The Interstellar Style of Sun Ra (2016)
pitchfork.com
pitchfork.com
I've seen them three times, the last just six months ago. They're the best live band I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of music. Marshall Allen is nearly 100 years old, and he still melts faces when he stands up with his sax. They are the tightest, freest, clearest, most incomprehensible band I've ever seen. One moment they're doing a jazz standard, perfectly clean as glass; the next moment they're tripping right off the rings of Saturn.
If you care about music, make a special effort to see these cats.
It's a dear experience, to feel your mental territory of music, or books, or art, expand outward in that moment. It leaves a lasting impression - or at least for me it does.
Anyways, I did a deep dive on Sun Ra and have collected as much of his music as I can. I've seen the Arkestra two times and hope to at least one more time before Marshall Allen departs this planet (he turns 99 this year).
Crazy story, again I have never done drugs, but I had a very intense dream where I met Frank Zappa and he took me through his warehouse(!) of records and introduced me to all his favorite Sun Ra records. I'll never forget that dream, I woke up energized to listen to all his recommendations.
On a sidenote, i hope the trend of popularizing hard drugs will fade and people will focus again on other means to achieve different state of mind through artistic activities, like live music.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/15k9kf/devo_hired_as...
This won't be a surprise for anyone who knows much about him. Mark Mothersbaugh was a punk/new wave guy (though obviously not exclusively) and most punks had a visceral hatred for disco.
> The earliest known live performance of the song was on Halloween night of 1975, opening for Sun Ra.[3] The released recording of this version is seven minutes long.[3] However, according to a 1997 interview with Mark Mothersbaugh, they performed a half-hour rendition of the song as a joke to annoy the crowd: "We'd play 'Jocko Homo' for 30 minutes, and we wouldn't stop until people were actually fighting with us, trying to make us stop playing the song. We'd just keep going, 'Are we not men? We are Devo!' for like 25 minutes, directed at people in an aggressive enough manner that even the most peace-lovin' hippie wanted to throw fists."[4]
Edit: here's the audio only version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82j12E3cpS4
It probably looked something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcp8osYmU88
There’s a recent book compiling much of the original cover art. Recommended.
Sun Ra: Art on Saturn: The Album Cover Art of Sun Ra's Saturn Label https://a.co/d/7h3J9II
Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23946102 - July 2020 (13 comments)
Space Is the Place (1974) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13304144 - Jan 2017 (7 comments)
He only has a few records, but they are incredibly unique.
Recommendations: “Phil Cohran and the artistic heritage ensemble” and “Armageddon”.
Musically adjacent but maybe more accessible, in this dark funk / hard-bop-acid-jazz realm, I highly recommend "Yo Miles!" https://open.spotify.com/album/6NI2WNLTa5E9J5RKQkL25X?si=CEt...