Saturday Night Traxx_Sun Ra edition_030621
New Music: "Dancefloor" Sun Ra and His Arkestra, EABS, Mike Huckaby, iPhupho L'ka Biko, Pino Palladino & Blake Mills
This installment of Saturday Night Traxx was initiated in late January/early February, when I got lost in the deep end of a musical constellation that’s home to one of the 20th century’s most prolific recording artists. As long as I’ve known who Sun Ra was, which was years before when I first saw him and the Arkestra live in April of 1991, I have been surrounded by Sun Ra takes; most of these “interpretations” of his music and philosophy focused on the eccentricity, but it was weird how instantly at home I felt with the Arkestra’s music me, almost from the get-go. It seemed exactly what it advertised itself to be: galactic swing music. Yes, some of it was more abrasive, especially when Ra would start pummeling his electric keyboards, or the multiple horns would lay out in full throttle. Then, the noise emanating from the stage was fierce. But as somebody who’d settled into Sonic Youth circa Sister (and a spine-tingling feedback loop at CB’s) and was wrapping his head around classic big bands swinging (at the time, Mingus’ “Haitian Fight Song,” Goodman’s live “Life Goes to a Party” and Ellington at Newport were receiving a lot of my attention), his space seemed like a helluva place; and not necessarily buying into established Sun Ra takes seemed a wise thing to do.
Thankfully, the takes that have been proliferating in recent years are less about exoticism than a recognition that some of the proclamations by the man who abandoned his Earthly existence as Sonny Blount from Birmingham, Alabama and signed on as Le Sonny Ra from Saturn, were not wild and wacky but prophetic and profound. It’s been especially heartening to see Ra approach the canon from multiple sides— increasingly recognized as one of last century’s finest freedom-music ramblers, a muse and a collaborator for some of the Black Arts Movement greatest literary figures, a multi-disciplinary creative thinker whose ideas about universal consciousness fit with Zen Buddhism, the psychedelic renaissance, emergent strategies, and holistic self-empowerment. (One of the institutions that’s done a great job elevating Ra to his rightful status as an artist ahead of his time, the Chicago gallery Corbett Vs. Dempsey, has a new exhibit opening in late March, “The Substitute Words,” devoted to his poetry, and is publishing a few of his books of verses.) What were once strictly musical fascinations have grown into, twenty years into the 21st century, life-changing and -affirming decrees; a different way of looking at the world, and certainly helpful for responding to situations such as the pandemic and quarantine.
So, does it bang? Oh yes, it bangs…depending on how you you approach “bangin’,” and what you‘re listening to. 27 years after his passing, Sun Ra’s beyond prolific recordings continue to be a forever flowing fountain—now being organized into a library. My aforementioned “deep end” meant listening to all Sun Ra Arkestra music that’s been released or reissued since 2017, which added up to more than 50 titles. Sifting through it, I kept thinking about contexts in which playing this music out would work; that’s how these pieces came to the fore. They’re hardly the only Sun Ra dancefloor jams—for instance, the soon-to-be-again-reissued Lanquidity is a stone-cold groove record. But these are the ones that stuck in my ear, or came to mind during the recent exercise, presented here in chronological order.
“The Sun Man Speaks” is a 1959 Arkestra R&B bop that already points to where Rocket Number Nine was heading. (If you read the biographies—highly recommend John Szwed’s classic Space is the Place but also William Sites’ Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City —Sonny Blount was bound for outer space since his late teens/early 20s, at least in his mind.) Sun Ra’s working 1950s in a music-rich Chicago meant integrating his cosmology into the recordings of all the artists whom he was producing, engineering, arranging for, and playing with; and local shouter Yochanan was the recipient of some of Sunny’s most anarchic work. If you like rock and roll and outer space and chaos, all of these sides are lo-fi bombs of the finest order, with key future Arkestrarians playing. This one is part-outer space hero story, part-Jesus parable.
More R&B goodness, now of the ‘60s Southern soul kind. For a long time, this album was a collectors item of the highest order for Sun Ra heads, a kind of open secret about an unlikely meeting between elements of American popular culture and Black creativity of the time. The gig was a nameless faceless 1966 session (hence the made-up artist name) to make a product on the theme of the hit TV show, Batman. The producer was Tom Wilson, best known as Columbia Records’ in-house producer who helped make classic Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel albums, but later also recorded the Velvet Underground, Mothers of Invention and Soft Machine. (He rose to prominence as a jazz producer, and worked with Ra in Chicago in the mid-’50s.) The musicians were members of the Arkestra, but also of Al Kooper’s Blues Project. And while some of the music is directly Batman-inspired (the surfy garage-rock theme song, a couple of reimagined score sequences), most of the album simply adds Batman and Robin-related titles to rollicking instrumentals that sound like the hits of the day. “The Bat Cave” could be, essentially, a cover of a Booker T & the MGs song about an onion, rough and tumble, organ-drive, tenor solo, guitar solo. Banging! And hardly the only one on this record.
