WOEBOT

Un Ra.

I have 25 or so Sun Ra LPs. Some of them are recent "semi-dodgy" reissues, some are from the early seventies batch of Impulse releases of classic Saturn material, some are bootlegs, some (9 or so) are actually original Saturn releases (gasp). There exist a few collectors who ONLY buy Sun Ra records; I've heard tell of at least one such nut. That's probably a sustainable habit because there is a universe within the man's music. You're also pretty well catered for quantity. In the wonderful "Omniverse" tome, put together by the leading Ra scholar Harmut Geerken, there are listed 189 records (a few of which admittedly Ra is not wholly central to). That's a staggering output which, I think, dwarfs that of all the competition. There will be releases which even Geerken isn't aware of I suspect.

In 1992 at a Record Fair held in Camden's Electric Ballroom I came across a guy from Birmingham who was standing over a school-room desk atop of which was a single, very large crate. This chap couldn't get mugged, he explained to me that he had received practically no interest in his stock, which was exclusively vintage Saturn releases he'd acquired from a garage sale (mmm). I remember looking through this selection of three hundred or so Saturns, all in their white cardboard sleeves, many of which were festooned with paintings and stamped with swirling linocut imagery, and not having a clue where to start. He was offering them for $50 a piece, which was (though mildly dear) a very good bargain even at the time. If I'd been more business-minded I'd have bought the whole lot off him. As it was I thumbed a copy of Disco 3000, passed it over and then suggested he call a dealer friend of mine. Which he did the next day, and who promptly bought the whole crate. They'd probably each fetch an average of about $350 today. Not a decision I really regret, but my mightiest brush with Saturn on vinyl.

I haven't come here to talk about Le Sun'y'Ra as such. I wanted to share with you a parlour game which I play with a few of my buddies. How often is it that one comes across the phrase: "That is just like Sun Ra." All the bloody time innit! It's one of the standard yardsticks for categorising and qualifying a vaste swathe of music. Well I thought it was about time someone tried to systematise that off-hand remark, and (puffs out chest) who better than me? (wheezes) What I've tried to do is examine the whole terrain, and through of a process of acutely disciplined selectivity and via much cogitation and some pretty deep research, come up with a fairly definitive batch of records which epitomise the "Un Ra."

This has involved leaving aside thousands of records, most of which which could be justifiably included: The entire oeuvres of Lee Perry, Fela Kuti, Magma, George Russell and Juan Garcia Esquivel; Figures like La Monte Young, The Residents, Om Kalsoum, Roland Kirk, Frank Zappa and Roky Erikson; The works of former Ra alumni like Pharaoh Sanders, Yusef Lateef and Brother Ah; Sonic bredren like Edgar Varese, Oskar Sala and Duke Ellington; and perhaps most sadly a whole lot of modern music by the likes of The Black Dog, Position Normal, New Kingdom, Jimi Tenor, The Polyphonic Spree, Quasimoto, cLOUDEAD, Killah Priest, King Biscuit Time, 4Hero, Scienz of Life and Underground Resistance. Yep it was a reet tuff task. Rather than calling me names (like "goggy" fr'instance) I'd really *REALLY* appreciate it if people would use the comments box to offer up their own suggestions for inclusions into the (ahem) very select canon. Please also forgive me if certain records are not accorded sufficently thorough annotation, this has taken me too long already (faints).

(Girds loins) In no particular order:

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1. Eddie Gale: Ghetto Music (Blue Note)

Trumpeter Eddie Gale, like the aforementioned Yusef Lateef and Brother Ah was a member of Ra's group in the early 1960s. He recorded this LP for Francis Wolff at Blue Note in 1968. The recording is "manned" by a sixteen piece group comprising a full choir. The tone is not entirely dissimilar to that of Donald Byrd's "Another Perspective" LP on Blue Note except that the singing, while also on a re-contextualised Spirituals/Gospel tip, are lot looser. The instrumentation, including colours like Jamaican Thumb Piano, Steel Drum and Bird Whistle is equally (satisfyingly) shambolic. The highlight of the record has to be "The Coming Of Gwilu," thematically matching the African-themed clothing on the sleeve. It's worth remembering that female choral vocals, what Ra referred to as "Space Ethnic Voices", the collective headed by June Tyson and featuring Ruth Wright, Cheryl Banks and Judith Holton (amongst many others) was key to the Ra sound. June Tyson was very important to the Arkestra's sound for years, as well as guiding the group's look.

