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Features Disc of the day
Sun Ra
Jazz In Silhouette
(Saturn, 1959; reissued on Evidence, 1992)
Don’t panic! It doesn’t sound like the Sun Ra you think you wouldn’t like.
Back when weird jazz was hard to find, and before Evidence’s concerted early-’90s reissue plan, I owned one Sun Ra album, and I didn’t like it. The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra was one of those albums that the humourless older generation of serious jazz types would use to browbeat us curious pups: you didn’t like it because you didn’t get it, and if you didn’t get it then you didn’t have it, in your soul and that. It now stands as my least favourite album by the man born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham Alabama in 1914 but who later revealed he was part of the “Angel race” of the planet Saturn. So this is where I started again. Recorded in 1958 at Ra’s El Saturn studio in Chicago, and billed as “Sun Ra and his Arkestra playing music for tomorrow’s world” it’s an album that sounds strangely out of time. Album opener Enlightenment begins with the striking of a large gong, but then careers off on some late-’40s be-bop groove that also seems desperate to shake free of its bonds, driving forward with the red-faced, puff-cheeked high-register of a free-jazz Dizzy Gillespie. Led by the wonderful trumpeter/bandmaster Hobart Dotson, the rest of the album continues in the same spirit, drawing on the shadows of bop jazz past whilst racing into the sunlight of free jazz future. As such, it’s the ideal place for the afeared Ra neophyte to start, a joyous collection of the raw bi band material that Sun and the gang would set about reshaping, deconstructing and destroying over the next 30-odd years. This is your map, now start travelling.
Andrew Male
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 29/03/2008
Further Listening
Sun Ra – Atlantis (Saturn, 1967/Evidence 1993)
Charlie Mingus – Ah Um (Columbia, 1959)
George Russell - New York, New York (Decca, 1958)
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Totally agree with Andrew's comments. This is an overlooked masterpiece which should be in any decent music collection.
"Sun Song" is also worth checking out. It should not be forgotten that The Stooges, MC5 and Funkadelic were huge fans of Ra....
Posted by Rob J at 11:12 AM GMT 30/03/2008 Report Abuse
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One of my all-time favorite albums. Ideal for Blinfold test. what's age it is?
Posted by carneham at 11:51 PM GMT 04/04/2008 Report Abuse
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