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For anyone already aboard the Sun Ra mothership, this latest release from the man and his Arkestra on the Dead Currencies label is going to fast become a key missing piece to the overall puzzle as well as a favoured edition from the catalogue. This is a collection of unreleased material that spans twenty years, the earliest being a 1971 blues riff all the way to a 1990 solo piano piece recorded just three years before Sun Ra’s death. As with so much of his work however, the pieces are completely untethered by time or era, and as you would expect from an artist whose legend has it around 1936/7 was “transported to a planet he identified as Saturn and told he would speak through music and the world would listen”, there is a cosmic wondrousness knitting these sounds and vibrations together. The music on this collection has an otherworldliness for sure, but the reason I believe it could become a go-to post in the Arkestra catalogue is an underlying accessibility to the music. Yes, there is a bold, DIY vision at its core, but every piece offers a sense of dramatic melodic adventure with an ear for mood and dynamics too, not to mention a hard-earned eloquence to some of the musicianship, especially the piano and keyboard work.
One enticing touch for the collectors that Dead Currencies are doing with this release is replicating the method and medium with which Sun Ra released his original 1950s recordings on his own El Saturn label. Back then, they would be put out in limited vinyl editions with individually printed and pasted on album sleeves. This 2024 physical edition of ‘Kingdom Of Discipline’ is doing exactly the same, with the vinyl edition available in a run of just 75 copies. That hands-on cottage attitude and music industry shunning mentality can also be heard in the grooves too; the aforementioned DIY ethics are audible. Let us not forget this is an artist releasing tape machine home recordings long before that lo-fi bedroom hero Daniel Johnston pressed record and even before Joe Meek blew open the possibilities in sound achievable from a home studio situation.
The album begins with Tone Poem #9 wherein the listener is beamed back to 1978 and a rehearsal at Saturn House on Morton Street in West Philadelphia. The first voice you hear is Sun Ra himself, instructing the Arkestra of the time (a highly regarded period for the collective) on the directions of travel. The sound here is very grainy, sandy and hazy in excelsis but somehow traditional in its cool jazz vibrations while the voice of Ra singing the lead melody lines and calling out the key changes anchors and lends a musical formality to the far-out explorations.
Love In Outer Space is not unlike a 1940s fairground attraction, you can taste the sawdust and envisage the hand puppets while The Schimmel Impromptu is a solo piano piece with more than a hint of Monk to its flourishes and notes-between-the-notes pounding. Pleiades (1980) features wind instrumentation and lo-fi percussion punctuation before Reel 191 Blues arrives as an insistent album highlight. It is held together by a basic groove over which the organ, sax and trumpet tussle and exhale with both joy and recognisable sixties bop style references.
The title track revives the delightfully off-piste piano excursions before closing track Sophisticated Lady finds Sun Ra in a live situation, attacking a piece that is jazz standard in form with all the shredding attitude of a true punk provocateur. This is undoubtedly one of those occasional archive releases that will find a natural home in acceptance as a vital part of the ever-expanding Sun Ra & His Arkestra catalogue.
Kingdom of Discipline (25th October 2024) Dead Currencies
Bandcamp: https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/kingdom-of-discipline
