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April 8th, 2006 by Jonathan Fletcher (Permalink)
Label: Golden Years of New Year: 2006 Add Comments |
One of my very first memories of TV was of this lurid and gauchely coloured trip to the moon. The moon seemed itself to be alive and have some kind of periscope coming out of one of its eyes. It was such a fantasticly sublime and other-worldly experience coming across these images. Time passes, discoveries are made and I learnt that this voyage was the work of Georges Melies, an inventor of one of the two paths at the dawn of cinema that has supposedly split the medium ever since.
Sun Ra both alone and with his ever-shifting Arkestra is the eternal soundtrack to this film and beyond, a painter of musical pictures of infinity to quote David Toop. Ra was a solar magickian, a mythology and far too enormous to ever be contained within this one Earth, one that he denied belonging to anyway.
There is simply not the space for anything approaching even a whistle-stop of Sun Ra’s biography, meaning, philosophy and importance never mind placing this album in the context of a monolithic and staggering oeuvre, but keep em peeled for a forthcoming feature. There are good, great and truly wondrous artefacts that Ra has beamed down from his Solar Myth Ship, No release has ever been anything less than fascinating.
A vast mind-boggling array of over 300 releases on countless labels means some can be of dubious quality but Leo Records have long had an intimate acquaintance with Ra’s discography and anything from their stable is a cause for excitement. This then is a live recording from New York on July 6th 1973. Time, date and Day become merely words in this one universe of many.
The Arkestra on this particular show numbered 23. If you have not been granted access to these tablets before, you are in for the strangest, wildest ride of your life.They were basically, a big band but like nothing you could ever imagine as, for a great majority of the time, the entire band was improvising under the benevolent guidance of Ra who himself played piano, organ and mini-moog. Ra plays the latter unlike anybody who has ever touched it- a swarm of electronic splinters and noise. The band can leap from these solo interludes to full-on noise vast enough to eclipse the moon, to swing-like structures completely destroying genre, narrative and earthly control. June Tyson is onboard this night with grace, elegance and wisdom as are Arkestra mainstays and heroes John Gilmore and Marshall Allen, two men of such extraordinarily ferocious ability who will forever remain overlooked simply because of their submission to Ra’s vision. The two circle the same stratosphere as Coltrane and Ayler.
Amongst versions of ‘Space is the Place’ and ‘The Shadow World’ are two untitled improvisations, unheard before and ignited with the intensity of a comet hurtling towards Earth.
Towards the conclusion of Disc 2, Sun Ra declaims that “The universe sent me to converse with you” and even a cursory listen will convince you that this is the truth.
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