I'm a little late to this party but who cares because it's so rad it doesn't matter. The official Sun Ra archivist Michael D. Anderson (aka the good doctor) did this wonderful 14 hour retrospective of Sun Ra's career for something he called the ESP Sun Ra Radio tribute. This is in anticipation of last years release of 21 newly remastered albums for the Sun Ra centennial.
The fantastic blog Adventure-Equation generously uploaded and made this radio series available.
Part 1 (Notes/Download)
Part 2 (Notes/Download)
Part 3 (Notes/Download)
Part 4 (Notes/Download)
Part 5 (Notes/Download)
Part 6 (Notes/Download)
Note: I don't think the above download links are valid anymore. Here is the download link off of the ESP website.
Jay 1-20-16
WNYC Sun Ra Tribute joined by Michael D Anderson and Irwin Chusid
Another rare performance from 1972 at Slug's Saloon in NYC has just been released featuring Sun Ra and June Tyson. The quality is amazing,
Friday, February 27, 2015
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Trey's Arkestra
Back in April of 1996 coming off the heels of the legendary Madison Square Garden New Years run, Trey Anastasio dove deep into the world of improv enlisting a who’s who of jamband musicians as well as members of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. The project was called Surrender to the Air. The group only played two shows on April 1 and April 2 at The Academy of Music in New York City. All of the music was improvised and allowed to go anywhere. Trey describes the project:
It was very loose. Everybody was just set up in the room, and you’d just come and go as you please. Sometimes it broke down to just two people. Most of the session was spent doing free stuff. [But, he adds,] The sound I wanted was free form and the structure I wanted was structure. It was basically a matter of figuring how to get both of those things. The problem that I don’t like about most free-form things is that it meanders. And to my ear, this doesn’t meander; it has direction all the time. It keeps going down a course.
The most interesting musician in these sessions is the incredible Marshall Allen. He is now the leader of Sun Ra’s Arkestra and has been in the band since 1958. Trumpeter Michael Ray and vibraphonist Damon Choice are also featured prominently in these sessions. The Arkestra of course are absolute masters of their craft performing art for art’s sake. Trey modeled this project after the Arkestra. Around this time Trey said of Sun Ra: “I think he was the pinnacle, he was as good as it got. His values remained pure for his entire life, and there's something to be said for that.”
This occasion wasn’t the first collaboration between Arkestra members. On December 2 1994 at UC Davis Michael Ray sat in amongst the Giant Country horns for the better part of the 2nd set. Gumbo, from A Live One is from this show. Marshall Allen sat in with Trey on August 2, 2001 on the tune Push On Til the Day. Caravan from the UC Davis show and Allen’s portion from the Trey show are enclosed on this podcast.
Also featured on this show is Phish’s only ever Sun Ra cover of Carefree from Purple Dragon studios in Atlanta on April 26, 1994. I also put a really weird Sun Ra version of Carefree. The Arkestra was always good at randomly playing weird versions of songs, which in the true jamband spirit makes the shows that circulate truly interesting.
The rest of the audience recordings are excerpts from the two nights. Don’t think Trey jams enough anymore? Check this out, it’s all they do. But of course there’s no ego and no one person dominating the improv, it is truly group improv and goes off in some really cool places. Listen for the space chords where it goes to group chaos and then on to the next idea. That was a common Arkestra tool.
0:00:00 Intro
0:06:42 Caravan 12-2-94 UC Davis CA Phish
0:13:25 Carefree 4-26-94 Purple Dragon Studios Phish
0:23:47 Nuclear War>Carefree 7-2-83 Knittelfeld Austria Sun Ra Omniverse Arkestra
0:34:45 Push on Till the Day 8-2-01 Mann Center Philadelphia Trey Anastasio Band
0:40:43 Surrender to the Air 4-2-96 Academy of Music NYC
1:26:43 Surrender to the Air 4-1-96 Academy of Music NYC
Surrender to the Air musicians:
Trey Anastasio - guitar
Jon Fishman - drums
Bob Gullotti - drums
Oteil Burbridge - bass
John Medeski - organ
Michael Ray - trumpet
Marshall Allen - saxophone
Marc Ribot - guitar
Damon Choice - vibraphone/keyboards
James Harvey - trombone
Kofi Burbridge - flute
The 2nd set of the 2nd night has Page McConnell on keys.
