Vinyl LP pressing. Travelogue through a cybernetical soundscape! The future rendered here by Ra seems more dystopian than utopian, and these 1975 guided improvisations are imbued with an underlying violence, alternate twists, bank turns, headchoppers, loops, rolls, sidewinders and drops. It's a dark & glorious journey. Featuring the debut of the complete version of 'Extension Out,' Pathways has been exquisitely mastered from the four-track session reel and includes an insert offering an enlightening glimpse at Ra & co.'s plans for their major label lucre.
Celestial Love contains recordings made in September 1982 at New York's Variety Studios, which had hosted countless Sun Ra sessions since the late 1960s. This was one of the last extended sessions at Variety, and these recordings were the last studio works released on Sun Ra's own Saturn label (though the label did continue to press concert recordings, and new studio recordings did appear on other labels). Aside from their inclusion on Celestial Love, tracks from these sessions landed on the albums A Fireside Chat With Lucifer and Nuclear War. Since Nuclear War's contents overlapped with both Fireside Chat and Celestial Love, we have reconstituted the latter two as complete albums, thus covering all titles from these Variety dates. The music on Celestial Love is mostly "inside" Ra, veering towards mainstream jazz (the lengthy and adventurous "Fireside Chat," not on this album, being an exception). Ra's early hero, Duke Ellington, is represented twice with "Sophisticated Lady" and "Drop Me Off in Harlem," and two other standards ("Smile" and "Sometimes I'm Happy," both sung by June Tyson) are given snappy Ra arrangements.
Vinyl LP pressing, Recorded in '73 and rejected by tin-eared major label execs in '75, Crystal Spears (or "Crystal Clear" as it appears on the tape box) subsumes a cathartic brawl between Minimoog and Yamaha combo organ, with percussionists providing tonal textures, and plaintive oboe colliding with roaring electronic keyboards over waves of rollicking marimba, devilishly chattering below the fray. Crystal Spears is Sun Ra's once lost aural cinematheque! Includes a quad-ra-color Sun Ra poster!
Soothing Sounds for Saturnians! Sun Ra, notorious for his aggressive keyboard attack and seemingly schizophrenic stylings, here offers a unique selection playing the celeste-like Fender Rhodes electric piano, which has a distinct sound (think Doors' "Riders on the Storm") and an interesting history. This is Ra sound at his most relaxed and contemplative state. This Sun Ra 1980 solo set at Haverford College has been kicking around the internet and in the digital libraries of Ra collectors for years, though it has not previously been properly mastered or commercially issued. Like many events in Ra's history, this gig has a story that goes beyond the music. Ra's presence onstage that night came about through an unforeseen chain of events that unfolded up until concert time. This is a very unique performance. Sun Ra is notorious for his aggressive keyboard attack and seemingly schizophrenic stylings-which can musically rocket from A to Z and back without transitional bridges. This set offers a marked contrast. Ra's instrument here is the celeste-like Fender Rhodes electric piano, which has a distinct sound (instantly recognizable in the Doors' "Riders on the Storm") and an interesting history. There are few pyrotechnics in this performance, and much restraint. Ra sounds relaxed and contemplative. It's Soothing Sounds for Saturnians. - Irwin Chusid 1. Love In Outer Space 2. Haverford Impromptu 1 3. Rhapsody In Blue 4. St. Louis Blues 5. Medley: Intro-Space Is The Place-Over The Rainbow 6. Haverford Impromptu 2 7. We Live To Be (previously unissued) 8. Take The A Train (previously unissued) 9. Haverford Encore Duet (featuring Walt Dickerson) (CD only)
