Sun Ra - Singles

Pitchfork 87

How do you pin down Sun Ra? The cosmic jazzman laid down so much music it would take a warehouse of full-time historians working round-the-clock hours to figure it all out. Albums were often hastily assembled from his prolific sessions, packaged with DIY artwork and sold at gigs for quick cash. Thousands of hours of unheard recordings are rumored to exist. Maybe he stacked boxes of magnetic tape on far-away planets too, such was his connection to the stars.

If it’s even possible to traverse the vast Sun Ra universe on board a single starship, then Strut Records’ new compilation Singles: The Definitive 45s Collection offers a compellingly sturdy vessel. It’s a 65-track set of 7-inch fragments of the celestial god, sent to earth to help us map out details of his galaxy that the albums could not. There are no wasted motions here: Each flat, wax disc represented another bright star in the constellation Ra.

The name of his birth certificate read Herman Poole Blount. Born in Alabama in 1914, the mysterious musician showed up in Chicago in 1946 with little more to his name than a jail record picked up for refusing to fight in World War II for ethical reasons. The jazz scene was primed for revolution and Blount moved to a different beat, driven by a journey to Saturn he claimed he made years earlier while in deep spiritual concentration.

The star man would later take up the name Sun Ra, form his ever-changing band the Arkestra, and spend a lifetime teaching the world Afrofuturism, a complex ideology of Black nationalism, Egyptian myth, scientific discovery, science fiction movies and the other-worldly fashion choices he’d flaunt on-stage. Forget “Disco 2000”; Sun Ra was envisioning to the paranoid blips and beeps of “Disco 2021” some 30 years before Pulp showed up. He mastered the electro squiggles of “Planet Rock” prior to the birth of hip-hop, and forged his own form of analogue cyberpunk as Philip K. Dick sat as his typewriter laying out his own dark vision of the future. Singles preserves all that for future generations.

It’s said when you watch classic movies like Citizen Kane today, it’s important to bare in mind that these movies were writing the rules of filmmaking that we now take for granted. Sun Ra’s music somehow doesn’t require that kind of explanation. As soon as the needle drops, it sounds like scripture—a key testament that formed a building block of a half-century of music. Everyone from George Clinton to OutKast read from The Book of Ra.

And yet, on paper the project seems an odd prospect. Sun Ra was a lot of things—pianist, bluesman, bandleader, arranger, interstellar poet, multiverse traveller—but he’s never been accused of being a singles artist. Because of the format, Singles eschews his lengthier wigouts for shorter vignettes. You might not get the 20-minute avant-garde virtuosity of “Space Is the Place,” but you do get jaunty holiday jingle “It’s Christmas Time.” That might seem less crucial, but when grappling with Ra’s slippery legacy, nothing here feels disposable.

For the fanatics, Singles will offer little they’ve not heard before. While the original 45 versions of a lot of these songs, many of which were released on Ra’s own El Saturn Records, are rare (or, in some cases, completely lost), they’ve all cropped up in other places, including a similar-but-less-expansive compilation put out by Evidence Records in 1996. Still, there’s undoubted power in hearing Ra’s career laid out like this.

Arranged chronologically (or as close to it as possible—Ra wasn’t exactly pedantic when it came to labeling his sessions) and with about half the songs recorded during his 1950s Chicago period, Singles captures the genesis of his forward-thinking space-bop. Fittingly, the opening two tracks, “I Am an Instrument” and “I Am Strange,” both spoken-word numbers, predict his metaphysical interests. “I belong to one who is more than a musician/He is an artist,” he says on the former. His voice is tuned low and grave, as though foreshadowing a seismic event.

Whether he’s envisioning a playful, pamphlet-utopian version of the city on the Lieber-Stoller-esque “Chicago USA” or mixing experimental rhythms with dense and fractured chants on “Spaceship Lullaby” (both recorded with the Nu Sounds, an important precursor to the Arkestra), it’s thrilling to hear Ra connect Chicago’s timeless jazz scene to his increasingly wild tinkerings. Even the earliest material on Singles is the sound of a bandleader confidently wielding his arsenal for maximum purpose.

It’s not just Ra that gets shine. Singles captures The Arkestra at their finest. John Gilmore, a chief lieutenant in the group for almost 40 years, blusters with his tenor saxophone on the peppy “Soft Talk,” recorded in his first few years alongside Ra. The gentle horn riff of “Space Loneliness”—from 1960, Ra’s final year in Chicago—pulls you towards the void of the outer cosmos before blissful and delicate solos from Phil Cohran (cornet) and Marshall Allen (alto sax) chime in.

Given the nature of the format, Singles also showcases Ra’s pop instincts. Whether it’s the smooth doo-wop of “Daddy’s Gonna Tell You Know Lie” (of which there are two versions), the wild-man energy of singer Yochanan on blistering R&B number “Hot Skillet Momma,” or Hattie Randolph’s sweet rendition of jazz standard “Round Midnight,” it’s a thrill to hear Ra carve out lean jukebox jams. On “Bye Bye,” the sweet harmonies of the Cosmic Rays are drowned out by short, sharp skewering of double bass that tears through the final few seconds. Recorded a decade before George Martin was doing that sort of thing, it confirms that even in the pop realm, Ra was a daring futurist.