2. Armando Sciascia: Impressions in Rhythm & Sound (Vedette)

This Sciascia Library Record, an absolute pearl (sustained harpsichords ahoy!), standing in for the whole Italian Soundtracks crew, comprising Bruno Nicolai, Piero Umiliani and Ennio Morricone. In particular I'm led to believe that Sciascia's Soundtrack to Metempsycho has moments of sheer unadulturated Ra-ness. The track "Latin Physics" supposedly a killer. On what grounds do this lot merit inclusion? Often as not they emerged from Avant-Garde roots, Morricone was famously a member of the collective Gruppo Di Improvisazione Nuova Consonanza, and yet they find themselves "hard-at-work", earning a crust as Film Composers. Often the material they have to score for is at the gutter end of the market, for Porn and Horror Soundtracks, ironically giving them more creative freedom than they might otherwise have had. It's at this juncture, between the cheap and avant-garde that they become Ra-esque. As is frequently commented on, at moments the Arkestra could sound like the most uncompromising protagonists of Free-Jazz, at others cheesy as brie, and therein lies their one of their charms.

I'm quite aware that this breakdown could be littered with Library recordings, in defense I'd make the standard criticism which I trot out on these occasions, that Library music (for me at least) lacks a philosophical and cultural agenda. To compare Ra's output (him the philosopher incarnate) with Library tracks would be entirely missing the point.

3. Tadd Dameron: Fontainebleu (Victor)

This from 1956, is a quite lovely example of orchestrated Jazz, splendid gutbucket stuff for a small group. Dameron had previously done arrangements for Jimmy Lunceford, Billy Eckstein, Georgie Auld and Sarah Vaughn. A Duke Ellington piece like "Black, Brown and Beige" would make the point I'm trying to here. That is that, whilst he receives praise and comparsion with artists in fields as diverse as Post-Rock, Techno etc Sun Ra would always view himself as a post-Fletcher Henderson band leader. Henderson with whom he was endlessly proud of having worked with. In this sense, ditch the spacey trappings and you have a character not dissimilar from Tadd Dameron. A simplistic though sympathetic reading.

It always amuses me to read on Ira Gitler's liner notes for this: "In 1949, Tadd went to the Paris Jazz Festival with Miles Davis and remained on the other side of the Atlantic to write for England's Ted Heath." Heath who became famous later as a Conservative politician and Margaret Thatcher's nemisis.

4. Hildegard of Bingen: Feather on the breath of God (Hyperion)

Some commentators believe Hildegard Von Bingen's visions were the result of her suffering from acute migraines. This reminds me of the theories that Einstein was in fact an Aspergers Syndrome sufferer. It's bland and reductive isn't it? Why not just accept them for their wondrous individuality and genius? Is her assertion that she was the recipient of divine visions any worse an explanation? Hildegard lived between 1098 and 1179 when she went from being abandoned by her family at birth to holding court to the Kings and religious leaders of her day. Hildegard shares with Sonny a devoted cult of initiates (though her pulling power far exceeded Ra's), a very personal and kooky cosmology and a penchant for forging otherworldy music music.

One of Hildegard's Illustrations from Scivias

This recording, graced by the exquisite voice of Emma Kirkby features "reed drones' throughout it, marking it strange even in the generally peculiar world of Gothic music (Leonin and Perotin are both among La Monte Young's declared influences). David Tibet is apparently a fan, and when I wrote to Harmut Geerken in 1998, offering to source a copy of Sun Ra's "Live at the Gibus" LP (Geerken had lost his copy and I had tracked one down) he sent me this postcard, the stamp of which was one of Hildegard's pictures. Very cosmic innit.