More unearthed tape from a jazz icon! Thanks to a 21-year-old with a tape machine, we can all experience the majesty of guitar legend Barney Kessel! This second volume of Jazz Mill recordings shows Barney firmly at the top of his game.\n\nOnce again, Barney and the Jazz Millers (pianist Pete Jolly, drummer Art Kile, and bassist Gene Stoffell) interpret a variety of standards from The Great American Songbook and each arrangement serves to demonstrate the group's superb chops and collective creativity.\n\nFirst up is "Mean to Me," a vintage standard from 1929. It's bluesy posture and timeless message is still as modern as today. On an uptempo rendition of "Tea for Two" Barney is out of the gate with chorus after chorus of smoking solos on a song some would consider a "chestnut" from 1925. "Indian Summer" has been a favorite of jazz musicians and fans for decades, and this bouncy arrangement serves as a Kessel showcase where he delivers like a master storyteller. The Millers' high velocity rendition of Harold Arlen's "Let's Fall in Love" generates non-stop excitement as Barney renders one blistering chorus after another and the group's version of the classic "Blue Moon" is also presented with flair and feel. "I Can't Get Started" is a "torch song," the story of someone with an embarrassment of riches who would relinquish it all for love. Kessel and the Jazz Millers' interplay express the atmospheric and contemplative sense of this composition. Closing out the album is the riff tune "Godchild," something one would expect to hear at an after-hours jam session.\n\nThanks to Jack Miller, a young Phoenix audiophile, armed with his Knight-brand recorder, today we can relive and enjoy the artistry of one of jazz's most extraordinary musicians. This is Barney in his salad days when he was topping all the major jazz polls and emerging as one of the most important guitarists of that or any subsequent era. 01. Mean To Me /02. Tea For Two /03. Indian Summer /04. Let's Fall In Love /05. Blue Moon /06. I Can't Get Started /07. Godchild
Digitally remastered edition. One of the rarer albums in the Sun Ra canon, RTTR originally entered our orbit in 1983, mystifying listeners and confounding Ra fanatics with the minimal info on the Saturn pressing. Recorded at several locations over several years (including legendary avant-garde arts enclave, the Squat Theater in NYC), the tracks here include everything from Ra's sci-fi synthesizer insanity, Marshall Allen's skronking sax, an excellent Arkestra vocal track 'They Plan To Leave,' and so much more.
Vinyl LP pressing. With Blacknuss, it's as if Kirk is taking listeners on a trip - from the top forty world of Soul Train to the roots of soul in gospel music and back in Africa. It is a remarkable musical-cultural shift in perspective and one that carries the listener with it. Exploding with near chaotic energy, this album makes a great soundtrack to a party about to teeter out of control. Cut all analog!
Limited orange colored vinyl LP pressing. Sightless, peerless, multi-instrumentalist, Roland's Kirk's 1967 debut for Atlantic is a monster of a live set from '65 featuring pianists Lonnie Liston Smith and Jaki Byard, bassist Major Holley and drummer Charles Crosby- all put to tape in Atlantic Studios NYC. Cut all analog.
Digitally remastered edition. An F-bomb saturated hip-hop call and response club cut... from Sun Ra?! While the most renown track in this omniversal opus is the atomic expletive-filled repartee Nuclear War, there is so much more to this dark mysterious journey through the mind of Sun Ra. The sprawling, suite-like 20-minute title track sustains a lyrical edge in spite of an open framework and textures, which encourage sonorities to surface and emerge from the band as if there was no human intention behind them. In opposition to 'Nuclear War,' Ra's organ playing here was built less on bombast and sonic terror than it is on whispers, stutters, shivers, and swells. Fireside Chat offers a wide stylistic array, as was the artist's intent, reflecting his eclectic, seemingly irreconcilable approach to compositional extremes. With Sun Ra you get everything... except predictability. First ever reissue of this iconic album!
