Recently I watched the brand new Sun Ra documentary called Sun Ra: Do the Impossible, which is part of the PBS American Masters series.
It is an excellent film, that covers the entirety of Sun Ra’s life and career. It features incredible archival footage throughout and has great insights from both former members of the Arkestra as well as researchers and fans of Sun Ra. That being said, I wish it was a little longer. It’s challenging to cover everything about Sun Ra into an hour and a half and it left me wishing it was a several hour film or perhaps even a series.
The documentary does touch on Sun Ra’s first trip to Egypt in 1971, which is one of my favorite eras of the Arkestra. At that point they were at the top of their game, the ensemble was large and they were playing much of the more famous Sun Ra compositions at that point. Maybe someday there will be a film focused solely on that trip, but perhaps there’s just not a lot of video footage out there? One can only dream and speculate.
There is this apparently undated interview with Sun Ra on Atlanta radio station WREK 91.1 where he talks about the trip to Egypt:
There is also this tantalizing footage of Sun Ra and other members of his band at the Gaza Pyramids which is totally wild!! I would love to see more of this!
At any rate, Sun Ra’s Saturn Record label did release several albums of recordings from the concerts performed on that fateful trip: Dark Myth Equation Visitation, Nidhamu and Horizon. As with all of Saturn Record’s albums at the time, they were limited run and hand made so copies are scarce. Luckily, Strut Records put out a box set of all of those recordings several years ago and also released them individually.
I have a copy of the box set and it is uniformly excellent. I have a fairly sizable Sun Ra vinyl collection, including the Egypt 1971 box (I’ve acquired some more albums since the video I linked here but this is a pretty healthy cross section of my Sun Ra records).
A box set, of course, is a pretty daunting thing to dive into, especially for a neophyte. If I were to pick one album that best represents what made their trip to Egypt so great, it would be Horizon which is today’s pick!
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Horizon is a recording of their concert at the Ballon Theatre in Cairo. Running a little over an hour it is almost the complete concert (a couple songs are on Nidhamu). It is a very clear recording and has a ton of great material on it. The band (including Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Pat Patrick and June Tyson) was on fire that night. There are tons of heavy percussion freakouts and Sun Ra goes absolutely bonkers on Moog and organ throughout.
A great example of how tight the ensemble was during the concert is “Discipline 2”:
The epic “Shadow World” is Sun Ra and the Arkestra in full flight. This has a bit of everything: Sun Ra solos, chaotic saxophones and everyone playing drums at one point. The sound is enormous in all the best ways:
Two of Sun Ra’s most famous compositions are also performed: “Love In Outer Space” and “Space is the Place” and they are great, practically definitive, renditions:
Horizons closes with another long-form piece “Satellites Are Spinning” which probably send the audience into a frenzy by the end:
The entire concert is very much worth hearing, even if you are previously unfamiliar with the magic of Sun Ra. I also urge you to watch Sun Ra: Do The Impossible.
Circling back to the PBS documentary: After I watched it I was going down rabbit holes of Sun Ra material on the internet. I realized there is massive amounts of great information about Sun Ra out there, but it is all in disparate locations. Many of the sites contain outdated links or horrible web designs, and it is quite the puzzle to put it all together.
I was inspired to try and solve that problem by launching my own web site! It is called The Spaceways of Sun Ra and you can find it here: https://sunra.plencnerlabs.com/.
This is very much a “soft launch” of the website, but all of the sections of the site are fully functional. There is a lot of great information I’ve compiled here. I especially urge you to check out the comprehensive Discography page and the Archive page that pulls in documents from Hamilton College and The Smithsonian. I plan to continue to refine it and add more information over time so keep checking back!
