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Around the globe, many consider America's greatest contribution to cultural richness the art of jazz. A JAZZ ARTIST FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM -- SUN RA by Dave Reaboi "Anyone can make sense playing in tune. But can you make sense playing out of tune? If someone's playing off-key the rest of us will do the same. And then it will sound right."-- Sun RaSun Ra's records are often difficult to listen to. They have been drawing animated responses ranging from "resplendent" to "noise" to "shit" since their original release, beginning in earnest in the early 1960s. Listening solely to the music, images of isolation in space are conjured. The listener can picture instruments floating through a void of rhythm, sometimes soothing, sometimes furious. Sun Ra's music was performance art that, unlike most of its contemporaries, is still a valid and tasteful musical statement. His performances, right up until his death in 1993, were legendary and highly influential. Listening to a record like Atlantis (Evidence), the concert where it was recorded improvisationally in 1967 is evoked.
In the dark of a sweaty college auditorium, filled with would-be hippies and pseudo-radicals, an infectious drumbeat begins, sounding eerily suspended in time. A bizarre film show provides the flashed lighting; the featured color being chosen by Sun Ra himself moments before the performance. Then musicians in his black-only big band, in homemade helmets and outer-space costume constructed from exotic material, creep through the crowd, playing their instruments in a "knot of dissonance" until the room was soaking with this "polyrhythmic snarl." Horn and reed players attack their instruments, each other, and the audience with equal unquantifiable intensity. Statues and glowing balls are paraded onto the stage by dancers in costume moving to their own inner rhythms. A chant begins, and Sun Ra, wearing a "working model of the solar system," emerges from backstage and ceremoniously occupies a "cockpit of electronics" that he will physically and emotionally abuse for the next three hours. By this time about a quarter of the audience has abandoned the performance in panic. Space Is The Place (Pantheon) is Yale Anthropology professor John F. Szwed's ambitious attempt to sort out and dispel the many myths surrounding Sun Ra and his musical cult of personality, the Myth Science, Astro-Infinity Arkestra or whatever name they were assuming for a different LP or performance. Sun Ra's performances were focused with "rationale and dramatic coherence," Szwed reasons, and drawn from "mythic themes, Afro-American liturgy, science fiction, black cabaret, and vaudeville." He attempts to tug Sun Ra's odd fashion sense and fanatical devotion to his own dually primitive and futuristic dogma into the realm of mere idiosyncrasy. In this attempt, the Yale professor falls short. It is a massive task, even if the reader suspends his belief in a reality distantly resembling our own. This reader can only believe that Sun Ra-while advancing a beautiful conception of primitivist music-was what one would call "nuts." However, in relating the "lives and times" of the man known as Sun Ra (he leapt from reclusive Herman "Sonny" Blount of Birmingham, Alabama to le Sony'r Ra of the planet Saturn), John Szwed has created a book of curious interest and intoxicating reading. The tale of this "interplanetary" jazz pianist is told with readability, depth, and organization.
For example, in perfect logical time, the author introduces and deals with the subject of noise. He places Sun Ra chronologically ahead of his contemporaries-both in jazz and modern classical music-in terms of the loosening of any rhythmic, harmonic, or melodic constraints. Szwed is careful not to intricately describe the music until the reader's sympathy for the character of Sun Ra develops. At that point, he can comprehend the cauldron of wacky logic that his compositions are poured from. The heart of the book is comprised of tales of Sun Ra's unorthodoxy. In one instance, he handed each member of his horn section an obscure foreign stringed instrument minutes before a live recording session. He added the element of inability to produce "honest" sounds from musicians that could not play licks, or lines they picked up from records. He would demand an obedient experimentation in music that included a distance from earthly indulgences like drugs, alcohol, and women. Free from distractions, he claimed, musicians could reach their unique selves. Under Sun Ra's guidance, saxophonists Pharaoh Sanders, John Gilmore and Marshall Allen, through their instruments, produced their own primitive human voices and spirits, raging and guttural. A generous helping of Space Is The Place is the chronicle of the magical and remarkable coexistence of creativity that was the New York jazz scene of the early 1960s, with obvious emphasis on the influence and presence of Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra. Szwed weaves together elements and personalities of the emerging avant-garde (tentatively called "the new thing") with slick agility. He recounts countless anecdotes of this period without tiring the reader. For example, one night at Slug's (the Greenwich Village club the Arkestra inhabited on Mondays for six years), a table in the cramped room was occupied by Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane. Of the three giants of jazz in attendance, none ever played with Sun Ra, but all three acknowledged the influence and admiration for his innovations. And recently, Funkadelic patriarch George Clinton, who's Parliafunkadelicment Thang is a living descendent of the Arkestra, said once of Sun Ra, "he's out to lunch; and I'm eating there too." Reading Space Is The Place will doubtless impress no one with Sun Ra's exceedingly bad poetry. (In fact, the presence of his poetry in the book chops away mightily at the author's contention that Sun Ra was in fact sane.) Szwed's remarkably researched and thoughtfully written book could very well entertain many into becoming appreciators of the extraterrestrial pianist, composer, and innovator of music. Dave Reaboi is the host of "Terry Gilliam's Jolity Farm,"
an eclectic late-night music program on WRGW 540AM.
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Diana Krall |
In concert, or gigging at a club, her confident yet playful piano style reminds the listener that jazz is still alive and well. Backed by Russell Malone, a virtuoso guitar player, whose deft touch on the frets anchors the melody and provides the richness of an entire rhythm section, Krall's gentle touch on the keys allows the melody to bounce back and forth seamlessly between piano and guitar.
Malone's riffs, ranging from Delta blues and Berry-esque rock 'n' roll, to Be-bop and lush orchestral ballads, pop up unexpectedly, but never startle. Like all great jazz, it's a conversation between old friends -- smooth and peppery, relaxed and exciting.
Krall's voice is the water in the river. It's it. "Wild honey with a spoonful of scotch," is how jazz writer Terry Teachout describes it. Her voice and phrasing take possession of the lyric, reinventing songs that have been sung a hundred thousand times by a thousand different singers.
In an age of pre-packaged musical acts, Krall is the real McCoy. She plays for the music.
To find more information on Diana Krall, go to Impulse! online at http://www.impulserecords.com/.
To purchase jazz music online, go to www.amazon.com.
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