The outsized sounds emerging from the Excelsior Mill organ captured here constitute a unique chapter in the Sun Ra story, a dizzying phantasmagoria that offers a whole new view on what Ra could do. It might thrill you; it might unnerve you; it might strum your heartstrings; it might spook the living daylights out of you. Most likely you'll experience all of the above before the jolting musical jeremiad is done. The CD includes the full uncut show with music not featured on the LP version! When you're Sun Ra, you don't need synthesizers to evoke apocalyptic visions and interstellar excursions. You don't even need a band. Ra is most widely known for working with various iterations of his Arkestra, but he was no stranger to unaccompanied keyboard expeditions. His discography contains solo piano albums, solo Fender Rhodes records, and solo recordings on conventional organ, the latter going as far back as his home recordings from the 1940s. But none of those instruments ever offered Sun Ra the kind of sonic artillery that waited beneath his fingers and feet when he sat before the keyboards, pedals, and multicolored constellation of tabs controlling the Wurlitzer pipe organ. Mystic and magisterial, Ra comes off here like a cross between a demonically riffing '50s horror movie villain and a futuristic congregation leader delivering the interplanetary gospel. Brassy stabs provide the kind of punctuation that could be graphically rendered as an endless string of exclamation marks in 500-point font. String-like swoops and swirls dance across the top of the carnage, cooling the flames just enough to keep the whole thing from combusting (for a while at least) but never dousing the fiery fury that Ra draws forth from the instrument.
Limited green colored vinyl LP pressing. Digitally remastered edition. One of the rarer albums in the Sun Ra canon, RTTR originally entered our orbit in 1983, mystifying listeners and confounding Ra fanatics with the minimal info on the Saturn pressing. Recorded at several locations over several years (including legendary avant-garde arts enclave, the Squat Theater in NYC), the tracks here include everything from Ra's sci-fi synthesizer insanity, Marshall Allen's skronking sax, an excellent Arkestra vocal track 'They Plan To Leave,' and so much more.
Vinyl LP pressing. "Soothing Sounds for Saturnians! Sun Ra, notorious for his aggressive keyboard attack and seemingly schizophrenic stylings, here offers a unique selection playing the celeste-like Fender Rhodes electric piano, which has a distinct sound (think Doors' "Riders on the Storm") and an interesting history. This is Ra sound at his most relaxed and contemplative state. This Sun Ra 1980 solo set at Haverford College has been kicking around the internet and in the digital libraries of Ra collectors for years, though it has not previously been properly mastered or commercially issued. Like many events in Ra's history, this gig has a story that goes beyond the music. Ra's presence onstage that night came about through an unforeseen chain of events that unfolded up until concert time. This is a very unique performance. Sun Ra is notorious for his aggressive keyboard attack and seemingly schizophrenic stylings-which can musically rocket from A to Z and back without transitional bridges. This set offers a marked contrast. Ra's instrument here is the celeste-like Fender Rhodes electric piano, which has a distinct sound (instantly recognizable in the Doors' "Riders on the Storm") and an interesting history. There are few pyrotechnics in this performance, and much restraint. Ra sounds relaxed and contemplative. It's Soothing Sounds for Saturnians". - Irwin Chusid.
This deluxe package includes three LPs, a Blu-ray disc, and a DVD. The audio portion contains the original music composed for the film, which was eventually released as a soundtrack in 1993. It also features The Mathematics of the Altered Destiny, a third, previously unissued LP recorded in the same soundtrack sessions, which is finally being released half a century after it was recorded. This newly discovered LP is heavy on the prose of Sun Ra, as he and June Tyson bestow countless bits of information and inspiration onto the listener. The film soundtrack is an entirely different journey than the 1973 Blue Thumb LP it shares it's title with. We suggest you take both journeys. These recordings were sourced from the Sun Ra tape vault, then were digitally restored to make an album this special sound the best it possibly could. The Blu-ray contains the entire glorious film complete with film artifacts and was sourced from the restoration prepared by Rapid Eye Movies of Germany. The bonus features on the Blu-ray are composed of Ra and Ra-centric material from the Modern Harmonic archives, including video from the Outer Space Visual Communicator footage.