Check out this episode!
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Review: The Execution of Sun Ra
Thomas
Stanley’s book, The Execution of Sun Ra:
The Mysterious Tale of a Dark Body Sent to Earth to Usher in an Unprecedented
Era of Cosmic Regeneration and Happiness Volume II, delves deep into the
complicated theories and pronouncements Sun Ra was famous for. This is by no
means an introduction to Sun Ra and his work or a biography. The best part of
the book is Stanley’s first hand account of hanging out and being a fan of the
Arkestra. He offers a unique perspective and knows the Sun Ra mythos well
offering fresh engaging analysis of Sun Ra’s music and ideas.
The way that
Stanley imagines Sun Ra’s musical legacy is of particular interest. The
Arkestra rehearsed and recorded tunes that have never been released or
performed publicly. Stanley claims that he’s:
Seen Marshall Allen, a pair of spectacles hanging from his nose, pull cassettes from a large plastic bag full of similar, hastily labeled, recordings made, I presume, during the hundreds (thousands?) of hours of rehearsals in the Philly rowhouse. There is more than one large bag like this.The artifacts are all there. Stanley compares Sun Ra’s musical legacy as being different from Hendrix and Marley since there is still new Sun Ra music that you can hear the Arkestra play due to all of the sheet music and rehearsal tapes left behind that were never played live. Arkestra member Michael Ray confirms the so-called secret music of Sun Ra:
We always had new music to play all the time. We really never played the real music in concert—Sun Ra had so much stuff that we would rehearse but didn’t even play live, because he’d say, ‘I’m just putting this out for people to steal stuff from,’ and he’d keep a lot of it from even being played in public at all. Suitcases full.
Sun Ra’s
musical legacy offers not only new music for listeners but lessons in
composition from transcribing the cassettes and understanding the sheet music
left behind. Of course, Stanley describes it more poetically: “A pharaoh’s
ransom of potential future releases hidden in the miles and miles of tape that
Sun wrapped around our planet like copper wire in an electric pickup.”
Stanley
confronts Sun Ra’s declarations denouncing death and his lifelong asexuality
while attempting to contextualize Sun Ra’s reasoning. He also defines certain
Sun Ra isms such as Sun Ra’s vision of Alter Destiny, his: “construct for a
posthuman future that excels beyond either our present condition or our skewed
vision of progress.” If Alter Destiny was the broader term that Sun Ra applied
to his unique vision, the method he used to develop this vision was Myth Science.
From a discussion with Jac Jacson Stanley describes myth as: “anything that
could not be proven true or false and as such, in this bizarrely suspended
state of quantum epistemology, myths necessarily have a potent effect on the
more definite facts of social history:”
The myth is the seemingly false and the seemingly impossible. The borders of the rim of myth are vast and nonexistent because there are no limits to the imaginated realm ideas of myth. It is a challenging frontier. (Sun Ra)
A lot of
theoretical ruminating and ideas are presented in the book including sound as
matter and the idea that God was hijacked from nature in a spiritual
“God-jail” at Gobekli Tepe. Thomas makes the inversion that, “Early worship
creates the necessity for agriculture. NOT the other way around.” This leads to
the Sun Ra tie-in, “if liberation atheism seeks to free man from God, Sun Ra’s
Myth Science conceals a timely plot to free God from man.” Stanley riffs a lot
like this in the same way that Sun Ra would. Sometimes he meanders too far when
describing things like the obscure deathless “jellyfish-like” Turritopsis nutricula. It always gets
back on point with grand summations like:
“Rather than a lifestyle, Sun Ra was modeling a mode of existence that deftly renegotiated the pressures of normative society in such a way that, against all odds, something novel, even miraculous, certainly something legendary, if not entirely mythic, was able to take place.”
Or:
Sun Ra’s life, his myth-science, his dream media, encompassed and was greater than his music, his writing, his teaching, his circus; it was shared with us as a seed-crystal for (re)creation of order, another large play of human intelligence, creativity, and love worked out through a reshuffling, refreshing, reimagining of the possibilities inherent in human bodies in time and a place (space) to act. We have excelled at the building, rearrangement and destruction (but not disposal) of things, and the vanguard medium of Myth Science is sound. This sound is real, vibrational, psychocymatic force, the individual and collective result of which may well be such radical departures in human economy, politics, identity, and communication that if we envision such large changes in what we do (agenda) as being acted out by the current version of what we are, we’ll retard our transformation.
