Kelan Phil Cohran and Legacy - African Skies (2025 US Listening Position LP Reissue)

Kelan Phil Cohran and Legacy - African Skies | Vinyl LP - 2025 US Listening Position Reissue (LP1, Fidelity Record Pressing), 180g, tip-on gatefold with OBI. Limited to 1,000 copies.

Kelan Phil Cohran was born in Oxford, Mississippi in 1927, grew up in St. Louis, played with Jay McShann and in a Navy band before John Gilmore introduced him to Sun Ra's Arkestra in Chicago in 1959. He spent two years with the Arkestra, appearing on "Fate in a Pleasant Mood" and "Angels and Demons at Play," before declining to follow Ra when the group left Chicago in 1961. In 1965 he was among the founders of the AACM alongside Muhal Richard Abrams. He opened the Afro-Arts Theater on the South Side, where a young Maurice White was among his students. His Artistic Heritage Ensemble, which included Pete Cosey and future Earth, Wind and Fire horn players, ran through the 1960s and into the 1970s. He invented the Frankiphone and spent decades teaching long-tone technique and what he called tone science to Chicago musicians, including the harpist Josefe-Marie Verna, who appears on this recording.

African Skies was his first recording since a 1969 Malcolm X memorial album. It was recorded live with the group called Legacy, which here means his son Malik Cohran on bass and guitar, Oscar "Bobo" Brown III on piccolo string bass and flute, Aquilla Sadalla on bass clarinet, flute, guitar and vocals, and Verna on harp and trombone. The music moves between African geographic subjects, "White Nile," "The Dogon," "Sahara," "Kalahari," "Kilimanjaro," and a compositional logic that owes more to space and duration than to conventional jazz structure. It was released in a small edition by Captcha Records in 2010 and became a sought-after collector item before Listening Position, a new imprint under the Stone's Throw aegis, produced this fully restored reissue from the original DAT recordings, mastered and lacquer cut by Josh Bonati, with audio restoration by Michael Graves.

This pressing is the 2025 Listening Position reissue (LP1), 180g vinyl housed in a laminated Stoughton Tip-on gatefold jacket with restored cover art, newly unearthed photographs from the Cohran family, and the original program notes from the Adler Planetarium. Includes OBI. Limited to 1,000 copies.