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.
I'm a huge fan of some of their music, but I must admit that I find the rest pretty annoying for my ears (I mean, when they go crazy with higher frequencies instruments). You probably will like Hermeto Pascoal if you don't know him already.
Sun Ra is one of those artists who I remember listening to for the first time and thinking, "this is what music could be," instead of "this is what music is."
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.
Yep, same here. I didn't get into jazz until late in life and toured all the popular and deep cuts. Miles, Coltrane, Coleman, Monk, etc. I loved it all, but then I heard Sun Ra Arkestra's "Springtime Again" and I was absolutely floored. It opened up so many possibilities in my brain, almost like what I would expect a psychotropic drug experience would be like (I have never tried).
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.
Who needs drugs when you dream those kinds of dreams :))
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.
I prefer to see Mark Mothersbaugh's being known primarily as "The Rugrats Guy" to most Millennials as something akin to karmic justice for his antics. See also his weirdly derogatory comments about disco.
>See also his weirdly derogatory comments about disco.
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.
Couldn't find the video but found this on wikipedia:
> 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]
A while back I somehow managed to watch Space Is the Place[1] without knowing anything about Sun Ra. The discovery that he was not an actor and was instead a great jazz musician was a wild one. If you haven't seen it, Space Is the Place is a super interesting look into early Afrofuturist films and Sun Ra as a character.
I saw Sun Ra and the Arkestra sometime in 1988 at Liberty Lunch in Austin, Texas. I believe it was just a few days before the "Live at the Pitt Inn" album was recorded in Japan. One of the best concert experiences I've ever had.
Sun Ra changed my life. Have always known about him but his music really clicked with me on one night 2 years ago (the song is Tiny Pyramids), I quote John Gilmore "I heard the intervals!" Stayed up all night, bought an alto saxophone the next day (switched to tenor 2 months later) and have been practicing every day since. Jazz and playing music has made me happier tremendously!
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.