Day 6 Sun Ra part 2 - Holiday for Soul Dance

Here's a quick one as I'm not quite ready to write my review for Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra. I've also JUST wrapped up all my grading and want to wind down. A review for Futuristic Sounds won't get me there, but Holiday for Soul Dance (1960) is a chill out album if ever there was one.

Unlike the 56 material which pushed that brassy aggressive sound that just never strikes me the right way, this one plays the horns for their cool moods (well, most of the time.) Virtually ever track here is a cover, and they're all straight as hell. This one is just playing beautiful music just for the sake of it, and it's hard to find fault there.

I think it's fair to say I really dig the second side while the first side is just OK. Autumn is a great song (with vocals), while I Love You, Porgy and Body And Soul are nice quiet numbers which show off the bands more subtle qualities. Keep Your Sunny Side Up is a louder swinging number (more like side 1) but is a nice close to the album.

Like Sound Sun Pleasure, this might be an unlikely disc for purchase. It is good music, but none of it is original, and there's nothing to hint at what Ra was really doing at the time. Still, it is amazing to hear that the Arkestra was as good as any band at a time that they were doing some seriously twisted music. When you hear this album there is no question how talented those guys are. I'd recommend Sun Sound Pleasure over this in part because it is better but also because it includes half of Deep Purple, but I could see plenty of Sun Ra fans (like myself) not owning either.

Day 1-3 Sun Ra (yeah, this is lame)

So, being this far in I thought I should at least link the amazon reviews that I wrote during the first three days of my Sun Ra odyssey. I don't think I can directly link the reviews, however:

(look for the reviews by C. Moon)

Sun Song

Sound of Joy

Jazz in Silhouette

Day 6 Sun Ra part 1 Fate in a Pleasant Mood

The new problem with the Sun Ra program is that I can listen to the music much faster than I can write reviews; especially since most of my time listening to music is in the car or while I am grading. As a result, I started getting pretty far ahead of myself, and had to start listening to albums many times over (IE 4-6 times) before I actually had the chance to listen to them. This may not sound like such a bad deal, and in a few cases I've definitely picked up on nuances not immediately evidence. That said, there are times when I simply am not a big fan of an album, but listening again and again still seems like the best option. I hope fans will not hate me for saying that Fate in A pleasant mood (1960) is that album.

What, am I writing my first negative response to an album? Well, yes and no. The bulk of the material here is great stuff, but taken as a whole, the album seems mediocre to me. Transitional music will always face the difficulty of being neither here nor there, but on other recordings, Ra makes good of it--in fact, it may be some of his best music! Fate however just seems to be the album that most of the songs that felt neither particularly inventive nor particularly memorable wound up on. Yeah, someone here isn't in a pleasant mood!

That said, let's discuss what IS good on this album. Space Mates has a dreamy quality--the soundtrack to some lush, exotic paradise. Lights of a Satellite is a throwback to Travel the Spaceways with it's death-march swing and nearly out-of-tune melodies. Kingdom of Thunder is a decent but not remarkable return to Nubians.


As you've noticed, that still leaves half the album. The remaining tracks (including the wonderfully titled Ankhnaton) just don't do much for me, though Distant Stars is at least bewildering (is that a good thing), sounding more like a brassy version of Monk's Hackensack than past or present Sun Ra.

This album is available on an Evidence CD paired up with When Sun Comes Out, which I like more than Fate in a Pleasant Mood, but neither is among the best from this period. I see this one as a fair addition for collectors, but casual fans can do a lot better.

Day 5 Sun Ra - We Travel the Spaceways / Bad and Beautiful

We travel the Spaceways (1956-1960). This album is split up chronologically more than most, so it may be surprising to hear that it is amazingly consistent and forward looking. When Ra and his arkestra threw this album together, they made some awesome decisions in arrangement, though one wonders if the arkestra was working along threads, IE this is our 'straight music' thread, our 'dissonant' thread, our 'throwing jazz structure out the window' thread, etc. If Nubians mostly seems to collect the later category, We Travel the Spaceways seems to collect music from the second category, and it is a brilliant success.

My first impression listening to this album was that Ra had been taking LPs and slowing them down, studying what happened tonally and texturally. In the same way that rock can sound AWESOME when it is slowed down, on We travel the Spaceways, what could be traditional arrangements come out like funeral dirges. Everything is slow and plodding. But there's more.

