Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 60

Record label: Saturn

Produced: Alton Abraham

Recorded: Live at Olatunji’s Loft, New York City; April 1965

Released: 1965

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Sun Ra (clavioline, p, bass marimba, tympani, electronic celeste, Sun Harp, dragon drum); John Gilmore (ts); Pat Patrick (bs, flute, tympani); Marshall Allen (as, flute, oboe, piccolo); Ronnie Boykins (b); Danny Davis (as, flute); Robert Cummings (bass clarinet); Harry Spencer (as); Walter Miller (t); Chris Capers (t); Teddy Nance (tb); Ali Hassan (tb); Jimmi Johnson (pc); Roger Blank (pc)

Track listing: The Magic City; The Shadow World; Absract Eye; Abstract ‘I’

Running time: 45.10

Current CD: Evidence ECD 22069-2

Further listening: Other Planes Of There (1964), The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra, Vols 1 & 2 (1966, 1967)

Further reading: Space Is The Place: The Life And Times Of Sun Ra (John F. Szwed, 1997); www.dpo.uab.edu/~moudry/ (fan site); www.elrarecords.com (official)

Download: Not currently legally available

Following an apprenticeship as pianist and arranger for Fletcher Henderson’s big band in the ’40s, Sun Ra (né Herman Poole Blount) founded and led various line-ups of his own improvising big-band, Arkestra, until his death in May 1993, releasing literally hundreds of albums – mostly small editions in plain white (or hand-illustrated) covers on his own Saturn imprint – whose music ranged from manic swing and hard-bop outings to otherworldly solo synthesizer extravaganzas and bouts of collective improvisation.

Named after the promotional slogan of Ra’s hometown Birmingham, Alabama, the 27-minute title track of The Magic City is in the latter style, a breakthrough work contemporaneous with similar avant-garde explorations like Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz and John Coltrane’s Ascension, but more fluid and obviously of a piece, the result of countless hours of development and rehearsal that enabled the Arkestra’s musicians to play in each other’s pockets even when they were navigating the most abstract sonic territory.

As producer Alton Abraham understood it, The Magic City was a city of fantasy, ‘a city without evil, a city of possibilities and beauty’, whilst in a poem of the same title, Ra himself described it as ‘that city of all natural creation … the magic of the Magi’s thought’.

The early parts find the mad-scientist whine of Ra’s clavioline in cosmic dalliance with sprays of flute and piccolo over a bed of mournful bowed-bass, before bursting into volcanic new life as the horns take over, battling above the undergrowth of high-register wind parts. Also notable is the tape-delay effect (discovered by accident a few years earlier by Ra’s recording engineer Thomas ‘Bugs’ Hunter, much to his boss’s delight) that imposes its own semblance of order on one of the percussion parts.

The three pieces that make up the album’s second side are further developments of the drum-choir style of his earlier Nubians Of Plutonia, with saxes trailing serpentine unison lines over complex polyrhythms of marimba, bongoes and tympani. Reissued several times by Ra’s cottage industry through the late ’60s, The Magic City eventually received its due acclaim when it formed part of an ambitious project which saw ABC/Impulse Records reissue ten Sun Ra albums in the early ’70s.