5. The Jonjun Crew: Lost in Space (Tommy Boy)

Space. Maybe Ra's overriding obsession. Here is Sun describing his abduction by aliens from John F. Szwed's definitive biography "Space is the Place", the first three quarters of which is likely to be the most inspiring thing you'll ever read. So go buy it. Sonny returned from class and found his room-mates huddled over his bed, reading his diary and laughing:

"They were having a good time. So then I abolished the diary. But I still retain the memory, and in there I said that these spacemen contacted me. They wanted me to go to outer space with them. They were looking for someone who had my type of mind. They said it was quite dangerous because you have to have perfect discipline...I'd have to go up with no part of my body touching outside of the beam, because if i did, going through different time zones, I wouldn't be able to get that far back. So that's what I did. And it's like, well it looked like a giant spotlight shining down on me, and I call it transmolecularisation, my whole body was changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up. Now that's what I call an energy transformation because I wasn't in human form. I thought I was there but I could see right through myself.

Then I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn. First thing I saw was something like a rail, a long rail of railroad track coming out of the sky, and landed over there in a vacant lot...Then I found myself in a huge stadium, and I was sitting in the last row, in the dark. I knew I was alone. They were down there on the stage, something like a big boxing ring. So then they called my name, and I didn't move. They called my name again, and I still didn't answer. Then all at once they teleported me, and I was down on the stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop (teachers training) because there was going to be trouble in schools. there was going to be trouble in every part of life. That's why they wanted to talk to me about it. "Don't have anything to do with it. Don't continue." They would teach me some things that when it looked like the world was going into complete chaos, when there was no hope for nothing, then I could speak, but not until then. I would speak, and the world would listen. That's what they told me.

Next thing, I found myself back on Planet Earth...."

The Jonzun Crew's "Pac Jam" is certainly pointe zero for the strain of electro star-worship that one finds in the Underground Resistance World to World/Galaxy to Galaxy series of records, and would you believe it, Sun Ra gets thanked on the sleeve's reverse!

6. George Duke: The Inner Source (MPS)

Recorded the year following Duke's departure from Frank Zappa's group (and don't ask me what Zappa records he was on cos I don't bloody care) this is a very rare and wonderful slice of electric jazz on the German MPS label. It's softer than Herbie Hancock's "Sextant", which would have made a more obvious choice for this slot, but less flabby than the Weather Report (though apparently "Non-Stop Home" is amazing). Ra, with his rocksichord, and via Bugs Hunter's engineering wizardry on records like "Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy" (1963) was the pioneer of synth music in Jazz. Whether that puts him ahead of the game across the board I'd be loathe to say.

7. Karlheinz Stockhausen: Illimite (Shandar)

Alongside "Ceylon" and "Stimmung" one of the most florid and mystical of Stockhausen's recordings. Witness Stockhausen in interview with Peter Heyworth in the book "Towards a Cosmic Music":

Interviewer: Can you say how you know about Sirius?

Stockhausen: It would lead to a misunderstanding and false interpretation. It is an inner revelation that has come several times to me, that I have been educated on Sirius, that I come from Sirius, but usually people laugh at this and don't understand it, so it doesn't really make sense to talk about it. It is alright to talk about such things privately, to one who is willing to understand and has similar visions, but it doesn't make sense to talk about it in public.

It makes quite a stark contrast to the usual image of him as an arch modernist doesn't it. Though perhaps this is widely known? Ra and Stockhausen were also both deeply engrossed in The Urantia Book, a 2,000 page-long "channeled tome" which they were each given in mysterious circumstances in the early seventies. It's also amusing to note that Stockhausen once attended one of Ra's concerts which clearly confused the hell out of him: "The first hour or so was avant-garde music of the very highest calibre, then it became like a hotel band."

