secret listening tip - do not read
secret listening tip - do not read
this is a secret listening tip for how to listen to sun ra, so no one read this, okay?
i kind of jumped into the middle of 'the sun ra all stars - milan'. wow!!! - it was terrible! needle drops (as best as that can be done with a cd) here and there - ugh! what the heck were they thinking when they played that? and i liked the 'all stars' video, too. so what happened here? i did the same with the 'the complete nothing is' album - y-i-ick. not having listened to 'nothing is' in a while, i tried to recall if that album was that bad as well, but nothing really struck me as 'outstanding' or 'memorable' from that first version either.
this cannot be.
so i decided to give the 'the sun ra all stars - milan' a complete listen, a sit-through all the way, regardless of how bad it may get. at least i will be able to say that i heard the whole album. the music starts, and then some accolades of applause - that must sun ra entering the stage... ate supper, had a refreshing beverage, some light reading... what, it's over? already??? that was too quick. so how does sun ra get all these guys together and they can play so well, together? bigger question - why can jazz musicians do that and rock musicians cannot? imagine if that was some 'pulled together all star rock musicians' band - they probably could not even do a credible 'johnny b. goode'! :-) meanwhile, sun ra has these guys making sense together. okay, so maybe at times they are running free and easy on their own, but they are not stepping on each others toes. everyone is polite, and waits their turn for a solo and then wails away!
while pondering that, i cue up 'the complete nothing is'. might as well suffer through this one too. :-) okay, a nice intro by the announcer, that's always a good sign. music... wait, what is that? quick, it's ahh, track number, title, o-o-o-ooo - THAT is 'velvet', very nice! it sounds ever so slightly 'el viktor'-ish, too. 'exotic forest' (the first one) - mmm!!! those reviews mentioned that it might be like that, and it was, but not at all in the way that the review said it would be. that reviewer might have to re-listen to it? :-) 'outer space ways in-core-pore-ate-ted' - that has to be the sweetest version eve... what the? the end is cut??? d*ng! and i was just about to sign up, too. :-) another 'velvet', so nice to hear two versions to compare, quickly concluding that these guys are really playing it new each time. a short second 'exotic forest', more insistent than the first. maybe i will cue up just the two 'velvets' and the two 'exotic forests' and listen to just those? yes - that IS nice. as with the first album, this was over way too quickly, too. a check of the wall clock (do you really need one?) shows that i just spent a couple or four hours in a very pleasant way!
conclusion: both albums are a-okay! what was i thinking when i did those needle drops? it really helped to listen to them 'in toto' to get the fullness of them. which leads to my top secret listening tip for listening to sun ra, in particular to the live sets: listen to the whole concert, all the way through! that puts so many of the songs in the appropriate relationship to each other and to the feel for what sun ra, or the arkestra, wanted to say that day.
secret sun ra guilty pleasure - http://nuvoid.blogspot.com/search/label/Sun Ra Sunday
in case you have read this, and you weren't supposed, you cannot tell anyone about anything, okay? pinky swear!
I-) ihor