking always to have fun, with their dazzling costumes and onstage antics. Once dismissed as a space case, then revered as a prophet, Ra’s renown has steadily grown. Yet, despite more than a hundred records to his credit, his new album Blue Delight (A&M), with the Arkestra at 19 pieces strong, is his first major American label release. That’s a curious distinction for a man in his late seventies, and pop indicators like airplay suggest that A&M has a hit on its hands.
The Arkestra swings hard, with tight arrangements, rich sweeping harmonies, and solos that really do reach into space. As the title tune of the album amply shows, Sun Ra himself sends it all into motion with the walloping yet subdued way he voices the piano. The power of the band rises and softens according to his sparest inflections. What emerges time and again is 1001 ways of reading the blues. Even when playing synthesizer, where he has carved his own highly unique sound for 30 years, as in Blue Delight’s “They Dwell on Other Planes,” the angular shimmering effects serve to enhance a lyric gesture. Ra likes to sing, but the new album showcases the mastery of his musicianship.
Through the last decade, Ra has returned with a bounding joy to the music of his youth, embracing clear romantic melodies and a more cohesive group sound. The band pays full respect to the standards it plays, as on “Out of Nowhere” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” while bouncing fresh light off them. Ra expands the harmonic colors of the original, elaborating on its rhythms. When the Arkestra performs Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson material, or its set of music from Disney films, they bring down the house in romping recognition of something old being made new again. Ra appears perennially serene, his music and manner pointing the way beyond, assured of his place in the cosmos (he says he comes from Saturn). He has had the wisdom to endure, to celebrate the spirits that abide in him.
*
[NB: Check out the phenomenal 14-CD set that Michael D. Anderson put together---Sun Ra, The Eternal Myth Revealed, Vol.1 (1941-1959) (Transparency, 2011)---a comprehensive and very revealing account of Sun Ra's early career, full of terrific interviews, analysis, and rare period recordings. Out of this world!]
