Re: Sun Ra live video on YouTube
Re: Sun Ra live video on YouTube
Uh, err. Thanks for the comments but that really didn't answer my question at all. Can anyone tell me if Ra played behind his back (like in the clip from 'A Joyful Noise') often or was this a one-off. Other than the Hendrix-stylings, I feel that clip is very much representitive of the Ra I know and love, sound-wise that is. The first time I heard Atlantis, I didn't think this was a man gone crazy, smashing the organ with his bare fists, I thought it was played just as he intended. I don't know too many people that can get the same sound and feeling out of a synthesizer. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Lawrence Murphy" garym@teledyn.com To: SATURN@NIC.SURFNET.NL Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2006 7:24 AM Subject: Re: Sun Ra live video on YouTube
"F" == Fhqwhgads! fhqwhgads@shaw.ca writes:
F> I always wondered about this particular clip from A Joyful F> Noise. Having never seen Ra play live, did he perform this type F> of Jimi Hendrix stage antics all the time, or was he playing it F> up for the cameras. It always struck me a kind of silly, but F> did Ra have a playful side that isn't evident on his records?
Playful?
Playful like a lion with a fresh kill; playful like a saint in deep rapture. Ra didn't call them Cosmic Jesters for nothing, but really this is a very complex question -- is Jackson Pollock's art "playful"? I'd never heard of Pollock describing himself as such. How about Pablo Picasso, who very often described himself as a child? A highly skilled and proficient child with an incisive wit and unerring aim. Are his dancing fairy people playful? Is Guernica?
The line between "play" and "serious intent" is a very fuzzy one. Loki, Nanabush, mythology abounds with jesters who are our greatest teachers, leading us to face ourselves by luring us in with the superficially absurd.
Ra gone crazy-man gonzo on the moog? Ra in rapture? Ra standing tall and proud and unrepentant and completely outside and beyond our commercialized pre-conceptions of what "keyboard performance" is "supposed to be" here in the money-shackled mindset of Planet Earth? Ra trying to get our attention before he teaches us something? Or is that clip the lesson itself, a live demonstration of the power of Joy?
It's a complex question :)
But as sound-byte clips go, for describing the experience that was a close encounter with Sun Ra, I was a little dissapointed. I thought this clip was really bad advertising.
True, Ra's music is blurs all categories, and often seeming wild and untamed, but almost never unhemmed or uneven. This clip gives us no sense of the discipline. It is like John Dean's scream, clipped out of context and broadcast as an amusing scene.
I found much the same with that BBC special (but watched it three times in a row anyway ;) -- they play up the face-painted spectacle and psychedelic space oddity of Ra while glibly glossing over the /message/ of our potential for being higher beings in the cosmic uni-verse, of the rapture of Space Joy, and the transcendent excellence-inducing power of the Myth.
IIRC, Space is the Place closes with Ra saying something like, "You don't want to speak about myth. But I am the Myth speaking to you"
-- Gary Lawrence Murphy garym@teledyn.com ============================== www.teledyn.com - blog.teledyn.com - irish.teledyn.com - sbp.teledyn.com ====================== The present moment is a powerful goddess (Goethe)
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