Sun Ra: Jazz By Sun Ra (180g, bonus track) [JAZZ WAX]

Why you'll love it

This edition comes on 180g vinyl in mono, with "Swing a Little Taste" added as a bonus. Recorded in Chicago in 1956, it's the first Sun Ra album and the start of one of the most prolific recording careers in jazz.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Mono
• Bonus track

About the album

Before the Saturn talk, the space costumes and the synthesizers, Sun Ra was a Chicago bandleader with a very tight band and some very big ideas. On July 12, 1956, he took the Arkestra into Universal Recording in Chicago, and Tom Wilson issued the results the next year on his small Transition label, with a booklet of Sun Ra's writing and photographs tucked inside.

The music sits between swinging big band and post-bop, already tilting toward the cosmos. John Gilmore's tenor and Pat Patrick's baritone lead the horns, Julian Priester plays trombone, Richard Evans is on bass and Robert Barry on drums, while Sun Ra moves between piano and organ. "Brainville," "Call for All Demons" and "Future" point toward the space-age records to come, Evans contributes "Lullaby for Realville," and "Sun Song" gave the album its later name.

Delmark reissued it in 1967 as Sun Song, and "Swing a Little Taste" first turned up on Transition's Jazz in Transition sampler. Wilson, for his part, went on to produce Simon & Garfunkel and the Velvet Underground, which is quite a range for one man's address book.

Also at Kops: more Sun Ra on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Jazz Wax Records (cat# JWR 4645), a reissue of the 1957 album.