Reissuing and remastering Sun Ra's 1966 Arkestra album Nothing Is, the complete live recording from St. Lawrence University in NY with a classic ensemble including saxophonists Marshall Allen, Pat Patrick & John Gilmore, bassist Ronnie Boykins, drummer Cliffor Jarvis, &c., an incredible concert with an exemplary set of Sun Ra compositions and performances.
Label: ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd Catalog ID: ezz-thetics 1127 Squidco Product Code: 31591
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2022 Country: Switzerland Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded live at St. Lawrence University, in Potsdam, New York, on May 18th, 1966. Originally issued in 1965 on the ESP label as a vinyl LP with catalog code ESP-DISK 1045, then issued with the complete concert in 2005 as a CD with catalog code ESP 4024.
"On May 26 1966, NASA unveiled the Saturn V, the heavy-lift launch vehicle that would, three years later, fulfil John F. Kennedy's promise that before the end of the decade America would send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth. A towering achievement! Literally so. The Saturn V was 110m tall and the project had cost more than $6 billion at 1960s.
Nobody at NASA may have noticed that at the same time as the agency's grand show-and-tell was in the planning and that dramatic unveiling, someone else was promising "Next Stop Mars" and "Second Stop Jupiter", of which only the first destination seems a viable proposition more than half a century on. In the spring and summer of 1966, Sun Ra and the Arkestra were playing penny-ante gigs on American campuses. The music on Nothing Is comes from a concert at St Lawrence University in Potsdam, New York, a nicely Old Worldsounding location for music that broke beyond the New Frontier. It was an epic affair, heard in total here remastered, though originally released by ESP Disk.
When Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon, it was taken for granted that it would be a white man, of course. Sun Ra didn't just aim for landings on the outer planets, he gave it to be understood that he came from there, as well. It's now fairly well understood that this was his metaphor, played to the hilt, for a profound sense of alienation from a society and nation that during its short history had rendered in law the principle that a black man only counted for half or two-thirds of a white man; a country that had gone to bloody war over whether it was morally valid to "own", buy and sell another person and claim his life's labour as your own; a country that had continued to abuse, subject and even murder people of colour with relative impunity.
Sun Ra's message seemed to be that if you thought space exploration was out there and edgy, you should try living with dark skin in the South, or even in a supposedly more enlightened northern city. The music of the Arkestra was the music of a dispossessed race whose ancestry went back to the great Nilotic and Ashante kingdoms, whose present was one of degradation and shame, but whose future was sufficiently limitless to make the Saturn V seem like a fizzling stick and its mission little more than parochial.
The Arkestra discography is vast and sprawling. With dogged self-reliance, Sun Ra had put out much of the group's early output on his own El Saturn label, but he inevitably attracted the notice of some of the more ambitious and enlightened record labels of the time, and notably Bernard Stollman's beyond-category ESP-Disk. The best known Sun Ra record on the imprint are The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra Vol. 1 & 2, which is now available remastered on ezz-thetics 1103. Nothing Is... remains less well known, but it is a classic Arkestra performance, with wonderful playing from some of the group's most loyal and dedicated members, baritone saxophonist Pat Patrick, the mighty tenor player John Gilmore, and alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, who many years later holds the keys to the Arkestra legacy.