The Execution of Sun Ra is an overall highly
entertaining book for the knowledgeable Sun Ra fan. Some of the best parts of
the book are stories from Arkestra members like saxophonist Danny Ray Thompson's
account of the Arkestra’s visit to an underground Egyptian tomb where
everything went black, or the claim of Sun Ra having a live beetle with a
string leash attached to its neck crawling around Sun Ra’s chest as some sort of
scarab. Imagining exploring an Egyptian tomb with Sun Ra is incredibly
appealing to any Sun Ra fan as is the couple of UFO stories thrown in there as
well. There is also an extensive sources listed section, an “Immeasurable Mix
Tape,” and a transcribed interview that Stanley did with Sun Ra in 1990. This
book is a definite must read for any Sun Ra fan.
This Spotify track is one of three of a random rehearsal. I'm pretty sure an excerpt of this is from the 1980 Joyful Noise documentary.
Monday, February 9, 2015
Gonzo Degenerate
To commemorate 10 years gone without the good doctor Hunter S. Thompson, PHC is releasing a series of talks and rare interviews with Thompson. The first is a raucous Q&A session from November 1, 1977 at UC Auditorium in Boulder Colorado. One of the big themes that kept being touched on was degeneracy. Hunter at one point paraphrases a question saying, “How do I maintain as a degenerate?” To which he quickly chatters something about sleeping little and running fast. Thompson gets annoyed towards the end of the talk but still manages to offer interesting insight such as conceding that for Thompson, the American Dream in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was writing the great American novel. He responds to a question about how to avoid jail with, “I never assume that anyone around me is anything but a potential menace.” The other dominant issue that keeps coming up is Thompson refuting people’s attributions of things he said in the past. He says he never said it or that he was lying if he did say it. This is curious in light of the recent Brian Williams controversy. Thompson built credibility around verbal ambiguity. His great works such as The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved and The Great Shark Hunt are works of art using poetic license to get at the real core of truth.
Thompson lived and died on his own terms. He killed himself February 20, 2005. When I heard of the news the next day, I did what any self-respecting Thompson fan would by buying and drinking a pint of 101 proof Wild Turkey with a friend. Thompson was reintroduced to another generation with the commercial success of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I was definitely of that crowd, and it sparked my interest in American politics and American History and especially how it relates to the counterculture. This all happened right around 2000, a time I assert was the beginning of a second wave of 60s style counterculturalism for lack of a better term. People are hungry to expand their consciousness and the taboos surrounding illegal substances such as marijuana and psychedelics are dissolving.
The next round of talks includes an interview complete with gunfire, peacock wails and deep discussions of journalism in Hunters home in Woody Creek Colorado.
Hunter S. Thompson
UC Auditorium
Boulder,CO
11/01/1977
source: SBD>??>SHN
01 Intro, American Dream, Tex Coalson 06:56
02 Nixon and Football, Vietnam Books 11:29
03 Tom Wolfe 14:48
04 Trudeau, Running For Office 19:36
05 Rockafellar, Tri-Lateral Comm. 25:34
06 Rush, Eldridge Cleever 29:55
07 VD, Disco & Rolling Stone 35:45
08 World Series, MK - Ultra 39:42
09 Kesey, Canada 43:52
10 Evil As Nixon?, Uganda, Degeneracy 49:24
11 Steadman, Gonzo 53:44
12 More Kesey, Avoiding Jail 56:20
13 Silver Platter, The Slide 60:15
14 Carter Argument 62:49
15 Drug Question, Drunk And Loud 67:31
16 Three Wishes, Fascist 72:52
17 Grateful Dead 73:34
What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?
KETCHUM, IDAHO
"That poor old man. He used to walk out there on the road in the evenings. He was so frail and thin and old-looking that it was embarrassing to see him. I was always afraid a car would hit him, and that would have been an awful way for him to go. I was tempted to go out and tell him to be careful, and I would have if it had been anyone else. But with Hemingway it was different."
