DIGGING FOR VICTORY
When Mark O’Shaughnessy is offered a haul of rare cosmic jazz, he finds himself temporarily blinded by the Sun…
The renewed interest in deep space and the race to learn more about Jupiter and Saturn reminded me of when Sun Ra died in 1993. I recall Gilles Peterson playing Space Is The Place on his KISS FM radio show that night and that, in turn, reminded me of an amazing Sun Ra collection that came my way in the weeks just after he died.
Nobody can ever be sure how many LPs Sun Ra and his Arkestra ‘released’ – to attempt a full discography would be a fool’s errand, because Ra off en pressed LPs himself and had band members stick hand-drawn labels on them while on the road – and during their peak, in the 1960s and 1970s, they were never off the road. Sun Ra recorded for several major labels – ABC-Impulse, Horo, ESP-Disk, Philly Jazz, etc, but most of his own recordings were released on his own label, El Saturn.