The later work sees Ra fully exploring the outer realms of his own talent. “Disco 2021” sounds like an android’s fever dream. A doomed but dinky organ holds hands with a Gilmore-led wind quartet on the ugly-beautiful “Outer Space Plateau.” Ra incorporates a Moog synth into “The Perfect Man”; probably recorded in mid-1973, he deploys a bluesy horn riff as the bedrock before running wild with the synthetic instrument. It’s a strange mismatch, but “The Perfect Man” feels like a rare link between dapper nightclub blues and the space-bound sounds of new wave, disco and early hip-hop. The song encapsulates Sun Ra’s freewheeling, alien brilliance.

The London-based Strut Records has long been prolific in unearthing and reissuing old music and has gotten pretty damn good at it. The three-disc CD and LP releases of Singles: The Definitive 45s Collection includes a lot of the trimmings you might expect: rare photos, artwork, sleeve notes and an interview with El Saturn Records founder Alton Abraham. There’s also detailed track-by-track and session notes by project compiler Paul Griffiths that you’ll open up a lot as you grapple with this set. Strut is experienced in dusting off old recordings, so the remasters sound crisp—particularly when played back-to-back with versions that cropped up on other compilations—but without suffocating that rich 45rpm flavor.

In addition to the CD and digital releases, Strut is putting out 20 cuts from the collection in two 45s box sets (Volume 1 released this month, Volume 2 released in March 2017) in a limited 500 copies run for the dedicated looking to fully immerse in the spirit of their original releases. For newcomers here for spiritual guidance, broaching Sun Ra’s seismic life work can be daunting. To penetrate the outer atmosphere and splash down into an unknown world; to crawl into a mind of a man with the power to transport his consciousness across our solar system. Singles offers a wide-ranging but accessible route to his unearthly sounds.

The Guardian 80

(Strut) (3 CDs)

Celebrated for his cosmic themes and avant-garde “space jazz”, the late Sun Ra had a terrestrial side that’s revealed on this three-CD compilation of his singles, most of them issued in tiny runs to be sold at gigs. Here you’ll find Ra and members of his proto-Arkestra in the 1950s providing backing for doo-wop groups and R&B singers while exploring standards such as Round Midnight. Later came instrumental Arkestra odysseys like Saturn Moon, though Ra never lost a taste for words on cuts such as Rocket No 9, celebrating a trip to Venus, and 1982’s droll protest song Nuclear War. Home recordings, small group experiments and the spoken credo of I Am an Instrument make for a rich, eventful ride.

Drowned In Sound 80

It's intriguing to hear his more conventional compositions, which predominantly roll out across disc one and in part into disc two. Although that said disc one opens with the alien ‘I Am An Instrument’ and ‘I Am Strange’; the former, right now, feels like a musical example of the futility of history as his spoken words of “I am strange/I choose love over hate” highlights our current political backwardness. Sigh.

Tracks like ‘Chicago USA’, ‘A Foggy Day’ and ‘Daddy’s Gonna Tell You No Lie’ (in all of these Sun Ra’s Arkestra is the backing band) would be at home on a Greatest Doo Wop comp, or as (very weak) additions to Birth of the Cool. What these tracks show, as well as being historical artefacts, is that Sun Ra was a competent band leader that thrived space become the topic. In these songs the music similarly takes off, although there are squawking brass moments that clearly delighted and influenced the Residents to no end in some of the more straight-up numbers, as in ‘Super Blonde’.

As the discs unfurl it really starts to become a tastier offering. A slicker, studio recorded version of ‘Daddy’s Gonna Tell You No Lie’ dazzles in zoot suit Technicolor, and makes you wish you had both the original disc-one bedroom recording and this version. It awakens the obsessive music fanatic within, and rousing from hibernation is always a wonderful feeling.

‘October’ drapes itself across its four-and-a-half minutes like a death march. Staggered brass parts layer up a sense of doom under the lead trumpet, which struts drunkenly. This could be the sound of down-trodden America or the sound of trepidation - some last moments on earth before ignition. It’s the sound of smog be it on earth or in space.

As songs like ‘Song To Earthman’ enter the listing and Ra starts ranting over big-bands of despair then the power of these compositions becomes undeniable. ‘Song To Earthman’ is a space journey delivered as sermons to overcome the frailty of the human condition: “Mike Mike Mike/Stop abusing that spike/Coz it takes away your might.”

A compilation like this is a perfect because it offers a thousand plus interpretations, swings stylistically with abandon and highlights how, while Sun Ra is revered for his ephemeral ruminations in music, he really did play with the conventions of the hustling house jazz band.

What’s missing… is the propulsion of his albums. There’s no fluidity here in the way Space is the Place so majestically catapults through jazz in a way even Ornette Coleman or an angry John Coltrane couldn’t. Disc three includes a version of ‘Rocket Number 9’ that plods mechanically; that’s not to say it's inferior to the Space Is The Place album version (it may well actually be funkier), but it sure as hell doesn’t enthral in the same way.

An artist such as Sun Ra, whose every output was so relentless (especially in the Fifties) and rich in meaning and composition, can be overwhelming to engage with in such an in depth format. It’s exhausting. And while collecting and devouring his albums is probably a more satisfying journey, to be delivered this trove of Fifties big band funk and perverted doo-wop, and to see it spiral out into interstellar space-jams in a stop-motion fashion is a huge thrill. Singles provides the first opportunity for an audience to extensively track Sun Ra’s evolution from prolific band leader into interstellar cult leader, and it's quite the ride.