American Monsters: Avant-garde geniuses of the USA
Contents: Sun Ra, Van Dyke Parks, The Brood
Sun Ra: The Surrealist Cosmographer
By Ed Pinsent
My way of coming to terms with the colossal achievements of Sun Ra is to see him as a creator of new worlds. A personal Cosmogony is fashioned from the air, each sphere generating its own atmosphere, a unique detailed surface. The listener becomes a Natural Historian, collating information on the populations, geography, flora and fauna of these strange globes. To buy a Sun Ra record that you haven’t heard is to discover a new species. The Borges story ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ describes the uncanny phenomenon of a ‘fictional’ world invented by a team of encyclopedists which gradually replaces our own world; Borges describes ‘The minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet’. With Sun Ra that story has come true. A fitting tribute would be an infinite project of Borgesian proportions: I would propose a 100 volume series of tomes dedicated to the Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, with luxuriant colour plates of paintings by surrealist giants which limn those fantastic terrains! Max Ernst for the forests, Yves Tanguy for the deserts, De Chirico the cities, Miro the farms.
I conjure this extravagant image to suggest the grandeur and volume of Ra’s recorded output, and leave the completists to the worthy task of compiling their detailed factual inventories. As the owner of a mere (!) 20-odd Ra recordings, I give this brief view to mention the bizarre film Space is The Place, and some recorded selections which demonstrate Ra’s great keyboard work. There was never enough of this put to vinyl for my liking, but that just shows he was no ego-tripping soloist like Zawinul or Corea (Weather Report seems to exist simply as a framework for their showing off). Rather, the Arkestra could sometimes be an ideal combo for a committed artist to play in, as it dispensed with the familiar tramlines of big band combos - no charts, no bars to count in so that you’d know when to play your solo. Ra managed to evolve his teams to a point where he could enable them to enjoy a structured freedom, somewhere in between the outright open architecture of say Company (which is a different discipline in any case) and the precision of say Duke Ellington. A player contributed what they felt was right, at the right time - played for as long or as short a time as necessary, then dropped out. Which isn’t to say they were incapable of getting it together to play the melody!
Space is the Place was directed by John Coney and produced by Jim Newman in 1974. You can get a video version on Rhapsody Films 9025. It has its best footage is at the beginning, pre-credits: a pink sky over a matte painting of an alien forest (very like a Gage Taylor painting). Sun Ra is exploring the new world in full Egyptian regalia. There’s a plant with a glass full of black liquid. A Mickey-Mouse yellow glove plant. Soap bubbles. The cheap, Pop-Art special effects add to the disorientation no end; the floating aliens with glass helmets could almost come from a Hieronymous Bosch triptych (and don’t forget the Bosch cover of It’s After the End of the World, BASF 20748). Further dislocations follow with a ominous card game in the desert, jump cuts transporting a character to another landscape in a second. Then there’s some priceless moments of Ra dispensing his bewildering epithets of wisdom, completely confounding the phonies and parasites trying to worm their way into his Outer Space Employment Agency. Listeners who require an entire CD of such wise witterings are pointed towards ‘Sun Ra talks on the Possibility of Altered Destiny’, on Japan DIW 388 (1994); which gives you an uninterrupted hour of this sort of thing…his monologue lecture is almost free-association, anything and everything is fair game for Ra to weave into his cosmic tapestry. Dreams, the Bible, social commentary, education, history, politics…the entire yarn’s spun out using outrageous word-play technique to suggest new meanings that surely beats Andre Breton at his own game.
It is currently possible to start accumulating a fairly respectable Sun Ra collection on CD. Some recent-ish recordings (1980s) are still available, a number of them on the UK’s Leo label. The crucial mid-1960s ESP albums are reissued by those fine German obsessives on ZYX: Heliocentric Worlds Volume 1, ESP 1014, and Volume 2 ESP 1017; Nothing Is, ESP 1045; and the previously unissued 1973 Concert for the Comet Kohoutek, ESP 3033-2. By far the best are the Evidence CDs, this is an impressive reissue programme that offers source recordings, sometimes two LPs formatted onto one disc, excellent sleeve notes and packages, reproes of original sleeve art and photos, and additional rare cuts. This is one case where it somehow feels better to own the CDs than the original records! A real labour of love.
Some selected Ra keyboard spectaculars…
Looks like Sun Ra bought himself a Mini-Moog in 1970 and couldn’t wait to try out his new toy. Others have commented on these solos resembling the translation of electric messages flying through outer space - Sun Ra as his own Joddrell Bank. Each solo is a complete statement of freedom - every note is unexpected, filled with inexplicable connections and wild leaps of logic. The Moog never fails to bring out the unique authorial voice of The Ra. My Brother The Wind ECD 22040-2 (Saturn LP 523), track ‘The Wind Speaks’ is a 1970 moog solo; as is ‘Scene 1 Take 1′ on The Solar-Myth Approach Vol 2, on Actuel and reissued as AFF 76.
Nuits de La Fondation Maeght, Recommended RR 11 - side 2 is ‘The Cosmic Explorer’, a 1970 moog solo which Chris Cutler aptly describes as ‘Concordes crashing and vacuum cleaners plaited into music.’ Nuff said. A sustained abstract meditation which documents Sun Ra’s total one-ness with his chosen instrument. Shame it’s out of print at the moment.
Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, ECD 22036 CD (Saturn LP 408) - Whoah! Essential for any self-respect human being who’s equipped with ears. On ‘And Otherness’ Ra plays the Clavioline (as used by Joe Meek), a French monophonic electronic keyboard that was almost antiquated as soon as the first model rolled off the conveyor belt. ‘Voice of Space’ features Ra on the astro space organ. The word ‘eerie’ doesn’t have enough letter Es in it to convey the supernatural power of these keyboard segments, let alone the whole recording!
Out There A Minute, Blast First BFFP 42 LP was a very affordable and accessible LP which Paul Smith issued in 1989, revealing the tinkly clavinet solo on ‘Love in Outer Space’ and the echoed organ and piano weirdness of ‘Song and Tree and Forest’.
I’ve heard the Hiroshima organ solo on q bootleg tape of a Saturn recording. Of course it resembles a cinema Wurlitzer organ, and I don’t care if that’s too corny for some listeners. Ra is watching his own personal silent film of the apocalypse brought down by the Atomic Bomb, and here’s his musical commentary on it, intuitive and reactive. Take Atlantis (ECD 22067 Saturn LP 507), of which the title track was a side-long 21 minute ’solar sound organ’ solo. He uses it more like a paintbox than a musical instrument. It is possible to read both performances as linear stories in sound, soundtracks to accompany these mind-movies of devastation. Yet it’s not just revelling in the psychedelic mushroom cloud or the streams of bubbles from those drowning Atlanteans - Ra never forgets what’s at stake in these two Cataclysms, and weaves in hints of the histories of the lost civilisations that are disappearing as he plays. The passing on of this history to the audience - sometimes real, sometimes fantasy - is surely what Ra’s great project was all about, manifested and realised through music, dress, performance, sleeve art and research.
ED PINSENT