Sun Ra - Pathways To Unknown Worlds - VINYL LP

Double yellow colored vinyl LP pressing. Sun Ra was a master of misdirection. Tape boxes wrongly labeled-whether by accident or design-are legendary among Ra archivists. One can speculate about the artist's intent or carelessness, but source misinformation abounds on Ra tape cases, album jackets, cassettes, ephemera-as well as in interviews. It's as if Ra, in furtherance of his own mythmaking, wanted to keep historians guessing. This project began as a misidentified tape discovered by Michael D. Anderson of the Sun Ra Music Archive. The 7-inch reel, which contained a live Ra solo piano performance of 11 works-some recognizable, others not-was of stellar quality, and was marked as a 1979 Carnegie Hall date. But the program on the tape did not align with known facts (e.g., titles played, concert duration) which were chronicled in a Newsday review of Ra's appearance at Carnegie in September of that year. With a prod from writer/historian Ted Gioia and further research by myself, the tape was eventually identified as a mostly unreleased July 1977 performance by Ra at a downtown NYC Inchjazz caféInch called The Axis-in-Soho. Album Tracks 1. Axis Rhapsody 2. St. Louis Blues 3. Blue Play 4. Axis Nexus 5. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child 6. Axis Extempore 7. Honeysuckle Rose - Enlightment 8. Space Is Place 9. Axis Impromptu 10. Everything I Have Is Yours 11. At Sundown 12. June Night 13. Rumination

Vinyl LP pressing. Omniverse, recorded in New York in 1979 and released that year on Sun Ra's Saturn tag, has been gathering dust for too long. It's a fine, overlooked item in the vast Ra catalog. The tracks aren't so much compositions as they are excursions, with only a few memorable themes or recurring motifs.

Vinyl LP pressing. Space Is The Place - highlighted by the rousing 21-minute title track - is both an essential album and a great onramp for new listeners to travel the spaceways of Sun Ra's other-worldly blend of avant-garde jazz, experimental rock, and Afrofuturism. The Verve By Request Series features 180-gram vinyl, pressed at Third Man in Detroit. Album Tracks 1. Space Is the Place 2. Images (In a Mirror) 3. Discipline 33 4. Sea of Sounds 5. Rocket Number Nine