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When Angels Speak of Love (Evidence)
The release of five Sun Ra CDs by Evidence Records is cause for celebration among the followers of jazz's transcendent composer/keyboardist/big band leader.
Return first to 1963, when Ra's music was primarily acoustic and hard-bop-based. When Angels Speak of Love is a key transitional date, one where Ra anticipated the melding of jazz horns and acoustic piano with the world of electrified instruments.. The recording opens with an echo-plexed oboe, one soon chased by spurts of drums. A trumpet follows, all part of Ra's "Celestial Fantasy." The pace radically accelerates on "The Idea Of It All" with the tenor wailing in the voice of space angels The title piece is both soothingly soft and challenging with crying horns. And then come the Ra band members chanting that they will take us "to the next stop, Mars" and the music does precisely that, led by a blues/bopping/cascading piano and horns that speak in as many voices as there as languages in the universe, again with the occasional echo-plex.
In the early seventies, Ra almost moved to the major-label sphere of jazz, having a dalliance with ABC/IMPULSE! records. Pathways to Unknown Worlds + Friendly Love is a compilation of one released major-label LP and a second that was recorded but never distributed. Ra's synthesizer reproduced what the leader imagined (some would say "knew") what outer space and rocketry sounded like, and curiously mixed those with primeval African percussion and extended flights by screaming tenors and altos.
More incredible are two never-before released discs that Ra also recorded for ABC. Jointly reissued as The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums, they are beyond imagination. Ra drives them with inter-stellar keyboard effects that dissolve into drum rhythms of African Egypt, a connectivity this master made again and again, and the horn work is vociferous and mystical. It is the same musical model as "Pathways," just more intense.
On the 1978 Lanquidity, the title cut has a lazy, molten-liquid sway to it as horns, electric guitars and keyboards slither through, and the album also has particularly funky moments, with "Where Pathways Meet" devolving from a soulful marching band to Ra on acoustic piano with a sound like a barrelhouse piano player who then encounters spirits and demons. Nods are made to the electric jazz of Miles Davis, and the inter-stellar space keyboarding that Ra pioneered darts in and out. Not Ra's strongest effort, but one that captured the imagination of what is now the acid-jazz audience.
Greatest Hits, ingeniously crafted, mixes Ra-song ("Rocket Number Nine" and "Enlightenment"), the type of chanted space-travel invitations that emerged from the sun-spot firestorms in Ra concerts and led dancers through the audience; incredible acoustic post-bop late fifties jazz; his electronified space capers; and tasteful renderings of "Round Midnight" and Gershwin's "I Love You Porgy." Subtitled tongue-in-cheek as "easy listening for intergalactic travel," the collection is a draw for anyone who ever attended a Ra concert and has a lingering desire to relive the fantasy and the fantastic.
Ra was an innovator in instrument selection (he pioneered synthesized music in jazz), a visionary composer, an orchestral leader rivaled only by Ellington in the loyalty shown by his sidemen, and a prophet who, in the tradition of African-American culture, stepped outside of the mainstream to create myth and song to carry people forward. He was the "chairman of the board" of what he dubbed "spaceways, incorporated," and these CDs are your ticket.
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Jules Epstein, Sept 2000
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last update 2 Sept 2000