Search - Sun Ra :: Heliocentric Worlds 1&2

Heliocentric Cosmic Chaos

doomsdayer520 | Pennsylvania | 05/21/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The first two volumes of Sun Ra's "Heliocentric Worlds" recordings (both originally released in 1956) have been combined into several different editions on CD. This latest package from ESP-Disk has apparently reached a pinnacle in sound quality, while the CD booklet forwards the work of biographers who seem to have organized the chaotic snippets of information (and, legend has it, deliberate misinformation) about Sun Ra's recording sessions. Only true collectors and experts will argue over whether this particular CD edition is better or worse than any of the others. But in any case, serious music enthusiasts, who are interested in the history of jazz, and the explorations of its far outer reaches, will be hard pressed to find a more astounding and mindboggling piece of work than the Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra.



The enigmatic Saturnian big band leader seems to have based his work during this period on hard bop, though he and his band took the music to distant interstellar regions that it had never been to before, or since. The Heliocentric sessions consist primarily of exploratory and heavily eccentric solos by Sun Ra's crack troupe of jazz astronauts. The woodwinds and percussion of Marshall Allen are especially ear-catching, as are Sun Ra's mystical meanderings on exotic instruments like marimba and celesta. The first seven tracks here, comprising Heliocentric Worlds Vol. 1, are comparatively dark and subdued, with all of the expert musicians laying down introspective solos, and coming together occasionally for skronky freakouts like the one that concludes "Other Worlds" One such jam in "Dancing in the Sun" is topped off by a brainmelting sax solo from Danny Davis. The sessions for Vol. 2, represented here by tracks 8-10, are much freakier, and the centerpiece of the project, if not the whole multi-decade multi-galactic Sun Ra experience, has got to be "The Sun Myth," which is overflowing with bizarre sonic explorations that are decades ahead of their time and light years from home. It's hard to get a handle on what Sun Ra was doing during his innovative and cutting-edge career, and he and his gang of outer space virtuosos surely reached one of their many peaks with Heliocentric Worlds. [~doomsdayer520~]"

Classic

Bill Your 'Free Form FM Handi Cyber | Mahwah, NJ USA | 12/21/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Sun Ra was one of those guys like Frank Zappa, Charlie Mingus, Don Ellis. When the jazz world was all too busy in the 1960s dividing itslef--Avant-Gaurd v. Hard Bop--Ra just didn't care. Like the rest of the best of the best, Ra took an all encompassing approach. Music was not meant to be compacted into labals and warring genre factions, it was a big, fun toolbox, and you could play with any genre you wanted at any time, or grab a few at once and see what happens.



It didn't hurt that Ra claimed to be from outer space. This may seem like pretentious shananagins now, but this was the early 1960s, satillites and a US moonshot. Sputnik. Meet George Jetson and all that.



Ra's spaceman act was brilliant musically: it deflated all the genre seriousness that was infiltrating jazz; this nut can pull any musical stunt at any time--look out.





Helocentric worlds is big band set to avant gaurd. It is, gernerally, free jazz, but does not follow any rigid idea. Ra's big Arkestra-as he called them--floats around the music universe, grunting, shouting, cooing, playing great tracks, like kids in a genre candy shop. Electronics don't play as a big roll in the Ra solar system as they later did--in 1960 and 1961, this was all very new and limited to people like Cage and Stockhausen.



But make no mistake, these are great players who can wonder because they know what they are doing and where they are going. And if this is not the electric space music that Ra soon added to his palate, these albums do at least introduce the comprehensive approach that soon allowed for this.



"