High Bias by Marc Masters

Author:Marc Masters [Masters, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2023-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

A portion of Pieter Schoolwerth’s concert recordings made on cassette tape in the 1980s. (Photo by Pieter Schoolwerth)

Eric Hardiman had just graduated from college in 1990 when he came upon a musical gateway of his own. It was the work of Sun Ra, the visionary pianist, composer, and bandleader who claimed to be from Saturn (which is why he discarded his birth name, Herman Blount). Ra’s work ranged from blues to bop to wildly adventurous improvised jazz with cosmic overtones, augmented by the glittery regalia in which he and his group the Arkestra performed. Not long after Ra passed away, Hardiman was living in Washington, DC, and listening to public radio station WPFW, which was playing several days’ worth of nonstop Sun Ra material, including many live recordings. “I remember rushing to the store to buy as many blank cassettes as I could afford,” Hardiman says. “I sat by my boom box and taped everything, setting my alarm clock to wake me up every forty-five minutes for side changes. These tapes became my constant companions as I walked around DC that summer. The more I listened, the more obsessed I became.”

Soon Hardiman found an email list dedicated to Sun Ra enthusiasts who mentioned trading live tapes. He offered up his WPFW recordings, and suddenly cassettes were arriving at his doorstep weekly. “My living room filled up with blank tapes, printed lists of other traders’ shows—sometimes a dozen pages in tiny single-spaced font—and cardboard mailers,” he remembers. “I can still feel the excitement of hitting play on some of those tapes, closing my eyes and imagining what it must have been like at those Arkestra shows.” Hardiman soon figured out which traders had the best-quality dubs, as well as which ones would toss in something extra, like photocopied show flyers or homemade stickers adorning tape covers. One trader even sent him a program saved from Sun Ra’s memorial service. Much like the Grateful Dead, Sun Ra inspired this kind of obsession because his music was always changing. Hardiman’s collection includes solo shows, duos, trios, and large ensembles with over twenty musicians on stage. Some tapes contain private Arkestra rehearsals at Sun Ra’s compound in Philadelphia, where the entire group lived. And each tape tells a story, such as a tape of a 1971 show in Los Angeles where the power shut off, causing Ra to cast a curse on the city.

“All of the tapes added up to puzzle pieces for me, offering one more tidbit of information in the weird and wonderful mythology of Ra,” says Hardiman. “The fact that someone else had prepared each tape for me only added to the depth of the experience.” That led him to start his own cassette label, Tape Drift, in the mid-2000s. “I’m still buying blank tapes, duplicating piles of them, and sending them around to customers and friends,” he says. “The connections I built in trading tapes have led to numerous real-world friendships that are vitally important to me.”

In the 1990s and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.