I've spoken of Ra's 'broken melodies' that perhaps might be compared with the 12 tone thing that appears in the early 20th century with Shoenberg. Other composers followed suit, and I wouldn't call a lot of this music '12 tone' or 'atonal', it's just a lot more dissonant (Milhaud, Shostakovich, Honegger). These folks produce a sort of melody I might call tarnished. It isn't necessarily dark or foreboding, it just not the bright romantic type of melody that permeates most music. This sort of more dissonant sense of melody/harmony shows up in a lot of soundtrack work, so you might find comparisons here.

Well this is the kind of melody Sun Ra has been pushing for in previous albums I've reviewed, but it doesn't really surface in full form until Nubians, and here it really dominates the whole album. There is a certain range of what is possibly melodic, and a line that when crossed passes over into dissonance. I feel that Ra is pushing the arkestra to play right at that boundary without passing over into dissonance.

Ironically, the pieces are are fairly conventional in structure, beyond being played very slow and continuously almost (but not quite) out of key. There are of course the few 'nearly' straight pieces, but like everything else here, there is much more low range instrumentation and all the bright happy brass from the early albums are gone. The normal-ness backfires anyway, working more like Fats Waller in Eraserhead than a pleasant respite from Ra's persevering strangness.

A few highlights for me: Interplanetary Music appears again, but nearly out of key with weird scraping strings. The transformation of this song is pretty incredible. Still, it barely registers when compared to the devastating title track, We Travel the Spaceways. It's a pity this (to my knowledge) never made it into Ra's live roster as it is a fantastic surreal number that is like zombies singing some cosmic mass. Absolutely needs to be heard.

On the same disc is The Bad and the Beautiful (1961). I'm not officially in the 60's, though clearly keeping the order exact is not going to be possible.

It may not be as bold as We travel the Spaceways, but don't write it off just yet. The first thing that may strike you is that as a NY album, this isn't as weird as its contemporaries. Most of the pieces here have a gentle dreamy quality to them, with that beautiful heavy low-end feel that will dominate Sun Ra's albums pretty much from now on.

Ankh (which we've already heard and will heard many times again) is performed with rugged beauty here. I tried listening to what Sun Ra was playing while the horn was wailing away and it barely sounds in tune with anything, but then comes back with the compositions melodic line. This might be my favorite performance of the piece.

There are a few moments in the album that remind me a bit of early-impulse Coltrane, but that doesn't mean there's any connection; just some great horn playing with good use of space and band interplay. You know how it is: good jazz is good jazz.

Exotic Two is another percussion frenzy, but I think Nubians has it beat. The final track (And this is my beloved) is a beautiful and dirge-like piece akin to 'We travel'. Why am I such a sucker for songs like this? I don't think there's a whole album like this track by Ra, but I'd be first in line if there was.

Final thoughts: is this album a commercial attempt, I can't really tell. It's definitely one I dig, even if it isn't doing anything to strange for 1961.

As far as the CD itself--yes, yes and yes. Buy this one for sure along with Angels/Nubians. My two picks for the late 50's material.

PS - I know I've skipped Super Sonic Jazz (which is still in the post). Coming up next should be Holiday for Soul Dance, Fate in a Pleasant Mood/Sun Comes out, and Futuristic Sounds of sun Ra. After that, we'll be nearly done with transitional and well into total weirdness.

Day 4 Sun Ra Part 3 - Angels and Demons

No, you can't escape, neither can I. Yes, I've done productive things with this day, but working on the webpage update for www.lastvisibledog.com entails an hour or so of sitting in front of the computer, and that means another opportunity to listen to music. Is opportunity the right word? Certainly the Evidence CD 'Angels and Demons at Play / Nubians of Plutonia' is fantastic stuff; but fantastic albums require fantastic reviews, and now listening to Sun Ra has become a job. Damn!

Anyway, let's get on with it! There's only 120 more Sun Ra albums after this (or so...) This is a really magnificent CD, one of the best you can purchase from the transitional Sun Ra before he goes down the road of total weirdness. Although, one could argue it's already past the cusp. A few of the tracks here are normal-ish but let's not kid ourselves, Ra's already past the point-of-no-return.

