Sun Ra - Somewhere Over the Rainbow - VINYL LP

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.

Sun Ra, the extraordinary, outlandish, and sometimes controversial pianist, is often described as an Inchacquired tasteInch, with a massive and diverse catalog. This is a good place to start for uninitiated or dismissive listeners. The album showcases Ra's grounding in the jazz tradition, with unique takes on standards like InchTime After Time,Inch InchEasy to Love,Inch and InchBut Not for MeInch. Not unordinary for Sun Ra, the recording process was informal; InchCan This Be Love?Inch was recorded in his Chicago apartment in 1955; he is accompanied only by the great Wilbur Ware on bass. The other five tracks, which feature, among others, Ra's longtime associate John Gilmore on tenor saxophone, were recorded at the Choreographer's Workshop rehearsal space in 1962 and 1963.

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.