This languorous epic from a deeply under-appreciated 1972 album named for it, is a swaying showcase for the Arkestra as a swing orchestra, and for the poet-philosopher-trickster side of Ra. At a time a moment when the band seemed to be approaching a peak in its atonal group-play, with Ra increasingly incorporating electric keys to stir the chaos, “Discipline 27-II Parts 1-4” stays away from these elements. What you get is a kind of call-and-response, spoken-word duet between Sunny and June Tyson (who continuously switch lead roles); and intermittent bonus mayhem initiated by echoes of female vocalists, and interjections from all the horns. It’s a party and a salon and an acid test, what starts out as an exploration of the universe’s oneness and the frailties of man’s world, ends up making fun of the whole damn business: “Where's your sense of humor? Let's all have a good laugh! Come on and laugh with us! Laugh at yourself! Isn't it ridiculous? This thing you call life.” The Arkestra’s horns laugh right along. As they should.
Like the saxophonists John Gilmore and Marshall Allen, June Tyson was a long-serving bright star within the Arkestra’s constellation, bringing not just the rare female energy to the proceedings, but a tone of levity to Sunny’s at-times difficult dialectics. (If you played the entirety of “Discipline 27,” where she is his steady prodding foil for 24 minutes, you already get it.) The 2019 compilation Saturnian Queen Of The Sun Ra Arkestra is chock-full of fantastic Tyson moments—her interpretive sly knowingness of what may come off as lyrical tomfoolery, mixed with a classic “standards singer” delivery. For my money, nowhere is this more apparent than on the 1972 version of the (by-then) Arkestra favorite “Outer Spaceways Incorporated,” which flies with more pizazz for her than it ever did when Sunny or an all-male chorus sang these words (“If you find Earth boring, just the same old same thing…”) previously. What opens as a solo synthesizer lava flow, ends up sounding like a swinging advert for an airline, a rom-com kiss-off, a moment of gleeful excitement, but with free jazz horns fighting Tyson for central space—and losing.
This rollicking piano boogie comes from 1979’s wondrous, under-appreciated (see the theme) album, God Is More Than Love Can Ever Be, the only piano trio session that Sunny released during his career. Flanked by bassist Hayes Burnett and drummer Samarai Celestial (Eric Walker), it both gives into and undercuts the piano trio format, endlessly tuneful and grooving like a MF’er, even when it’s at times drifting off the rails. Though here, the music never too far. “Magic City Blue” doesn’t actually fall apart until the very end, when Ra sabotages what was great blues piano funk, Burnett burbling with propulsion, and Celestial running all around the pocket. Ra’s piano that is in full control and out front, sometimes tickling in stride, at others stuck in triple loops, at others locking all the three players in. Though never for long. This is glorious fun.
By far, the song that most sent me back into the outer spaceways to again consider Sun Ra as a figure of mothership reconnections and dancefloor epiphanies is 1979’s “UFO.” (I touched upon this in the last Saturday Night Traxx.) And that song’s got versions, as a great piece like that inevitably will. The spark for my “UFO” obsession actually took place last fall, and was not generated by the Arkestra but by EABS, a Polish (!!! go ahead, sue me) sextet, from their excellent 2020 album, Discipline of Sun Ra. It’s a jazz record made by hip-hop generation European players, so their version centralizes the funk, cutting up and streamlining the original’s elements into a sleek machine (it’s essentially a a house track here), with a long sample of a philosophical reading by the great man himself. A deeper dive reminded me that another great take on “UFO” was executed in 2015 by the late great Detroit producer Mike Huckaby, whose “Reel-to-Reel Edit” of the song cleans up the original On Jupiter version, boosting the sonics, filling out the track. That 12” is going for somewhat obscene prices on the vinyl resale site—but I can’t say it’s not fine as hell.
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There’s a great compilation of current South African jazz out there right now called Indaba Is. It features a rotating cast of young(ish) Johannesburg players trying to give broader consideration to the historic, spiritual and groove natures of the local, current music. One of its stand-out tracks is the debut recording by iPhupho L’ka Biko (Biko’s Dreamscape), a kind of Xhosa gospel improvisational quintet (but often expands its ranks) founded by young bassist Nhlanhla Ngqaqu in the service of calling on the music’s rich tradition to try making something for the future. “UThixo Ukhona” is their second released recording, it means “God Exists” and it is one of the most incredible songs I have heard in a long time, built on a naturally spiritual SA melody, reminding me of how Abdullah Ibrahim and Johnny Dyani effortlessly invoked the past to create exquisite, timeless modernity. It quickly explodes into something genuinely, emotionally anthemic, with many voices and horns rising together towards a common destination, mixing sadness and hope like I haven’t heard in a minute.
There’s a pretty unique record on it’s way from Pino Palladino, a powerhouse bassist immortalized by his starring role on D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Black Messiah, and Blake Mills, a producer/multi-instrumentalist-for-hire for numerous high profile country and roots-minded rock artists. From a distance, their collaboration, involving a diverse cast of talented players (Andrew Bird, Chris Dave, Marcus Strickland, Sam Gendel, Larry Goldings) can appear to be a potential hodge-podge. But damn! if Notes With Attachments doesn’t do the sum of its parts incredible justice, heavy on groove syncopation, dubby smears, beautifully weird soul abstractions, and most of all, tunes! Multiple great songs are floating through it—“Ekuté” seems the most Traxx-y (especially this week), with its Afrobeat overtones, dirty minimalism (is that Dave’s clavinet?), and Strickland’s bass clarinet. Killer record.