Like 'Visits Planet Earth', we've got material from several different years, and if at any point you're starting to settle back into more comfortable territory, it will be during the second half of 'Angels' which is, amazingly, from 1956. I always wondered why there was so much inconsistency in the album, and here's why. Side A was recorded in 1960 and I wouldn't be surprised to find it the source of inspiration for the Impulse sound that starts on A Love Supreme and ends when Pharoah Sanders starts making easy listening albums. Here's the title track with a great head shot of the man himself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw3Trh10Jr8

Nubians of Plutonia ( originally titled 'Lady with the Golden Stockings' or even 'The Golden Lady') is a little more consistent coming all from one period (58-59). It's a heavy percussive affair, including an extended drum solo on Nubia, though does not have the dense 'polyrthymic' thing (I know I'm overusing the term) that we find on the early tracks of Angels. Certainly the whole album is extremely satisfying, but by side B the thing breaks lose and we can really see how Sun Ra and his Arkestra are willing to take it THE WHOLE WAY. Africa's drumming, low end horns and humming/singing is trying only to make Sun Ra music; jazz itself being only a foundation, a leaping off point. All builds into the frenzy-like Watusa (in shows from the early 70's I've heard Ra use Watusa anthem like to conclude massive improv/freak-out sessions, and the wild energy you hear here was no less in those performances.)

What is striking is what happened to the horns which had been, up until this point, right up front in the mix. Now they are often muted, low and providing harmonic support. In Nubians especially, percussion is everything, and when there is melody, it is broken and unpolished. Whatever accessibility might have been present on the albums prior to this (Sun Song, Jazz in Silhouette, Sound of Joy, etc.), it is absent here. Ra is reaching for something else entirely , and his success at doing this would give us some of the most fiercely experimental albums of the 60's. Good bye big band, hello Stockhausen.



PS - Is 'Nubians from Plutonia' the beginning of the AfroFuturism?

DAY 4 Sun Ra part 2 - Visits Planet Earth / Interstellar Low Ways

Yeah, grabbed some coffee and breakfast at a place called 4 and 20; heh. So, back to Sun Ra.

The Evidence CD Visits Planet Earth / Interstellar Low Ways is a weird collection because it is not exactly two albums, or rather, Visits Planet Earth was never a proper album. With Sound of Joy not yet released, half of the material from that future album was released as the B side of Visits Planet Earth. Here, Evidence reverses the order and those tracks appear as side A (well, as much as you can have a 'side A' on a CD.

The end results, much like the Angels and Demons at Play CD is that you're getting a rather diverse set of material. The three songs of Visits Planet Earth that are originals (or at least original versions) are Planet Earth, Eve and Overtones of China, all from 1958. The accompanying album is Interstellar Low Ways, and comes two years later still (1960); so regardless of whether you find the mix good, there's definitely a bit of range.

Now when I first heard this CD back in the mid 90's, I have to admit that I found it pretty dull; hoping for Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (I could say this about a lot of Ra albums actually, and it would be terribly unfair). Coming back to it now, the CD is a really great one. I've already reviewed Sound of Joy on Amazon, and while I'd rather hear the whole thing than just one side, it's still great material, though easily the most straight. The other material falls squarely into what I'm going to call 'transitional' Sun Ra.

The three tracks from 'Visits' have a lot more space in them than what I want to call the 'Sun Song' sound which permeates Jazz in Silhouette and parts of Sound of Joy. Instead, there's perhaps a hint of the future polyrhythmic experiments that would dominate a lot of Ra's future albums, though Ra writes this sort of thing off as Orientalism in his 'Overtones of China', but don't be fooled; all three tracks are looking for new inroads. There's also a sort of darkness (at times encrouching on 'atonalism' that seems mostly absent from any prior recordings. It's worth pointing out that Eve has some killer Sun Ra piano on it.

Interstellar Low ways, though being recorded two years later is pretty similar in tone to the three 'real' tracks from 'Visits Planet Earth', but the album itself feels a bit of a mess. I like Interplanetary music, but it comes off like a joke track in the middle of some very mesmerizing pieces (for instance, the phenomenal title track.)

Given that this material was recorded at the same time as side A of Angles and Demons at Play, I have to admit a little dissapointment. Well, it just goes to show that Sun Ra was playing in a lot of modes at once. If Low Ways sounds more like a 58 album than a 1960 album, so be it. It is great music, and something I'm sure I'll be wishing for once I'm stuck in the late 60's of my forced Sun Ra Chronological thingy!

