Angels & Demons / Nubians of Plutonia

This is a great place to start if you're discovering Sun Ra. Another album I'd strongly suggest is "Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth/Interstellar Low Ways."Sun Ra has made a huge number of recordings with his Arkestra... His albums range from adventurous to downright insane. This particular album and the other one I mentioned contain a very pleasing balance of all the things that make Sun Ra so much fun: the big band, the swing, the rumba, the wild orchestrations and rhythms, the improvisations, and the overall "interplanetary funksmanship" of which George Clinton once sang.My first Sun Ra album was actually a wild one: "Other Planes of There." I really like it, along with another adventurous title "Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy/Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow." There are a number of these wilder examples of free jazz in his catalogue, and there are also more conventional albums.My recommendation is to begin with the more conventional albums, because they offer plenty of fun insanity to begin with. "Angels & Demons at Play/The Nubians of Plutonia" is a particular favorite of mine. If you can get a hold of a copy, check it out!

It's Sun Ra.

A must-own for Sun Ra fans, if only for the studio recording of Watusa alone. Marshall Allen is featured heavily on this one and shines.

Arrived quickly, as described, many thanks!

This was one of my favorite albums in high school & I would play it while playing video games, & it would create a soundtrack to them of it's own (it was on vinyl & didn't include "Nubians of Plutonia" so this review deals with "Angels & Demons at Play". This is a very good introduction to the world of Sun Ra, if you are looking for a starting place in his massive & sometimes confusing discography. Side 1 contains material recording in 1960 & while jazz was moving into the avant-garde by this time already, it is rather remarkable to consider how far ahead of the time Sun Ra was in this respect. It would be hard to find another jazz ensemble in 1960 doing anything like "Music For the World Tomorrow", which is dissonant & futuristic, yet not chaotic. "Tiny Pyramids" is a rhythmic Egyptian style tune with a motif that is memorable, sandwiched between some fluent drum & flute improvisations. The other 2 on side 1, "Between Two Worlds" & the title track seem like cousins, in that they are both rhythmic to the point of being hypnotic, but not repetitive or boring.Side 2 deals with material from 1956 & this also is rather advanced for it's time. It is what would be called "hard bop" for it's time, hinting at the experimental things that were to come. You could think of it almost in a crude way as "Duke Ellington on acid", although Ra likely never indulged in such substances, but the illustration is still apt. Listen to "Urnack" written by trombonist Julian Priester for an example- although the melodies still (somewhat) conform to traditional harmony, their onstruction is rather winding & abstract & the tempos are past what would qualify as 'dance music'.Just 3 years after side 2 was recorded Ra & the Arkestra appeared in a film called "Cry of Jazz" which postulated that jazz norms & traditions had to die to move forward. A year after that, the more experimental first side of the record was recorded, which gives an interesting angle for historical examination. You see the tail end of the past moving into the beginnings of the future on this record, & a lot of ground that is covered farther, longer & wider elsewhere in his career is presented here in digestible chunks, almost like 3 minute avant-garde pop tunes.

Unlike most of the other reviews, this review is written from the perspective of a relative newcomer to Sun Ra's music who is not a newcomer to jazz. About ten years ago when I began getting into jazz, I heard a snippet of Sun Ra's music that was some of the most raucous and chaotic noise I had ever heard. At that point, I basically wrote Sun Ra off as anyone I would ever want to listen to again. Ten years and thousands of jazz albums later, I have finally returned to Ra in search of new and interesting sounds. I was only disturbed to find out what I had been missing all these years!As, it seems, with many of Sun Ra's cds released by Evidence, this cd combines two LPs. The first, Angels and Demons at Play, combines some really haunting piano by Sun Ra with some incredible saxophone solos by John Gilmore. There are a lot of spots in which the band plays together as a unit or plays a series of alternating lines in response to one another. The harmonies and general playing of the band simultaneously convey an odd sense of spookiness with a feeling of real excitement about the music. Considering the primitive equipment on which this was recorded, the sound is very good.The Nubians of Plutonia combines, as the title suggests, complex African rhythms with the spacey melodies characterisitc of the Arkestra. Though the recording quality dulls the drumming somewhat (it is better on some tunes than others), the rhythms drive the other players to creative heights that exceed those on Angels and Demons, creating an unexpected combination of earthiness and spaceyness. As a newbie to Ra, this album--which is not nearly as free or dissonant as a lot of his other music--is highly recommended, especially to those who are already jazz fans and in search of new and creative sounds.

"Angels and Demons" is a short 8-song collection (more an "EP" than an "LP") that shows Ra's Chicago-era Arkestra doing some of their best work, moving from colorful big-band music (tracks 5-8) to more idiosynchratic music that reflected Ra's belief is cosmology (tracks 1-4)."Nubians" is a heavily percussive LP that influenced Coltrane among others. The recording quality on it varies from good to so-so. There are some wonderful compositions on it and many lengthy moments of drum-fueled ambience - "global trance" - that sound contemporary today, and were extraordinary for the late 1950's.