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SUN RA
Lanquidity (reissue, 1978) STRUT 8/10
Swirling psych-funk-jazz from the cosmos’s favourite son.
By Jon Dale
Cosmic character: Sun Ra at the controls
VERYL OAKLAND
THE night before recording their 1978 album Lanquidity, Sun Ra and his Arkestra filmed a brief live spot for Saturday Night Live. Given a window of only four minutes, Sun Ra crammed three classics into the performance: “Space Is The Place”, “The Sound Mirror”, which featured a typically cosmic monologue from Ra himself, and “Watusa”. With their membership in double figures, the Arkestra couldn’t help but look cramped on the small SNL stage, but the kaleidoscopic whirl they brought to America’s TV sets – spinning dervish dancers, multicoloured robes and shawls, glittering headdresses – still feels uncontainable, even watching four decades later on a low-resolution upload of grainy VHS.
This appearance on SNL, and the subsequent Lanquidity sessions, came after a few years of international exploration for the Arkestra. In 1977 they travelled to Lagos for the FASTEC festival (the World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture), where Sun Ra refused a visit to Fela Kuti’s nightclub; on their way back home, they toured Egypt again. In 1978, Sun Ra also took a quartet to Italy for a brief tour. As John Szwed notes in his book Space Is The Place, Sun Ra had also started to focus on solo piano, at the urging of fellow pianist Paul Bley, resulting in some of the former’s most idiosyncratic, surprising recordings.
SLEEVE NOTES
1 Lanquidity
2 Where Pathways Meet
3 That’s HowI Feel
4 Twin Stars Of Thence
5 There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)
Produced By: Sun Ra
Recorded At: Blank Tapes, New York
Personnel: Sun Ra (Arp, Fender Rhodes, Yamaha organ, Hammond B3 organ, Minimoog, acoustic piano, orchestral bells, Crumar electric keyboard, voice), June Tyson (voice), John Gilmore (tenor sax), Marshall Allen (alto sax, oboe, flute), Danny Ray Thompson (baritone sax, flute), Julian Pressley (baritone sax), Michael Ray (trumpet), Eddie Gale (trumpet), James Jacson (bassoon, flute, oboe, voice), Eloe Omoe (bass clarinet, flute), Dale Williams (guitar), Disco Kid (guitar), Richard Williams (bass), Luqman Ali (percussion), Atakatune (congo drums, tympani), Michael Anderson (percussion), Eddie Tahmas (voice)
Lanquidity, though, feels like a particularly emboldened album in Sun Ra and the Arkestra’s history. If you come to it expecting the mystical free-jazz blowouts of ’60s classics like Heliocentric Worlds and Atlantis, you might be taken aback by the slack groove of the five songs here, the group vamping on riffs that draw from funk and R&B. The strangeness in Lanquidity works at a cellular level – at no point does anything feel like ‘business as usual’, even as this album, and some of its immediate peers (see also the minimal, drum-machine grooves of Disco 3000), reference recent developments in music in a more concrete and codifiable manner.