Summing this CD up, it's a good overview of Ra's late 50's material, but it isn't the best of said material. Low Ways just isn't an A+ album to my ears (though again, killer title track!), while Visits Planet Earth is hardly an album at all. Still, the three 58 tracks + the gems on Low Ways. Yeah, this is certainly a good one. Still, I don't think it is gonna hold its own next to the two other Evidence CDs I'll be addressing shortly, Angels & Demons at Play / Nubians of Plutonia AND We Travel the Spaceways / Bad and Beautiful.


Sound Sun Pleasure (1958) with side A from Deep Purple (54-56):
This and the other Evidence CD Holiday for Soul Dance constitute the 'straightest' of the Evidence CDs (perhaps I should include the Singles collection in here as well) not so much because of the playing, but rather because for the most part what we have here is Ra playing standards.

I'm not going to take a lot of time reviewing this release because I think in part I'm not qualified. I was not raised loving jazz (something of a tragedy) but grew to love it throughout the 90's. Still, my pedigree in jazz is the obvious Coltrane, Davis, Mingus and Monk making up the backbone with a smattering of other odds and ends. Lots of free jazz. It was with great difficulty that I found myself loving the jazz of the 50's, and at times the 40's are nearly inaccessible to me. So how am I supposed to approach albums like Sound Sun Pleasure? Well, fortunately I found my love of old jazz through cinema, and it's a great way to learn. I think a lot of these songs here have some beautiful atmosphere, and at times they're actually haunting in the way music isn't anymore; but there isn't much here to remind you this is a Sun Ra album (though hear that percussion on 'I could have danced all night!')

Amazingly, Enlightenment has been directly ripped from Jazz in Silhouette and plopped right in the middle of this album. I love the song, but I'm not sure it fits. It's the delicate vocals and other touches that work, while the brassier moments tend to overwhelm things.

The real treat though are the bonus tracks which make up Side A of Deep Purple. Dating from 54-56, they've got a wonderful primitive sound with some Carnival of Souls keyboard playing buried in there.

That said, this disc may be a novelty only for the Sun Ra fan unless their tastes extend back to some relatively early modes of Jazz (I hope to be there some day), but the material is definitely strong, and I've found myself digging the music even if it isn't quite what I was hoping to get out of a Sun Ra album. Take that as a caveat before purchase.

Day 4 Sun Ra part 1 - I need coffee

As of Friday (9/25) casually came to the decision to make an attempt at listening to as much of Sun Ra's catalog in order, as possible. There are two immediate problems with this being that Sun Ra has ~130 official releases (you can check it out here.) Of course, as a compulsive listener, this is a fine challenge, though a few days in, I'm certainly hitting points where three to four albums in a row feel far too similar to want to ever hear them in sequence again.

The second problem comes from not having all 130 albums. A few of them, I'm sure I can safely skip, a few no doubt will have to be lost to obscurity, but I'm sure I will manage to find other means to fill in the remaining gaps--something that simply must be done for the purpose of my Sun Ra self-indoctrination course. Even acknowledging these gaps in my collection, I'm still pretty freaked out by how much Sun Ra I have (about 40 official albums + those transparency lost reels.) My current Sun Ra mania has been aided in particular by Atavistic and Art Yard's recent reissue programs. I'll come to these in time (Night of the Purple Moon, I'm looking at you!)

Anyway, to briefly sum up the current state of affairs, Friday I spun my LP of Sun Song (56), following it on Saturday with Sound of Joy (also 56 I believe). I proceeded to write reviews for both of them on Amazon. On Sunday I listened to Angels and Demons at Play (parts from 56) (I'll discuss it in a later entry) and Jazz in Silhouette (58), the later I also reviewed on Amazon.

That night I listened to 'Visits Planet Earth' (58), which is in reality only three songs. Was rather tired of reviewing everything, and the Evidence CD paired it with Interstellar Low Ways, so why not keep going?

While writing this first entry, I finished up Interstellar Low Ways (60) and will discuss this in my first serious entry after I find some cream for my coffee and figure out where this day is going.

PS also plan on getting back to Super Sonic Jazz, Sound Sun Pleasure and that singles collection. I have not forgotten them.

PPS My plan here isn't to just list the albums I've listened to. I will be discussing each in depth, but seriously man, the coffee is calling me.