8. Teo Macero: What's New? (Columbia)

In which Teo takes side one. Very Ra-like in the most superficial ways, highly-structured odd-ball Jazz orchestration. But of course beyond the sonic similarities Teo Macero is a crucial link between Jazz (the remixing he did made Miles's "In a Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew") and the Avant-Garde. In this great interview hosted at Jason Gross's Perfect Sound Forever site he describes Edgar Varese as being like a "second father" to him. Varese's "Ionisation" is as close as the classical music world comes to sounding like Ra, closer even than John Cage's Prepared Piano pieces.

9. Arthur Lyman: Taboo (HiFi)

It's quite easy to view Ra as a kind of more spiritually commited practitioner of Easy Listening. See also Eden Ahbez's "Eden's Island."

10. Unknown Ethiopian 7". (Emporio Musicale)

This 7", from the collection of my good friend Sacha Dieu, is pure Ra. Jazz from the Far East FOR REAL!

Part of the mythology around Ra centres upon his visit to Egypt in December 1971. In an extraordinary moment of synchronicity, the collector Harmut Geerken picked up a black hitchhiker who asked to be taken to the pyramids. This gentleman turned out to be Ra's perennial stalwart (and the man who can take some credit for affecting John Coltrane's later direction) John Gilmore. Ra ended up recording with Geerken's friend Salah Ragab on a number of occasions most notably on "The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt plus The Cairo Jazz Band." Ragab was a jazz afficionado, drummer and percussionist and was formerly in charge of the Military Music Department of the Egyptian Army. Ragab was one of the very few non-Afro-American musicians to work with Ra (Talvin Singh being another).

Ra's visit and dalliance with Egyptian music singles him out as deeply courageous and forward-thinking. For all of Rastafarianism's focus on Ethiopia, and Afro-American music's "Back-to-the-motherland" inclinations there exist precious few instants of collaborations between musicians of the (notional) diaspora. It's missing the point to invest too much meaning in this, and unrealistic to expect more (there are the financial considerations to consider, plane tickets aren't cheap), but yet it does surprise me. Instances of trans-cultural meetings of this type are certainly more common in recent years, though as always they're no guarantee of worthwhile music. In terms of Jamaica there is only Lee Perry's recordings of two African visitors at The Black Ark, elsewhere only Guy Warren's work, Olatunji's dalliance with Ra and Coltrane (Did they record together? I don't think so), Ellington's casual encounters with various third word assembalges (more later), Roy Ayers's LP with Fela Kuti, the work of Ahmed Abdul Malik and a brace of lesser examples before disco and Laswell-style Global Futurism make it a normal working practice.

In recent years, thanks to the work of Franco Falceto, who has curated the wonderful series of Ethiopiques records, Ethiopia's Jazz-inflected music has been made readily available in the West for the first time. Prior to this Modern Ethiopian music of the sixties and seventies has been under-represented, available only on a few compilations. It's a wondrous treasure trove of sounds too. It's arguable that the greatest auteur this series has unearthed is that of Mulatu Astatke. Mulatu's music is superb and I incite you to track down Volume 4 of the Ethiopiques series (an absolute *MUST HAVE*), it's a bejewelled, languid, eastern-tinged Ra-like hallucination of jazz. At once groovy and mysterious. Here is the limited edition vinyl reissue of the same CD, which you might still be able to snap up if you don't nap:

We'll be coming back to this Eastern Jazz theme. Pay attention, no nodding off in the back there!

11. Patrick Cowley: Mind Warp (Megatone Records)

Italo, or is it Hi-NRG? Cowley was Sylvester's producer, behind huge hits like "You Make Me Feel Mighty Real." This is perhaps the disco twin to The Jonzun Crew record. The sleeve graphics (ahem, MUCH better than the record) are what sealed the deal here. The Indoor Life record on Celluloid, especially "Voodoo", which Cowley produces and plays on is the killer.

