For some time now it has been our contention that far too many mediocre jazz records are being issued each month. Records which have little or no sales potential at all obviously spoil the picture for those...
The problem is that Ginger Baker rather early disappeared behind “Ginger Baker”, the flame-haired irascible who notoriously broke the nose of a documentary maker who was attempting...
I was sorry to learn that Ginger Baker had died. He was in my band, The Storyville Jazzmen (later led by Bob Wallis) back in 1956-7. We were very much into purist...
Way back when the New Thing was a young thing, these Heliocentric World recordings were pathfinders, an imbroglio of organised chaos in which the established big band frameworks — instrumentation and scoring — were bent and reshaped against the anvils of free improvisation and constantly changing textures. Indeed, there is little here that is scored in any conventional sense; rather, the performances build and develop, subside and redevelop, as players receive spontaneous cues from Sun Ra himself.
Such dangerous flirtations with chaos invite an anarchy that quite often neuters the inherent individuality of a performance (eg, Cosmic Chaos, Outer Nothingness, Sun Ra & His Band), but sometimes the multilayered voices touch sublime heights, as on Dancing In The Sun. It is when the rhythmic ingredients are strongest, however, that the music is most telling — as in the often sinister Of Heavenly Things, the brilliant developments of The Cosmos and elsewhere.
There is much here that pits reeds against percussive playing by other instruments (piano, bass, trombones, other reeds); some even...