The neighbor shrugged and glanced at Ernest Hemingway's empty house, a comfortable looking chalet with a big pair of elk horns over the front door. It is built on a hillside looking down on the Big Wood River, and out across the valley at the Sawtooth Mountains. A mile or so away, in a small graveyard at the north end of town, is Hemingway's simple grave, lying in the afternoon shadow of Baldy Mountain and the Sun Valley ski runs.
Beyond Baldy are the high pastures of the Wood River National Forest, where thousands of sheep graze in the summer, tended by Basque sheepherders from the Pyrenees. All winter long the grave is covered with deep snow, but in the summer tourists come out and take pictures of each other standing beside it. Last summer there was a problem with people taking chunks of earth for souvenirs.
When news of his death made headlines in 1961 there must have been other people besides myself who were not as surprised by the suicide as by the fact that the story was date-lined Ketchum, Idaho. What was he doing living there? When had he left Cuba, where most people assumed he was working, against what he knew was his last deadline, on the long-promised Big Novel?
The newspapers never answered those questions -- not for me, at any rate -- so it was with a feeling of long-restless curiosity that I came, last week, up the long bleak road to
Ketchum, over the drainage divide between the Magic and the Wood River valleys, through Shoshone and Bellevue and Hailey -- Ezra Pound's hometown -- past Jack's Rock Shop on U.S. 93, and into Ketchum itself, population 783.
Anybody who considers himself a writer or even a serious reader cannot help but wonder just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive chord in America's most famous writer. He had been coming here off and on since 1938, until finally, in 1960, he bought a home just outside of town, and, not incidentally a 10-minute drive from Sun Valley, which is so much a part of Ketchum that they are really one and the same.
The answers might be instructive -- not only as a key to Hemingway, but to a question he often pondered, even in print. "We do not have great writers," he explains to the Austrian in Green Hills of Africa. "Something happens to our good writers at a certain age. . . You see we make our writers into something very strange. . . We destroy them in many ways." But Hemingway himself never seemed to discover in what way he was being "destroyed," and so he ever understood how to avoid it.
Even so, he knew something had gone wrong with both himself and his writing, and after a few days in Ketchum you get a feeling that he came here for exactly that reason. Because it was here, in the years just before and after World War II, that he came to hunt and ski and raise hell in the local pubs with Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor and all the other celebrities who came to Sun Valley when it still loomed large on cafe society's map of diversions.
Those were "the good years," and Hemingway never got over the fact that they couldn't last. He was here with his third wife in 1947, but then he settled in Cuba and 12 years went by before he came again -- a different man this time, with yet another wife, Mary, and a different view of the world he had once been able "to see clear and as a whole."
Ketchum was perhaps the only place in his world that had not changed radically since the good years. Europe had been completely transformed, Africa was in the process of drastic upheaval, and finally even Cuba blew up around him like a volcano. Castro's educators taught the people that "Mr. Way" had been exploiting them, and he was in no mood in his old age to live with any more hostility than was necessary.
Only Ketchum seemed unchanged, and it was here that he decided to dig in. But there were changes here too; Sun Valley was no longer a glittering, celebrity-filled winter retreat for the rich and famous, but just another good ski resort in a tough league. "People were used to him here," says Chuck Atkinson, owner of a Ketchum motel. "They didn't bother him and he was grateful for it. His favorite time was the fall. We would go down to Shoshone for the pheasant shooting, or over on the river for some ducks. He was a fine shot, even toward the end, when he was sick."
Hemingway didn't have many friends in Ketchum. Chuck Atkinson was one of them, and when I saw him one morning in his house on a peak overlooking the town, he had just received a copy of A Moveable Feast. "Mary sent it from New York," he explained. "I read part of it after breakfast; it's good, it sounds more like him than some of the other stuff."
Another friend was Taylor "Beartracks" Williams, a veteran guide who died last year and was buried near the man who gave him the original manuscript ofFor Whom the Bell Tolls. It was "Beartracks" who took Hemingway into the mountains after elk, bear, antelope, and sheep in the days when "Papa" was still a meat-hunter.
Not surprisingly, Hemingway has acquired quite a few friends since his death. "You're writing a story on Ketcbum?" asked a bartender. "Why don't you do one on all the people who knew Hemingway? Sometimes I get the feeling I'm the only person in town who didn't."
