Day 43 Sun Ra -- Featuring Pharaoh Sanders & Black Harold

These posts are starting to become pretty infrequent as we enter some of the more challenging material. 'Featuring Pharoah Sanders & Black Harold' (now reissued on ESP with over 40 minutes of extra material) is a satisfactory and occasionally brilliant live performance from December 1964.

The immediate problem with 'live' Sun Ra, is that Ra was live continuously, and I imagine if every sound ever produced by the man and his arkestra were actually recorded, the hours needed to listen to it would see an infant Sun Ra listener through his late teens or even college years. This massive productivity by Sun Ra (or anyone for that matter) demands a curator if not the cruelest of editors. Of course, Sun Ra would have had no notion that so much of his music would at last become widely available, and like a good archivist sought to preserve everything. He certainly couldn't have imagined the efforts of Transparency to make hours and hours of live shows available, many of which are as significant as any of his official records.

So where is this 'immediate problem'? Perhaps it is just in my head, but one thinks of an artist refining their work, issuing at some point a full-blown statement (I think taken together, Heliocentric Worlds is one of these). Every show made on tour need not always have official releases. Without a curator though, there is nothing to distinguish what might have been meant as more definitive statements, and what was just another night's gig.

Hard core Sun Ra fans will likely dismiss this argument and I will side with them on the opportunity afforded by the availability of obscure Sun Ra recordings. The question however is whether EVERY Sun Ra recording should be considered an album?

'Featuring Pharaoh Sanders & Black Harold' is (for the most part) great stuff, and at times a significant step toward Heliocentric Worlds. There's an early version of Shadow World, while Black Harold adds considerable dimension with some killer flute playing on Voice of Pan and Dawn Over Israel. In fact, short of the too-often heard Rocken Number 9 (which is only 4 minutes anyway), everything on the original Saturn recording is quite exceptional.

The additional material is good as well, though 'The Other World'--a 20 minute blowing/percussion jam is a point of contention. Recently I've heard the Slug Saloon sessions released by Transparency, and we see huge blocks of time devoted to noodling; an aspect that Ra either only did in live shows or felt was better left off his records. Not that 'The Other World' is a bad track, but it is, to my ears, far less interesting than Ra's composed work, and it is of course these sorts of tracks that are always the longest!

Having given this album a few spins, I find my interest in the record starting with track 4, the magnificent 'The Now Tomorrow'. It starts gently enough with piano and flute, graduating to strings and reeds, echoing the sort of foreign melodies we've heard on Cosmic Tones. The piece wavers then graduates into a grand Sun Ra piano freakout. At 10 minutes this is a solid composition with a lot of room to fully explore musical possibilities. It's a great intermediate between Cosmic Tones and Heliocentric Worlds. The other new piece here, Discipline 9, is in fact a fat, extended version of We Travel the Spaceways.

The question then remains, is 'Featuring Pharaoh Sanders' just another live album (with live versions of all those songs you've already heard), or is it a critical work in the development of the Sun Ra sound? Is it an important window into what the Arkestra was up to, or is it just more?

I think there's suffient new material here, that and it being a substantial period of development for the Arkestra, that one can only concur with the former, but let's be cautious. The coming glut of live recordings should be caveat enough!