Day 16 Sun Ra - When Sun Comes Out

Man, it's getting harder and harder to find time to write about Sun Ra. I've given a lot of time in the last few days to 'When Sun Comes Out' (62) and 'When Angles Speak of Love' (63). There are a couple other oddities from this period, What's New and Invisible Shield. If I can find a way to hear and discuss them I will, but I'm not making any promises.

For today's entry (there may be a second entry later if time permits), I want to get my thoughts out there on 'When Sun Comes Out', an album that never really settles down to any one particular thing.

The first two tracks (Circe, The Nile) are Sun Ra doing his weird Egyptian soundtrack thing, the former having odd female vocals. There's another version of We Travel the Spaceways that turns into a free-blowing piece. This approach continues through the frantic Calling Planet Earth, but is abruptly cut short by the bizarrely out of place Dancing Shadows (a stylistic return to 56.)

The Rainmakers at first seems to continue the retro-50's style, but it's slightly more out tonally. The original final track, When Sun Comes Out, continues right where Rainmakers left off, but comes full circle by transforming into a free blowing number. There's pretty weird use of percussion and the horns rip, but neither this track nor anything on the album (up until this point anyway) is really mind blowing.

Now the evidence CD adds a discovered track from the same period (Dimensions in Time) and this one is truly out! Bongo with echo/delay effect and some weird melodic lines. I don't have a good language to describe this sort of sound, but effectively this is the Cosmic Tones sound, but isn't quite there.

Have now heard the album a good dozen times, I can't argue about the albums strengths, but it certainly is a middling album between the towering transitional efforts of the late 50's, and those albums which are to follow immediately. It is not as satisfying as Secrets of the Sun, though is probably about on par with Art Forms.

My personal take for the non-completest is to avoid this release. Paired with Fate in a Pleasant Mood (so far, the release I have been most bored by), this CD just doesn't show off the Arkestra's talents the way so many of the surrounding albums do. While virtually everything else from this period is quite impressive, this CD has two good, but not spectacular albums. All that said, good does not equal poor. I'm glad I own the CD.