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.