12. MC5: Kick Out The Jams (Elektra)

Och aye the noo! The McFive. Better get this out the way for all the Lester Bangs groupies. I saw Sun Ra live actually. I saw him at a free concert in Central Park in the Summer of 1992 where he shared the bill with Sonic Youth. It was one of those iconic moments, embodying the spirit of the ESP label, where Sun Ra and other Jazz heavyweights like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and Alan Silva rubbed shoulders with Arty-Primitive Garage Punkers like The Fugs and The Godz. By the time I saw him Ra was by this time unable to walk and was pushed up to his piano on a wheelchair. If truth be told the vibe wasn't really happening, the Arkestra seemed tired, but you know "I was there!" Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore famously sold his entire collection of early Sonic Youth recordings to fund his purchase of a vaste hoard of Ra vinyl.

From Szwed: "Under (John) Sinclair's musical and political tutelage, the MC5 took rock and roll in directions it had only teased about before. They came on stage carrying rifles and guitars, their amps emblazoned with inverted American flags. They played thirty-minute songs, planned an album to be called Live on Saturn, tried to get ESP to record them, created versions of Archie Shepp's, Pharoah Sanders's and John Coltrane's compositions, and recorded "Starship" on their 1969 Kick out the Jams Elektra album using a poem from the back cover of The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. II ("There is a land/Whose being is unimaginable to the /Human mind...")

John Sinclair, founder of The White Panthers and the band's manager and svengali, went as far as bringing the Arkestra out to Ann Arbor in Detroit for a series of concerts and moved them to the house adjacent to the MC5. Amusingly Sonny was: "shocked by their hippie lifestyle- their language, drugs (Ra never took drugs), their state of undress and the Police Surveillance which followed them. And to make matters worse some of the Arkestra's musicians were drifting over to hang out with the ladies in Sinclair's place." Aah you've gotta laugh...

13. Oliver Messiaen: Turangalia Symphony (RCA Victor)

Odd almost cheesy electronic instruments (the Ondes Martenot), CHECK, Composer with obsessive, bordering on the curious, religious cosmology, CHECK, Disciples in evidence (who *WASN'T* tutored by Messaien), CHECK, Far Eastern strand (Seiji Ozawa conducts here the most famous performance of the picece, twinned with Toru Takemitsu's "November Steps" for good measure), CHECK, Pop Art Sleeve (Robert Indiana's "Love"), CHECK.

14. Count Ossie and The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari: Tales of Mozambique (Dynamic)

Not such a struggle to slip this one in, while the "Grounation" Triple LP might have fitted better (sheer quantity was one of Ra's strong points) this has the advantage of more distinct horn charts, it's not a percussion smorgasbord. Ossie was responsible for the heavy driving drum accompaniment on The Folkes Brother's "Oh Carolina" which distinguishes it from the preceeding Jamaican R&B. Ossie's method of playing is "Burru" a Rasta style of percussion. Lloyd Bradley uses the hit as the birth moment of Reggae.

Duke Ellington visited Count Ossie on his trip to Jamaica. According to the LP's liner notes: "He urged them to tour the world and let others hear their music of Peace and Love." They appeared at the Newport Jazz festival with the pianist Randy Weston too, both of which events strongly tie them to the Jazz tradition. Like alot of the pivotal figures in early Reggae, Coxsone Dodd, The Skatalites etc, Ossie was a Jazz maven. To seal it's status as "Un Ra" check these remarks by one of the band's circle:

"Think about the Creator of the Universe, the one out of whom in whom out of in which we are manifested and moved, think about the Sound-Mind which is the vibrating consequences of the rhythm.

Listen and you'll see this Music which came from Outer-Nothing to Out-Nothing, the Void, in response to the Burning Need for Nothing-Else: for nothing-else will do:

The mystics are two much Black Magic, High Energy, Soulful, Tribal, Solar, Rasta, Tighteous Sounds which totally bombard the Senses and provoke a tidal-wave of Positive-Thoughts.

If Creation is what Conception aspires matter to Be; then the Mystics are the Concious Creators of the Antennae that receive Visions of a more Communal/Tribal Life and transmit these Visions/Hopes into Concrete Realities."

