![\"SunRa_featured\"](\"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/SunRa_featured.jpg\")
I\u2019d heard of Sun Ra years ago, but even then I knew he was a jazz pianist, plus a figure associated with a more theatrical presentation of jazz music.<\/p>\nI\u2019d heard of Sun Ra years ago, but even then I knew he was a jazz pianist, plus a figure associated with a more theatrical presentation of jazz music.<\/p>\n
One day I bought a LP of Walt Dickerson\u2019s sublime Impressions of Patch of Blue<\/a><\/strong> (1965), a great reworking of Jerry Goldsmith\u2019s Patch of Blue<\/a><\/strong> themes into material that sounded nothing like the original \u2013 an approach that probably delighted Sun Ra who was a player on the recording.<\/p>\n The good: the album got a measure of play. In addition to Dickerson \u2013 a sorely forgotten figure in jazz \u2013 the name of Sun Ra stayed in my mind, buried for a while, but a figure I knew one day I\u2019d explore.<\/p>\n Jump ahead 20 years and I\u2019m still a bit behind in getting to know this eccentric, but two things recently caught my eye online: a pair of performance recordings of Sun Ra and his Arkestra with visuals created by Bill Sebastian and his OVC gizmo, a kind of mega-organ that renders 3-D styled video graphics.<\/p>\n In both pieces, one can see Sun Ra as an artist who adapted himself in part to his own eccentric visions as well as adopting sounds and contemporary synths and keyboards in a quest to stay spiritually young \u2013 quite unusual for an artist whose career goes far back into the 1930s and 1940s playing a variety of classic jazz styles.<\/p>\n Although he continued to play well into his senior years, he was still a force to be reckoned with in 1980 when Robert Mugge directed Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise<\/a><\/strong>, a 16mm 50 min. documentary recently reissued on Blu-ray by MVD Visual from very clean film materials.<\/p>\n In addition to the review, here are the links to those two aforementioned OVC-backed performances:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nThe bad: the album is one of those dastardly quirks of fate where there\u2019s no Side B \u2013 just Side A pressed on both sides, so to this day I\u2019ve never heard the other half of the album!<\/em><\/p>\n![\"SunRaJoyfulNoise_BR\"](\"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/SunRaJoyfulNoise_BR.jpg\")
It\u2019s a seamlessly match of Sun Ra\u2019s music with amazingly intricate imagery, and by coincidence there are two YouTube extracts, \u201cCalling Planet Earth<\/a>\u201d and \u201cSunset on the River Nile<\/a>.\u201d Some info on the Sebastian\u2019s gizmo is detailed at Video Cicuits<\/a> as well as Sebastian\u2019s own site, Visual Music Systems<\/a>. (Another video, \u201cReturn of the OVC<\/a>,\u201d is also available.)<\/p>\n