SUN RA - UNCHARTED PASSAGES Vinyl LP

Sun Ra was a master of misdirection. Tape boxes wrongly labeled-whether by accident or design-are legendary among Ra archivists. One can speculate about the artist's intent or carelessness, but source misinformation abounds on Ra tape cases, album jackets, cassettes, ephemera-as well as in interviews. It's as if Ra, in furtherance of his own mythmaking, wanted to keep historians guessing. This project began as a misidentified tape discovered by Michael D. Anderson of the Sun Ra Music Archive.

The 7-inch reel, which contained a live Ra solo piano performance of 11 works-some recognizable, others not-was of stellar quality, and was marked as a 1979 Carnegie Hall date. But the program on the tape did not align with known facts (e.g., titles played, concert duration) which were chronicled in a Newsday review of Ra's appearance at Carnegie in September of that year. With a prod from writer/historian Ted Gioia and further research by myself, the tape was eventually identified as a mostly unreleased July 1977 performance by Ra at a downtown NYC "jazz cafe" called The Axis-in-Soho.

Tracks:

LP1

1 Axis Rhapsody

2 St. Louis Blues

3 Blue Play

4 Axis Nexus

5 Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child

LP2

1 Axis Entempore

2 Honeysuckle Rose - Enlightment

3 Space Is The Place

4 Axis Impromptu

5 Everything I Have Is Yours

6 At Sundown

7 June Night

8 Rumination

Label: Modern Harmonic