Sun Ra Reissued

Sun Ra Reissued The fact that the jazz industry never really came to terms with Sun Ra?not to mention his own butt-headed insistence that he was actually from another planet?marks him always as one of the few true crazies of jazz. Yet as jazz bandleaders go, Sun Ra was probably the most important one of the second half of the 20th century (Ellington being of the first). True, he suffered sometimes from his pretensions, and his "business" sense was pure suicide. But then, on Saturn, what did it matter? Using these concepts as a springboard, Sun Ra conceived his "Arkestra" with a lineup that would remain intact for years. This included the gifted saxophonists Marshall Allen (alto) and John Gilmore (tenor), plus an ever-expanding array of accompanists who more or less gave themselves over to Sun Ra's kozmik groove. But the most fortuitous circumstance for Ra was meeting Alton Abraham, who, in 1954, helped him establish the Saturn label to document and distribute the strange music he was creating?which, at that time, no one in mainstream jazz was willing to touch.

Fast-forward to the early 70s. ABC's Impulse label?the label that, at one time or another, had recorded John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler?was interested in adding Sun Ra to its esteemed roster. Not only was his interplanetary music finally starting to make sense in light of the "free jazz" revolution, but also the artist came with an extensive backlog of work, since he'd by then recorded more than two dozen albums for Saturn. So in 1973 Impulse undertook a major licensing pact with Abraham and Ra, agreeing to release not only the entire Saturn back catalog, but a few new titles as well. Part of the campaign involved reprogramming a lot of the extant Saturn product into "quadraphonic" sound, an audiophile gimmick making the rounds in 1973. But the deal fizzled after a couple years, because ABC/Impulse was going through merger mania at the time and ultimately found Sun Ra too eccentric to work with. The Impulse albums would become almost as sought-after as collector's items as the Saturn originals.

A few years ago Evidence Records in Conshohocken, PA, began reissuing a lot of the Impulse/Saturn stuff. They've now added five more titles to their catalog, including a couple of the "missing" titles from the Impulse series.

A good place to start would be the sardonically titled Greatest Hits. This is a compendium of Ra's material recorded for Saturn throughout the years, and most of it is first-rate. While this is definitely the most accessible of all Ra's material, the joke of the title is he never had anything ever resembling a "hit" (despite releasing a bounty of fantastic doo-wop and r&b material on Saturn in the 50s, most of which was compiled on the excellent The Singles, issued by Evidence in 1996). On tracks like "Saturn" and "Kingdom of Not," the horn charts are still very much in Miles Davisville, but already one can tell there's something slightly askew about Sun Ra's music-making methods. Another thing these tracks prove is the guy was a great pianist; on "Kingdom" he plays in great well-rounded tones a la Thelonious Monk, a nice glissando stretch of actual jazz (as opposed to Saturnian skronk).

"Enlightenment" is almost Mingus blues. There ain't no blues on Saturn?this must be his Alabaman background coming to the fore (according to public records, Herman Blount, aka Sun Ra, was born in Birmingham on May 22, 1915). The classic "Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus" is like the intergalactic version of Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" with crazy, out-of-control "free" soloing before "free" was officially even born. "We Travel the Spaceways" is atonal 60s stuff. Remember, many hippies purchased things like Sun Ra's The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra Vols. I and II, just for the covers.

Then we come to the Great Lost Albums: Cymbals and Crystal Spears (released as a twofer). These are the albums Impulse declined to release. Cymbals was recorded in 1973; Impulse went through with the cover art and had already assigned it a catalog number, but it never hit the stores. Too bad: Sun Ra makes grinding asphalt (as opposed to "astral") sounds with his organ, and both Gilmore and Danny Davis (alto) solo excellently. For the most part this is topflight free-skronk, reminding one of William Parker's recent experiments in the same vein. But Crystal Spears is basically unlistenable, a lotta gray organ murk and brushstrokes, not much actual music.

Pathways and its companion piece Friendly Love (which consists of a session that resided in a film can in Alton Abraham's office up until now) are chaotic opuses that are more than any casual music listener should be expected to endure. Recorded in the early 70s, they lean heavily on two ideas that were circulating freely at the time. One was electronics, which everyone from Miles to Herbie Hancock was using. Sun Ra had just gotten his Mini Moog and he was using it all over these LPs in great rubbery licks that give a menacing undertow to the proceedings. The other was the Back to Africa movement: many of Sun Ra's musicians had taken African names by this time, were wearing dashikis and playing instruments like congas, not to mention weird Beefheartian instruments like the "Neptunian libflecto." The improv takes on a jungle ambience, with a lot of quiet dickering leading up to more atonal outbursts, almost as if waiting for dawn to break over the mountains or a monsoon to hit. Like nature itself, Sun Ra's music is unpredictable.

When Angels Speak of Love was recorded in 1963 but not released on the Saturn label till '66, when it no doubt sounded more contemporary in the wake of things like Coltrane's Ascension, to which actually it bore no relationship. Sun Ra was adamant that he was not part of the "new thing"?not part of anything except pure Sun Ra. And it's true: his work sounds like no other. But at times its seamless indifference is just plain boring. Angels starts with an act of ear-splitting defiance in "Celestial Fantasy," courtesy of Danny Davis' alto. It was almost as if Sun Ra was taunting his audience, saying he didn't need them, didn't need any audience except for the one on Saturn. This is the extraterrestrial stuff: atonal bleeps like moonbeams zeroing in on barren glaciers a few seconds before the end of the world.

The centerpiece of the album is "Next Stop Mars," a 17-minute chaotic monorail ride of galactic dimensions. Gilmore pulls off some excellent elephantine squawk about 15 minutes into the thing, but this is mostly an exercise in tedium. What is amazing, however, is that it was recorded in 1963. "Free" or no, this is pretty mindblowing stuff as far as conception goes.

But perhaps the most interesting album in the series is Lanquidity, a relative latecomer in the Ra catalog. Originally pressed in a run of 700-800 albums in 1978, this record attains a flowing groove of mantra-like proportions. It's funky, but not a bit "earthy"; it's celestial, like all of Ra's works. "Where Pathways Meet" isn't that far from James Brown or Funkadelic. Guitars comes into play on this album (courtesy of someone named the Disco Kid, no less). "That's How I Feel" is some kind of gritty and down-and-out blues. All throughout Lanquidity a kind of space funk slowly burbles like lava from Sun Ra's organ. "Twin Stars of Thence" is a percolating mass of organ funk, sinewy guitar lines, wheezing Miles Davis-style trumpet and vibrating percussives. Considering that this was released in the same age as Beefheart's Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), Ornette's Dancing in Your Head, Donna Summer's "I Feel Love," Bowie's Low and Tales of Captain Black by James "Blood" Ulmer, it makes perfect sense. Maybe Ra's universe was "parallel" after all.