Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra by John F. Szwed

Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra by John F. Szwed

Author:John F. Szwed [Szwed, John F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Composers & Musicians, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Jazz, Music, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780306808555
Google: JtUIgpLqh4QC
Amazon: 0306808552
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 1998-08-21T23:00:00+00:00


If “Heliocentric” lacks a melody, it nonetheless has motives, like the staggered entry of three trombones (which oddly suggests the “Kane” motif at the opening of Citizen Kane), which also occurs in “Outer Nothingness” and “Of Heavenly Things.” It maintains interest by contrast of register, texture, piccolo against bass, timpani, trombones, and bass marimba. “Outer Nothingness” follows a similar pattern, and seems to be another take of “Heliocentric.” “Other Worlds” pits Sun Ra’s furiously atonal piano (sometimes played simultaneously with celeste) against the rest of the Arkestra. The Arkestra at this point had such confidence in what they were doing that the rest of the group could suddenly drop away in the moment to reveal a cymbal solo or a bass and timpani duo. And even where there is no contrast in the music, as on Sun Ra’s celeste and piano solo piece “Nebulae,” there is such independence of movement and free rhythm of right and left hand that interest is still maintained. The album ends with less than two minutes of free collective improvisation over a fixed “swing” beat, as if to say, we can do that, too.

Back in the studios with a smaller group for ESP on November 16, they recorded three extended pieces for The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, II. “The Sun Myth,” the longest, is something of a double concerto for Boykins’s bowed bass and Ra’s piano and Clavioline which hold together the instrumental bursts of free improvisation from the rest of the Arkestra. The piccolo and nasal Clavioline opening of “A House of Beauty” gestures towards Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” but soon adds arco bass for an exercise of counterpoint between the three instrumental voices. And “Cosmic Chaos” hangs a series of solos on an arhythmic thread created by tuned drums and other percussion. Through these three pieces the combination of timbres and textures is constantly shifting in spite of the presence of only eight instruments in the group. Sun Ra orders the proceedings either from keyboard or tuned drums, and directs the construction as they go forward. Again, some have tried to read the titles of Sun Ra’s compositions as pure programmatic statements, but by this point the changing textures make it virtually impossible to hear even a fixed musical metaphor within a single composition.

This time the record cover is an early German illustration of the solar system above a gallery of portraits of scientists chiefly from the sixteenth century, the period in which belief in the solar system was established—Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Tycho Brahe. But square in the middle of the row of portraits are pictures of Pythagoras and Sun Ra, calling attention to Sun Ra’s links to the Greek astronomer-mathematician-musician who studied in Egypt, and who formed a brotherhood which attempted to purify their souls to allow the initiates to escape the “wheel of birth” and to aid them in the transmigration of the soul after the death of the body.

As soon as the ESPs



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