Sun Ra, born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, released just over 100 studio and live albums between 1956 and his death in 1993. Most folks resort to classifying him and his Arkestra band as prolific output jazz, but his dedication to consistent evolution and bizarre idiosyncrasy – he earnestly believed he was born of an “Angel Race” on Saturn – defies any attempt at definite taxonomy.
Marshall Allen, the Arkestra’s saxophone, flute, oboe and piccolo player, curated the newly-released compilation “In the Orbit of Ra,” which presents two hours of striking evidence of just how far out Sun Ra’s music was and still is.
“Plutonian Nights,” an early cut recorded between 1958 and 1959, reads like conventional hard bop, with the wild, expressive meanderings of Allen’s saxophone supported by a cymbal’s steady “tiss-tiss-tiss-tiss” and muted horn coos.
But the oscillating buzz that permeates 1973’s “Astro Black” bores through the layer of shrieking horns like a bathroom remodeling project two rooms down the hall, while the upright bass paces nervously in the apartment directly overhead.
On “Solar Differentials,” from 1965, warped, muted moaning fills the spaces in between sparse, percussive piano strikes.
Pastoral piccolo forms a stark contrast to the inebriated stumble of clanging-lunch-pail drums in “The Nile,” from 1963, while a muted, repeated tribal rhythm provides the steady foundation for the flitting flute and fat big-band horns of “Ancient Aiethiopia,” from 1959.
Tracks like “Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus” and “Interplanetary Music” – Lady Gaga sampled the former for “Venus” on her 2013 record “Artpop” – push their agendas of idiosyncratic cacophony so diligently that each and every discordant trumpet burst or chanted lyric brings its respective song to the brink of collapse. Critics can say what they want about this stuff, but it ain’t boring.
