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?
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