Featuring what may be his only recordings on the Prophet keyboard, these once lost performances expand the omniverse of Ra across a stellar set of lengthy cuts! All recorded in a single day and finally making their terrestrial debut, pressed on red vinyl and packaged with a Prophet keyboard brochure plus notes from Ranthropologist Brother Cleve! What happens when a Prophet meets a Prophet? The answer lies within these grooves. Amongst the hundreds of recordings issued by Sun Ra and his Arkestra, under their various guises, the majority were recorded in concert or in makeshift studios such as their early 1960s set-up at NYC's Choreographer's Workshop. Beyond those, roughly 22 albums were recorded at Variety Recording Studio in New York's Times Square. However, on August 25, 1986, Sun Ra and cohorts entered Mission Control, a state-of-the-art 24-track studio north of Boston, which was teeming with electronic keyboards and otherworldly sound generators. Nestled within that arsenal was a brand-new digital ultra keyboard - the Prophet VS ("Vector Synthesizer"). Of all the keyboards Ra played throughout his half-century career, the Prophet was one of the most sophisticated. There's no evidence that he had played either of the instrument's earlier incarnations, the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 and Prophet-10. Created using microprocessors, a then-new technological advance, under the auspices of engineer Dave Smith in 1978, the Prophet-5 revolutionized electronic music as the first polyphonic and, most importantly, programmable synthesizer. Ra was intrigued by the Prophet (surely by the instrument as well as by the name). Recorded during a single day, it's about time that these once lost performances have now been found.
Sun Ra was a master of misdirection. Tape boxes wrongly labeled-whether by accident or design-are legendary among Ra archivists. One can speculate about the artist's intent or carelessness, but source misinformation abounds on Ra tape cases, album jackets, cassettes, ephemera-as well as in interviews. It's as if Ra, in furtherance of his own mythmaking, wanted to keep historians guessing. This project began as a misidentified tape discovered by Michael D. Anderson of the Sun Ra Music Archive. The 7-inch reel, which contained a live Ra solo piano performance of 11 works-some recognizable, others not-was of stellar quality, and was marked as a 1979 Carnegie Hall date. But the program on the tape did not align with known facts (e.g., titles played, concert duration) which were chronicled in a Newsday review of Ra's appearance at Carnegie in September of that year. With a prod from writer/historian Ted Gioia and further research by myself, the tape was eventually identified as a mostly unreleased July 1977 performance by Ra at a downtown NYC "jazz cafe" called The Axis-in-Soho.
Double yellow colored vinyl LP pressing. Sun Ra was a master of misdirection. Tape boxes wrongly labeled-whether by accident or design-are legendary among Ra archivists. One can speculate about the artist's intent or carelessness, but source misinformation abounds on Ra tape cases, album jackets, cassettes, ephemera-as well as in interviews. It's as if Ra, in furtherance of his own mythmaking, wanted to keep historians guessing. This project began as a misidentified tape discovered by Michael D. Anderson of the Sun Ra Music Archive. The 7-inch reel, which contained a live Ra solo piano performance of 11 works-some recognizable, others not-was of stellar quality, and was marked as a 1979 Carnegie Hall date. But the program on the tape did not align with known facts (e.g., titles played, concert duration) which were chronicled in a Newsday review of Ra's appearance at Carnegie in September of that year. With a prod from writer/historian Ted Gioia and further research by myself, the tape was eventually identified as a mostly unreleased July 1977 performance by Ra at a downtown NYC "jazz cafe" called The Axis-in-Soho.
If you're looking for melodies, structured compositions, pleasant harmonies, songs you can whistle, and serenades for social gatherings - seek elsewhere. This is Triple-A Ra: Audacious, Aggressive, Adventurous. In the collection we've titled Stray Voltage, Ra is not so much composing music as painting soundscapes with electronic keyboards. Ra doesn't simply play these consoles - he attacks, cajoles, and pounds them. Stray Voltage compiles unissued electronic peregrinations during the 1970s and '80s.
One of a handful of albums Sun Ra released on the legendary Impulse! Label in the early '70s, Astro Black provides a comprehensive picture of where the Arkestra was around the time, drawing to the end of their ultra-free period and beginning to investigate more traditional jazz forms, and even the fringes of funk. Pressed on purple vinyl! 1. Astro Black 2. Discipline "99" 3. Hidden Spheres 4. The Cosmo-Fire
