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Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra: Life Is Splendid (1972) |
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Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals
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Monday, 16 January 2006 10:03 |
Life Is Splendid
Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra
Live at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972
By John Sinclair
Sun Ra & His Arkestra enjoyed more than 40 years of glorious musical fruition, and for every minute of its elongated existence--from its formation as the Herman Blount Octet in the early 1950s until the leader's earthly demise in the early 1990s--the Arkestra blazed a trail across the musical firmament unlike anything that's ever been heard.
Organized by the pianist as a means of realizing his idiosyncratic compositions and nurtured in Chicago in the seond half of the 50s, the Arkestra developed around a solid core formed by several key members, including bassist Ronnie Boykins and saxophonists John Gilmore, Marshall Allen and Pat Patrick.
After five or six very productive years in the Windy City, during which the Arkestra's ever more innovative music was carefully documented in performance by Sun Ra and his visionary business partner, Alton Abraham, Ra and the band resettled in New York City in the winter of 1960-61 and soon began to play a leading role in the city's burgeoning jazz avant-garde.
Sun Ra's startling orchestral music and otherworldly space philosophy were introduced to the jazz world at large by a pair of obscure albums for Transition (1958) and Savoy Records (1960), both of which were issued almost without notice.
Ra met a slightly wider audience with the appearance of three mid-1960s LP releases on ESP-Disk, including the magnificent Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra, Volume 2. At the same time Ra and Alton Abraham set into motion their own record label, El Saturn, and began to issue a steady stream of Sun Ra releases drawn from the Arkestra's archives.
These albums revealed the origins of the composer's musical genius and traced its incredible growth and ever-broadening scope from the off-center bebop "little big band" charts of the early- and mid-1950s through his earliest space-jazz arrangements and their flowering into full-fledged explorations of previously unmapped musical horizons.
Abraham and Ra had been documenting the composer's music in performance by the Arkestra almost since its inception, and the hard-to-get, bizarrely-packaged Saturn albums with titles like Super-Sonic Jazz, We Travel the Spaceways, Interstellar Low Ways and Angels & Demons At Play soon began to attract the attention of adventurous listeners all over the world.
By the early 1970s Sun Ra & the Arkestra--now working under a variety of titles utilized by Ra to help define the specific function he had in mind for each musical permutation had been introduced to enthusiastic European audiences, although the U.S. jazz establishment seemed forever to regard Ra & the Arkestra--under whatever guise--as some sort of freakish oddity unworthy of serious consideration.
During their decade in New York City, which ended when the Arkestra moved en masse to Philadelphia around 1971-72, Chicago veterans John Gilmore, Marshall Allen and Pat Patrick were joined by a wild assortment of adventurous players and a vocal ensemble, the Space Ethnic Voices, led by the incredible June Tyson.VV Seasoned by daily rehearsals and regular performances at places like Slug's Saloon on the lower east side, the Arkestra was now fully skilled at bringing the composer's revolutionary musical concepts to vivid life before the public.
By the fall of 1972 Sun Ra & the Arkestra were operating at full strength. Now Ra was able to reveal the full extent of his compositional genius and utilize the Arkestra to unveil the cosmic philosophical underpinnings of his music, presented in a swirl of brightly colored costumes, leaping dancers, exotic percussion choirs and space vocal chorales, daring instrumental excursions and precisely executed ensemble passages.
The best of the Arkestra's performances during this period unfolded into one continuous multi-media exposition of the music and space philosophy of its leader, moving seamlessly from beginning to end under Ra's direction to create a splendorous tapestry of sound and sight, the likes of which had never been seen or heard before.
This is the ensemble which met what was its largest American audience to date on Friday, September 8, 1972, the opening night of the first Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival.
At the Ann Arbor festival Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra took the stage following stellar performances by the Seigel-Schwall Blues Band, Detroit's Contemporary Jazz Quintet, Junior Walker & The All Stars and the great Howlin' Wolf to close out the evening with a spectacular offering that thrilled the ecstatic crowd of some 12,000 music lovers.