Charley Mason, a wandering pianist, is one of the few people who spent much time with him, mainly listening, because "When Ernie had a few drinks he could carry on for hours with all kinds of stories. It was better than reading his books."
I met Mason in the Sawtooth Club on Main Street, when he came in to order coffee over the bar. He is off the booze these days and people who know him say he looks 10 years younger. As he talked, I had an odd feeling that he was somehow a creation of Hemingway's, that he had escaped from one of the earlier short stories.
"He was a hell of a drinker," Mason said with a chuckle. "I remember one time over at the Tram [a local pub] just a few years ago; he was with two Cubans -- one was a great big Negro, a gun-runner he knew from the Spanish Civil War, and the other was a delicate little guy, a neurosurgeon from Havana with fine hands like a musician. That was a three-day session. They were blasted on wine the whole time and jabbering in Spanish like revolutionaries. One afternoon when I was there, Hemingway jerked the checkered cloth off the table and he and the other big guy took turns making the little doctor play the bull. They'd whirl and jerk the cloth around -- it was a hell of a sight."
On another evening, out at Sun Valley, Mason took a break on the stand and sat down for a while at Hemingway's table. In the course of the conversation Mason asked him what it took "to break in on the literary life, or anything else creative, for that matter." "Well," said Hemingway, "there's only one thing I live by -- that's having the power of conviction and knowing what to leave out." He had said the same thing before, but whether he still believed it in the winter of his years is another matter. There is good evidence that he was not always sure what to leave out, and very little evidence to show that his power of conviction survived the war.
That power of conviction is a hard thing for any writer to sustain, and especially so once he becomes conscious of it. Fitzgerald fell apart when the world no longer danced to his music; Faulkner's conviction faltered when he had to confront Twentieth Century Negroes instead of the black symbols in his books; and when Dos Passos tried to change his convictions he lost all his power.
Today we have Mailer, Jones, and Styron, three potentially great writers bogged down in what seems to be a crisis of convictions brought on, like Hemingway's, by the mean nature of a world that will not stand still long enough for them to see it clear as a whole.
It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task in a time when chaos is multiplying.
Hemingway was not a political man. He did not care for movements, but dealt in his fiction with the stresses and strains on individuals in a world that seemed far less complex, prior to World War II, than it has since. Rightly or wrongly, his taste ran to large and simple (but not easy) concepts -- to blacks and whites, as it were, and he was not comfortable with the multitude of gray shadings that seem to be the wave of the future.
It was not Hemingway's wave, and in the end he came back to Ketchum, never ceasing to wonder, says Mason, why he hadn't been killed years earlier in the midst of violent action on some other part of the globe. Here, at least, he had mountains and a good river below his house; he could live among rugged, non-political people and visit, when he chose to, with a few of his famous friends who still came up to Sun Valley. He could sit in the Tram or the Alpine or the Sawtooth Club and talk with men who felt the same way he did about life, even if they were not so articulate. In this congenial atmosphere he felt he could get away from the pressures of a world gone mad, and "write truly" about life as he had in the past.
Ketchum was Hemingway's Big Two Hearted River, and he wrote his own epitaph in the story of the same name, just as Scott Fitzgerald had written his epitaph in a book called The Great Gatsby. Neither man understood the vibrations of a world that had shaken them off their thrones, but of the two, Fitzgerald showed more resilience. His half-finished Last Tycoon was a sincere effort to catch up and come to grips with reality, no matter how distasteful it might have seemed to him.
Hemingway never made such an effort. The strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older, and his last book was about Paris in the Twenties. Standing on a corner in the middle of Ketchum it is easy to see the connection Hemingway must have made between this place and those he had known in the good years. Aside from the brute beauty of the mountains, he must have recognized an atavistic distinctness in the people that piqued his sense of dramatic possibilities. It is a raw and peaceful little village, especially in the off season with neither winter skiers nor summer fishermen to dilute the image. Only the main street is paved; most of the others are no more than dirt and gravel tracks that seem at times to run right through front yards.
From such a vantage point a man tends to feel it is not so difficult, after all, to see the world clear and as a whole. Like many another writer, Hemingway did his best work when he felt he was standing on something solid -- like an Idaho mountainside, or a sense of conviction.
Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn't. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him -- not even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.
National Observer, May 25, 1964
The above passage is from Hunter's book The Great Shark Hunt.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)