by Rodger Coleman, edited by Sam Byrd (Music 781.65 Sun Ra)
Where most important jazz figures are concerned, diving into their work via recordings can be a daunting exercise, simply because there are so many records. Compared to most popular music idioms, where composition is the main form of musical expression and studio recordings generally stand as the most important recorded works for understanding an artist, songs are largely vehicles for improvisation in jazz, and charting the growth and development of jazz musicians is often best done by catching them live or through live recordings of performances. Naturally, most musicians play lots of shows, and this can mean that “important” live recordings of iconic jazz artists can start to number in the dozens or even hundreds.
This is true for Sun Ra as well,
but let’s look at some practical realities about his long career that make
things even more complicated in his case. Consider that he continued to work
with a large ensemble, his Arkestra, well into eras where small-ensemble jazz
combos became the norm. Considering the practical realities of keeping a large
band together and traveling with them, that’s a lot of mouths to feed, and is
likely one of the reasons that jazz from the bebop era onward tended to focus
on smaller groups. Also unlike most jazz artists, who historically took little
interest in the logistical side of making their own recordings, Sun Ra was one
of the first people in the world to start buying and using his own recording
equipment, as early as the 1930s and 40s. Just as he kept up with the latest
inventions in the electronic keyboard world, he continued to keep up with
recording technology over the years, and often engineered his own recordings in
rehearsal spaces or live. Ra was also one of the earliest artists to side-step
record labels and self-release albums of his music, starting his own El Saturn
Records in the 1950s and Saturn Research in the 60s. With his own label, he could
essentially private-press smaller quantities of his own recordings to take with
the band on tours, a great way to supplement their income on the road.
Problematically, though, this practice has sometimes left his discography hard
to navigate, as there are multiple low-quantity pressings and re-presses of
many records, sometimes new records made by combining cuts from previous
records in new ways, and various differences between pressings. It all adds up
to a lot of complication sorting things out. Many recordings have dropped in
and out of print for years, and have been reissued in similarly altered forms
by semi-legal entities over the years. It’s a headache to sort out.
Sun Ra’s music grew, evolved and
shifted styles dramatically, too, arguably a lot more than typical jazz artists
(although Miles Davis and John Coltrane come close). Because of this, it is
entirely possible that you might be a fan of some parts of Sun Ra’s work, but
not be so into others. Weigh this fact with the complicated maze of Sun Ra
recordings out there, and sometimes it just seems like it’s too hard to figure
out where to start.
Enter Sun Ra Sundays. What began as author Rodger
Coleman occasionally talking about a favorite Sun Ra record on his blog NuVoid
in 2006 gradually grew into a sizable body of Sun Ra record reviews. As Coleman
describes in his Foreword, he gradually decided it would be fun to highlight
all of his favorites, and then expanded even beyond those. By the time he
stepped away from writing Sun Ra Sundays in 2016, he had covered around 200 Sun
Ra records in some capacity in over 150 blog posts. As blog entries, though,
there was no particular big-picture order to the posts, and they were formatted
with the usual kind of informality of blog posts. To transform this content
into a book, then, editor Sam Byrd organized all of the material covered into
chronological order, combined mentions of recordings that have been made
available across multiple releases, and included some of the latest information
regarding availability of these recordings, many of which have become more
broadly available digitally in recent years, among other adjustments to the original
posts.
The result is a very readable,
conversational journey through a hefty proportion of the Sun Ra catalog,
meeting a need that’s long overdue! If you’re totally new to Sun Ra, this book
is a great way to learn about his work through this series of fairly short but
insightful reviews, and if a description is sounding like something you’d find
interesting, you can start looking for albums from there. If you’re a little
more familiar with his work, though — I’d place myself in this sort of
category, where I’ve heard quite a few Sun Ra records that I like but still
feel kind of lost looking for more — you’ll also find entry points to continue
your hunt. And there’s plenty here even for quite seasoned Ra aficionados, too,
as Coleman writes about some of the more obscure audience recording-sourced
bootlegs that have circulated among tape and CD traders long before the advent
of file sharing and review blogs. Some of these are pretty low fidelity
recordings, but some also feature particularly spirited performances, and
Coleman will let you know which ones are worth hearing and which ones are
probably best left to completists.
The coverage here focuses on what
most critics would probably agree are the best decades for Sun Ra: the 60s and
70s, with a few early reviews discussing his 50s work. For the later stuff,
you’re still on your own, but in most cases, I don’t think you’ll feel like
you’re missing much. And the occasional editor’s notes from Byrd keep these
reviews very up-to-date. For example, Coleman reviewed the 2009 Art Yard CD
versions of material recorded when Sun Ra traveled to Egypt, but it’s been
noted in the reviews that there was a subsequent 4-CD version with lots of
previously unreleased additions released by the Strut label in 2020, well after
Coleman had stopped writing Sun Ra Sundays. Perhaps most important of all,
Coleman’s enthusiasm for this music shines bright throughout the book. You can
tell that he has a deep feeling for this body of work, and on the occasions
where he declares a particular record “essential,” you can believe it.
In the Epilogue section, editor
Byrd contributes some additional albums not covered by Coleman that listeners
might find intriguing, followed by a short “core recordings” list to get folks
started. I guess short is relative in the world of Sun Ra, where everything is
measured in cosmic proportions: there’s 27 core records!
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra by John
F. Szwed or Sun-Ra : Traveling the Spaceways: The Astro Black and Other
Solar Myths by John Corbett.)
( author Rodger Coleman's music
blog nuvoid.blogspot.com
) | ( Sun Ra Sundays page on the www.sunra.com site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
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