Re: Sheet Music/Fake Book

In reply to the question:

Is there any sheet music "out there" which includes the music of Sun Ra. I'd love to get ahold of some Chicago period Ra.

As far I know, all the musical examples that have been published are included in Tilman Stahl's 1983 discography, which I imagine will be pretty hard to find nowadays. It was a private publication, and Stahl has now apparently left the the planet. His discography included partial transcriptions of several pieces. They are mostly small fragments, and usually just melody lines, not whole scores:

• A Call For All Demons (from Angels And Demons At Play)
• Ankh (from Sound Of Joy - two bs melody lines)
• Enlightenment (from Fondation Maeght vol 1)
• Moonship Journey (from Cosmos)
• My Favourite Things (from the eponymous Saturn LP - John Gilmore's beautiful ts solo)
• Shadow World (from Fondation Maeght vol 1 - just the bs riff)
• Space Is The Place (from The Other Side Of The Sun)
• We Travel The Spaceways (from Live At Montreux - short figure)
• Saturn (from Sound Of Joy - p intro)
• Outer Nothingness (from Heliocentric Worlds vol 1 - bcl solo)

The last two of these are reprinted from Ekkehard Jost's "Free Jazz", which is the only other book I've seen which has any Sun Ra musical examples - and these two fragments are all that is contained in Jost's book. So if you can find Stahl's discography you will probably have all the transcriptions that have appeared in book form so far.

Tilman Stahl's says of his musical transcriptions:

"[They] had been deliberately chosen. A clear connection, however, appears in the second part of the book. But I would like to present them even in this part in order to give jazz fans some interesting topics."

As far as I know he never finished the second part of his book, and is no longer around, so it seems difficult to say exactly what points he was trying to illustrate with his examples.

Of course, Sun Ra wrote sheet music in vast quantities, and it would be interesting to know if any of that has been properly archived yet. Does anybody here know of anything happening there?

-- Chris Trent