Here at Otis Spann Memorial Field in Ann Arbor Ra unveiled his latest creation, the sensational Space Is The Place suite which may now be heard--almost in its entirety--on this compact disk. (The opening sections are not available because a proper mix could not be achieved until several minutes into the performance.)
The music unfolds with seamless clarity and brilliant logic from beginning to end, modulating from theme to theme and mood to mood without a moment's lapse of focus and moving the crowd to respond with unprecedented enthusiasm, so much so that we can hear a vast chorus of people gleefully chanting the composer's name for several minutes after the performance had ended.
This wholly unanticipated display of mass acclaim for the heretofore obscure bandleader and his wildly unorthodox Arkestra provided one of the highest points of my experience as a concert producer. The greatness of Sun Ra and his potential for reaching a greatly expanded audience of popular music lovers had been demonstrated beyond contradiction, and the visionary composer was well on his way to establishing his ensemble, in the words of Mark Steuve, as the Ellington Orchestra of the second half of the 20th century.
The 1972 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival was recorded in its entirety by Jimmie Douglass for Atlantic Records and co-produced by Douglass, Michael Cuscuna and Tunc Erim under the supervision of Mark Meyerson. The original 16-track masters are presumed to have been destroyed in a warehouse fire, although several segments of the Arkestra's performance were mixed and edited by Alton Abraham and this writer to produce a track titled "Life Is Splendid" for release on the Atlantic double-LP compilation of music from the 1972 Festival released in 1973.
The music on this compact disc was digitally transferred and remastered from the 2-track stereo masters recorded simultaneously with the 16-track masters as reference tapes. These tapes have been precariously preserved and lugged by the producer from residence to residence for more than a quarter of a century.
Now they are finally finding the light of day through the release of this CD, and it gives me extreme pleasure beyond belief to present the astral music of Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra in concert at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival on that lovely Friday night in September 1972.
Tighten up your gravity belts and hold on tight--you're about to take a musical trip through the galaxies to worlds beyond, where Life Is Splendid and Space Is the Place indeed.
--Cleveland/Detroit/New Orleans
October 13-26, 1999/
New Orleans
November 2, 1999
(c) 1999, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
Sun Ra & His Solar-Myth Arkestra: Life Is Splendid
Live at the 1972 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival
Sun Ra, piano, space organ, keyboards, lead vocals; Ahk-Tal Ebah, trumpet, flugelhorn, vocals; Lamont McClamb, trumpet; Marshall Allen, Danny Davis, alto saxophone & flute; Larry Worthington, alto saxophone; John Gilmore, tenor saxophone, percussions; Pat Patrick, baritone saxophone; Danny Thompson, baritone saxophone & flute; Leroy Taylor, bass clarinet; Lex Humphries, Alzo Wright, drums; Stanley Morgan, Russell Branch, percussions; Robert Underwood, Harry Richards, space drums; June Tyson, lead vocals; Space Ethnic Voices: Judith Holton, Cheryl Bank, Ruth Wright, vocals. Recorded in performance at Otis Spann Memorial Field, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Friday, September 8, 1972.
[1] Enlightenment [2] Love in Outer Space [3] Space is the Place (includes the subsequent Gilmore tenor, Ra organ and moog solos)
[4] Discipline 27-II/ > What Planet is This? > Life is Splendid > Immeasurable
[5]Watusi
[6] Outer Spaceways Incorporated
Produced by John Sinclair for Big Chief Productions
All these compositions can be credited to Sun Ra, except for: Enlightenment (Dotson-Ra) and Watusi (Pitts-Merrill)
Festival produced by John Sinclair & Peter Andrews for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation. Recording engineered by Jimmy Douglass and produced by Jimmy Douglass, Michael Cuscuna & Tunc Erim under the supervision of Mark Meyerson and with the assistance of John Sinclair & John Ryan for Rainbow Productions. Digitally transferred from original stereo master tapes & edited by Patrick Boisell.
(c)(p) 1972, 1999, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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