
Le Sony’r Ra, the philosopher/composer/musician/poet known to the world as Sun Ra, died in 1993. Recordings from across his career have been coming out ever since, and this one is proof that the barrel’s bottom is not yet being scraped. The two-CD Lights On A Satellite: Live At The Left Bank contain 16 tracks performed by Ra and his Arkestra—which, on this occasion, included 16 other musicians and an unidentified number of dancers—at the Baltimore jazz club in 1978.
While a few of its tracks appeared in Robert Mugge’s 1980 film portrait Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, most have not been heard before. While it does not reproduce the complete concert—at the time, the Arkestra routinely performed multiple sets lasting a couple hours—it reproduces a typical evening’s arc. It begins with a barrage of percussion that’s soon cleaved by Ra’s outer-space-oriented synthesizer. Then singer June Tyson delivers a languorous edition of “Tapestry From An Asteroid,” which gets an extra spring from Richard Williams’ electric bass, which morphs into a full-band evocation of cosmic chaos. This sequence will sound familiar to Ra fans, since the Arkestra often used similar content and pacing during the 1970s and 1980s to grab an audience’s attention, then draw them in.
From there, the material steers a purposeful course, touching upon yearning vocal pop, muscular swing standards and space chants that invite the listener to join the Arkestra in transcending mere possibility. The most-featured soloists—alto saxophonist Marshall Allen (who, at age 100, is releasing his first solo album next month), tenor saxophonist John Gilmore and Ra on a variety of keyboards—are in fine and flexible form, alternately affirming and shaking up genre conventions.
While this set exemplifies what was great about Ra and his band at the time, it also speaks to the present. Elections around the world attest to human dissatisfaction with their options as they trash contemporary solutions and reach back to trashy old ones. Ra fused the best aspects of African-American popular and art music with the optimism inherent in speculative fiction that humans could improve their lot by letting go of conventional ways and prejudices. Given the way things are these days, realizing the impossible and traveling the spaceways sounds pretty appealing. [Resonance]
—Bill Meyer