Sun Ra And His Intergalactic Research Arkestra - It's After The End Of The World (1972 US MPS/BASF Vinyl LP Gatefold)

Sun Ra And His Intergalactic Research Arkestra - It's After The End Of The World | Vinyl LP Gatefold - 1972 US MPS / BASF (20748)

Donaueschingen is not a jazz festival. The Musiktage has run since 1921 and exists to premiere new concert music, which makes the decision to book Sun Ra's Arkestra in October 1970 one of the more remarkable programming choices of the period. The man responsible was Joachim-Ernst Berendt, Germany's most influential jazz writer and the author of The Jazz Book, who heard in Sun Ra's music a lineage running through blues and gospel, African highlife, Egyptian marches, minstrel shows and ritual, and argued the case for taking it seriously as composition. Plenty of critics at the time thought Sun Ra was a charlatan. Berendt did not, and he produced this album from the recordings of both concerts. What the Donaueschingen audience got was a band in costume with dancers and a fire-eater, playing music that could shift within a single piece from Fletcher Henderson-era swing voicings to collective free improvisation to electronic keyboard washes. Sun Ra, born Herman Poole Blount, had actually worked as a pianist and arranger for Henderson in the 1940s, and that history is audible in the writing even at the Arkestra's most abstract.

The band assembled for these dates is unusually deep even by Arkestra standards. John Gilmore, whose tenor playing John Coltrane studied closely, is here alongside Marshall Allen on alto, flute, oboe and piccolo and Pat Patrick covering most of the saxophone family. Alan Silva plays violin, viola, cello and bass. Alex Blake, credited on the sleeve under his full name Alejandro Blake Fearon, plays bass. June Tyson sings. Hazoume is credited as fire-eater and dancer alongside Ife Tayo and Math Samba. The album presents selected passages from the two concerts rather than either performance complete, which is worth knowing: the full Donaueschingen and Berlin sets eventually appeared in 1998 as the double CD Black Myth / Out in Space, adding more than seventy-five minutes of unissued material. All compositions are Sun Ra's.

This is the 1972 US pressing on MPS / BASF 20748 in a uni-pak gatefold sleeve made by Shorewood Packaging, from the German original of 1970.