The pianist, composer, and bandleader Sun Ra was not solely some of the enigmatic figures in jazz, but additionally one in every of its most outrageously flamboyant and colourful. Once memorably described in Rolling Stone journal as “the missing link between Duke Ellington and Public Enemy,” Ra started constructing a space-themed musical universe within the Nineteen Fifties. Over the course of the remainder of his profession, he recorded nearly 200 albums. One of probably the most well-known of these information was 1973’s Space Is The Place.
Considered too eccentric for the jazz mainstream, Ra had been largely ignored except for a small coterie of devoted followers till the late Nineteen Sixties, when the extra open-minded counterculture era, obsessed on the free spirit of avant-garde jazz in addition to acid rock, helped take him out of the underground and onto the radar of a broader listening public.
Listen to Sun Ra’s Space Is The Place now.
After years of releasing music in restricted version pressings with handmade covers on his small El Saturn label, in 1972 Ra got here into the orbit of Ed Michel, a producer at Impulse! Records. Michel, whose credit included avant-garde trailblazers Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, was a Ra fan and proposed that Impulse license and reissue among the bandleader’s again catalog; extra importantly, he additionally needed Ra to make some recent recordings.
Impulse!’s involvement enabled Sun Ra’s music to achieve extra folks than ever, however a lot to Michel’s dismay, his label’s curiosity within the bandleader rapidly cooled and the deal was nixed earlier than all of the information scheduled for launch appeared within the market. A upset Ra recalled: “Impulse! was going to spend almost a million dollars in publicity. They were going to put out fourteen LPs at one time. Something happened where they didn’t keep their contract.”
That wasn’t the top of Michel’s working relationship with Ra, nevertheless. Not lengthy after the Impulse! deal soured, the producer obtained a cellphone name from Bob Krasnow, co-founder of a younger label referred to as Blue Thumb Records, who requested him if he’d like to provide a Sun Ra album for them. The outcome was Space Is The Place, a totemic work in Ra’s monumental discography.
The seeds for the album started earlier in 1972 when Ra was persuaded by movie director John Coney to characteristic in an 85-minute film titled Space Is The Place about his life, music, and beliefs. What resulted was a weird however visually arresting collision of documentary and science fiction that included animation and in addition a nod to the then-in-vogue blaxploitation style. The title observe of the film’s soundtrack was a brief piece that Sun Ra determined to revamp and broaden for his Michel-helmed Blue Thumb album.
During a one-day recording session at Chicago’s Streeterville Studios in October 1972, Ra, accompanied by his nineteen-piece “Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra,” made Space Is The Place’s title observe right into a 21-minute widescreen epic outlined by eerie Moog synthesizer bleeps, wailing saxophones, and singer June Tyson’s astral vocals. An anthemic celebration of the cosmos, the observe took up the entire of facet one of many album. On facet two, Ra showcased 4 shorter tracks; amongst them, the wildly cacophonous “Sea Of Sound” and a brief, explosive melee of voices and devices referred to as “Rocket Number Nine.”
Space Is The Place was launched in 1973 with a lavish gatefold cowl that used a photograph nonetheless from the film, depicting a regal-looking Ra carrying his trademark flowing robes and an ornate, Egyptian-influenced headpiece topped off with what resembled radar antennae. On the LP’s inside cowl, there have been quotes from Ra’s ebook of esoteric poetry The Immeasurable Equation.
As it was launched on a significant label, Space Is The Place was simpler to trace down in report shops than lots of Ra’s independently pressed albums and consequently grew to become an accessible touchstone for a number of generations of curious musicians. Rock teams like MC5, Sonic Youth, and Spiritualized fell beneath Ra’s spell, whereas the album’s prescient Afrofuturist leanings and distinctive iconography had a profound influence on Black music and tradition. Everyone from Parliament-Funkadelic and Earth, Wind & Fire within the 70s to Erykah Badu within the 90s, and, extra lately, Janelle Monae and Flying Lotus have spoken admiringly of Sun Ra.
In reality, there isn’t any higher entry level into the mysterious parallel universe that Sun Ra inhabited than this one. For its creator, although, Space Is The Place was rather more than an album or film title; it was a mantra that mirrored his perception that humanity was a part of one thing a lot larger, higher, and altogether extra cosmic in nature. For Sun Ra, area wasn’t the ultimate frontier however the place to begin for humankind’s date with future and a better extraterrestrial energy.