I rest my case ;-)

15. Disney Original Soundtrack: Dumbo (Disney)

Ra's introduction to Disney came at the hands of Hal Wilmer. Wilmer asked Sonny to cover "Pink Elephants on Parade" for the Tribute to Walt Disney's films entitled "Stay Awake." Ra found he could identify with Dumbo, the ungainly, gentle, asphasic individualist and particularly the far eastern imagery found in the "Pink Elephants" sequence itself, of course most notably the pyramids. Here are some screenshots I have artfully hacked off the Dumbo DVD (bit of an interval this):

Ra proceeded to undertake an entire tour as "The Disney Odyssey Arkestra", playing themes from the Disney songbook, and Walt rose to prominence among Ra's pantheon of the divinely inspiring alongside Fletcher Henderson. I'm not entirely sure, but Ra's love of Disney may have inspired "Sleeping Beauty" perhaps my favourite Sun Ra track ever, which still remains unissued.

16. Marion Brown: Afternoon of A Georgia Faun (ECM)

An early early ECM record, before they'd dovetailed into the svelte and vacuous. One of my favourite Ra stories comes not from within the mythology, but outside it. A musician, whose name I can't recall, made a passing comment to the effect that he'd been in Philadelphia and had popped in to the Arkestra's communal dwelling to witness them "bang on cans." It cracked me up anyway, because there is so much earnestness invested in Ra scholarship, at least as much as Ra and his cohorts invested in their painstakingly practised "free" music. But that little comment says so much, throwing a kindly but revealing light on the proceedings in hand. If Ra lived next door to you (or me!) we'd think he was nuts. Harmless, but nuts.

This Marion Brown recording operates in a similar seemingly amateur manner. The title track, a riff on Debussy, is just this. A recording of folk clapping coconuts and whistling. Very atmospheric however and a means, through it's inclusion, for me to avoid talking about free jazz in any greater depth. "Un Ra" covers that turf too, I could have dug out LPs by Francious Tusques, AACM or The Globe Unity Orchestra but I don't really have a stomach for it. Next!

17. Philip Cohran and The Artistic Heritage Ensemble (Hefty)

Which I'd slept on buying, but rushed to pick up for this survey. Don't be slack folks! The original of this would probably set you back a thousand or so dollars, AND it'd be scratchy. Cohran, who received a marvellous extensive write-up in The Wire a couple of years ago, played what he called a Frankiphone, essentially an amplified Mbira or African Thumb Piano. It's an indelible sound. His group ply a deep funk which some commentators have compared to Kool and The Gang, causing me to flash on both the marvellous Kool LP "Love and Understanding", featuring one of my fave rave up tracks "Universal Sound" and also the fact their Michael Ray chose to ditch life with the band to join Ra in the Arkestra. Oh and the Cohran LP has very "June Tyson" vocals courtesy of Patricia Anna Smith.

Funnily enough who do you think was thumbing the bin beside me when I picked up this? Gilles Peterson innit. I'll growing a goatee next.

18. Harry Partch: Petals (CRI)

Another fan of Ancient Philosophy, another Beatnik who treads a single-minded path through the post-war landscape of American music.

19. Eddie Palmieri: Exploration (coco)

Proving once again that deep jazz psychedelia isn't just the province of Afro-American music. It's the B-side you want, specifically "The Mod Scene (Lo Que Pasa Hoy En Dia)" and "Random Thoughts (Pensamientos Desconectados)". In truth the mood invoked is closer to "Bitches Brew" and "In a Silent Way"-era Miles though, like Ra's recordings, Palmieri's electric piano is to the fore and the sleeve evokes a Mayan/Egyptian/Interplanetary agenda.

