10 songs to make (some) sense of Sun Ra - part two
Last week I wrote about the first five songs in my guide to Sun Ra. This week, things get chilled, pop, remade and live in part two.
Sun Ra and his Arkestra - Door of the Cosmos (1979)
AKA something chilled.
“Chill” is not often a word you would associate with Sun Ra and his Arkestra - even at their most laid-back the band tend towards the unruly and chaotic in a way that is more likely to interrupt your sleep than lull you into submission.
But Sleeping Beauty, another 1979 album to be taken from the band’s Variety Arts sessions, very much lives up to its title. The title track is like an underwater ballad of infinite wonder; Springtime Again, which opens the record, is jazz as ambient drift, a snooze in a hammock at the collapsing edge of the universe; and Door of the Cosmos perfectly circles the square between pop, funk, jazz and ambient music. If UFO is the party at Variety Arts, then Door of the Cosmos is the after-after party, limbs ever so slightly trembling, minds wandering and eyes itching, as the brain tries to work out whether it might actually already be asleep.
Sun Ra and His Outer Space Arkestra - Nuclear War (1982)
AKA something pop.
Well not really pop - although Sun Ra was apparently convinced that this seven-minute, expletive-laden song was going to be a hit and suggested so to Columbia Records. No - Nuclear War is more pop à la Sun Ra, which combines a perfectly languid piano line with a bustling drum beat and a fantastic call-and-response vocal line, whose easy catchiness seems utterly at odds with the song’s dire subject matter - sample “Nuclear War / It's a motherf***er, don't you know / if they push that button, your ass gotta go” - and yet works perfectly.
In fact, I’ve always thought this song the perfect response to the utter absurdity of nuclear war, a threat not just to one country or continent but humanity in its entirety that our leaders still seem to play around with, as if it might, in some way, make logical sense. Sun Ra’s brilliantly relaxed song is the sound of ordinary citizens throwing up their hands in the face of such a ridiculous threat, as if to say, ‘Well, what can we do? Might as well enjoy a bit of music while we can still have a dance.’ And that seems perfectly legitimate to me. Its brilliantly named parent album A Fireside Chat With Lucifer is utterly fantastic, too.
See also: Interplanetary Music, two and a half minutes of utterly addictive hooks.
Sun Ra - Why Go To The Moon? / It's After The End Of The World (Live at Fondation Maeght, 3 Aug. 1970)
AKA something live.
Like most things in the Sun Ra world, there is an abundance of live recording for fans to enjoy - around 60 live albums, if Wikipedia is to be believed. As such, I have no idea which is the best. But the one I have listened to most - and the one that Gilles Peterson tips - is Nuits de la Fondation Maeght, a two volume album recorded in 1970 in St Paul-de-Vence in Provence, which has recently been re-released by Strut as a six-vinyl box set that takes the album up to 47 songs.
It’s a hell of a lot to take in - about four hours in total - and there is a great deal of drift, skronk and atonal experimentation among the more closely defined songs. But it’s definitely worth giving the album a go, if only to get an idea of how ludicrously brilliant it would be to see Sun Ra play live on two consecutive night in a medieval French town.
And if you only have time for one song, then I favour the medley of Why Go To The Moon? / It's After The End Of The World, both, I believe, unreleased at the time that the Arkestra played the Fondation. The result is brilliantly sassy, a fabulous call-and-response vocal front and centre over a wandering bass line, swing drums and prominent hand claps and tambourine shakes, like a cosmically inspired Gospel service, drunk on ecstatic conviction and rampant energy.
Sun Ra Arkestra - Chopin (2022)
AKA something new.
Sun Ra died in 1993 but the Arkestra has continued on, led first by saxophonist John Gilmore, who joined the band in 1953, and then by Marshall Allen, who joined in 1958. You can still see them live, some 70 years after their formation, and they are still keeping things weird and wonderful, very much how Sun Ra would have wanted.
They’ve produced new music too, with four studio albums to their name since 1999, the most recent of which Lights On a Satellite, came out in 2024. It’s 2022’s Living Sky that has really stuck with me, though. The album tends towards the slightly more traditional, laid-back but melodic side of the Sun Ra universe, albeit with space for a lumbering groove like Night of the Living Sky, and the standard really is amazing. Opening track Chopin, which is based on Chopin’s Prelude in A Major, is especially gorgeous, the sound of skittering stars on a hot summer night, which could have fit onto Sleeping Beauty without too much difficulty, praise indeed.
See also: New Dawn, Marshall Allen’s debut solo album, released two days after his 100th birthday and bubbling with elegant life.
Sun Ra - Saga of Resistance (Theo Parrish remix) (2003)
AKA Something remade.
Does Sun Ra need to be re-made, remixed, covered and re-done? Probably not. But that hasn’t stopped bands as diverse as the MC5 (Starship), Yo La Tengo (Nuclear War) and Ezra Collective (Space is the Place), giving it a go.
Remixes of Sun Ra are rarer - because, frankly, where the hell do you go? - and I’m not even sure if this Theo Parrish track counts as one, given that (as far as I know) the only Sun Ra work called Saga of Resistance is a poem and this track (which originally appeared on the 2003 tribute album Sun Ra Dedication: The Myth Lives On) is sometimes billed as a Theo Parrish tribute to Sun Ra, sometimes as a remix and sometimes as a Theo Parrish original.
To deepen the confusion, there are apparently two versions of this, the 13-minute long Promo Version 1, which has some barely intelligible, spoken-word on it, and Promo Version 2, which doesn’t. My guess, if I had to, is that Theo Parrish used the Sun Ra poem as the basis for his track, while also sampling various other examples of Sun Ra’s musical work. If anyone knows better, please get in touch.
But maybe we shouldn’t let my confusion get in the way of what is a glimmering, forward-looking appreciation of Sun Ra’s that takes fragments of the great man’s sometimes abrasive musical adventures - in this case a wild brass trill - and turns it into a slinky but dusty lo-fi house, its force of focus a reminder of the abundant greatness that could be found almost casually dispersed within Sun Ra’s work.
PS I have compiled an Apple Music playlist of some of my Sun Ra favourites.
PPS I would love to know your Sun Ra favourites, in the comments.