20. Andrew Hill: Points of Departure (Blue Note)

Neither my favourite Hill (the Blue Note out-takes on "One for One" are unmissable) nor my favourite peak-period Blue Note Free Jazz record (Alfred Lion cut the BEST sounding free jazz with Eric Dolphy's "Out to Lunch", Ornette Coleman's "The Empty Foxhole" and Cecil Taylor's "Conquistador") but still wholly unavoidable. Hill was a mysterious pianist born and raised in Port-au-Prince in Haiti. I've often found the cult of Hill (like Ra a post-Thelonious-Monk Pianist commited to formal innovation) co-existing with Ra's and I've always been keen to hear Hill's "Grassroots" LP.

21. Scriabin: The Poem of Ecstacy (Everest)

Unfortunately I haven't had the time to tease apart Alexander Scriabin's connections with Theosophy, however clearly this Russian Romantic composer was bound up in Ra's mind with the works of Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. If you want to find out more about Blavatsky go here. Scriabin is widely feted for "Prometheus, The Poem of Fire" Scriabin's fifth symphony (from Szwed) "with a chorus (and audience) dressed in white, and an organ which played lights and colours" and "The Mysterium", a piece with a week-long duration which would "literally destroy the world and raise the human race to a higher plane at it's finale." Strictly speaking "The Poem of Ecstacy" is his first deep foray into the devotional and metaphysical, it's wonderfully overwrought, florid, passionate stuff. Just like that sentence.

22. Gil Evans: The Individualism of Gil Evans (Verve)

Another bandleader exploring the possibilities of jazz orchestration, when strictly speaking the Jazz orchestra had no cultural currency. The era of Ellington and Basie, at it's latest in the fifties, was the time when the big bands were "alive." Figures like Ra and Evans, whilst creating brave new sounds, are essentially throwbacks to that golden era. "The Barbara Song" off this is incredible.

And I'll take this opportunity, which I missed when talking about Teo Macero, Miles's other great collaborator to pose the suggestion that the Japanese-Double-LP-era of Davis's ("Get Up With It", "Pangea", "Dark Magus") is (coughs) vibrationally in thrall to early sixites Ra records like "Art Forms and Dimensions of Tomorrow", "Astro-Black" and (of course) "Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy." Discuss.

23. Cedric Im Brooks and The Light of Saba (Honest Jons)

I was recently quite disparaging of this reissue. Silly me. I've had the Saba LP on a CD courtesy of my mate Steve Caruana for a while and never really enjoyed it. This however has a whole LPs extra of material, much of which is the deepest instrumental roots you could dream of. Don't miss the reissue.

Now I get to chasten some sloppy tarts who have been wrongly informing people that Cedric Brooks played with the Arkestra. He didn't. But he DID visit Ra in Philadelphia (maybe at about the time Sonny was working on "Languidity") and witness proceedings:

"We went to Sun Ra, which really got me into the whole kind of vibes, because they were playing jazz, but it was a mixture of all the jazz styles, because they had some really good musicians with them. The energy of the music expressed the philosophy he was talking about. I was very much taken with that, I was over-awed by it. They had a discipline, and actually I was trying to get involved in it, but I had to wait to go through the steps that were necessary.....When I left Philadelphia to come home to Jamaica, when my second daughter was born, I decided to pursue the music in that way of Sun Ra."

24. Hermeto Pascoal: Slaves Mass (Warner)

Physically a freak and a proponent of the electric piano to boot. Notable immediately for the squeezed "Live Pigs" played by Airto Moiera on the title track. Very Ra that. Hermeto cuts a much more impressive dash when seen live. I was lucky to catch him at the Barbican a few years ago. He had a rent-a-band with him, but one or two imported Brazilian soloists. What stuck in my mind, beyond the goofy/charming theatrics in which the entire ensemble play children's toys, was Hermeto recounting a game he and Airto play when they're alone together. They have to guess what kind of sound an object will make when it is struck: a tree, some railings, a discarded tin can. Hermeto explained that an object's sound is it's soul.

25. Ahmed Abdul-Malik: East meets West (RCA Victor)

See also "Jazz Sahara". This one from 1960, years ahead of it's time. Both records recently reissued. This an original (swoon).

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Abyssinia.

Posted by Woebot at January 16, 2004 12:04 AM