Sun Ra

Joachim-Ernst Berendt had tried for four years to get Sun Ra to Europe. In autumn 1970 he managed it: a commission for the Donaueschingen contemporary music festival, where the Arkestra played on 17 October on the same programme as the Globe Unity Orchestra, and an invitation to the Berlin Jazz Days on 7 November. In the seventeen days between, nobody in Germany would book them. These were Sun Ra's first German concerts.

The Donaueschingen piece, Black Forest Myth, was written for the astrological position of that night and, as Hartmut Geerken explains in the reissue notes, performed once and then retired. The Berlin set includes a piece from the numbered Discipline series that exists on no other recording. Sun Ra played piano, Farfisa and Hohner organs, clavinet and MiniMoog; the band had John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, Pat Patrick, Danny Davis, Danny Ray Thompson, Kwame Hadi, June Tyson, three dancers and a fire-eater.

The audience in Donaueschingen was enthusiastic; the critics were appalled. In Berlin, when Sun Ra pointed a telescope at the ceiling and announced he could see Saturn, part of the hall booed, and he had the band play what he called an asshole space chord and carried on. Der Spiegel's headline was "Cosmic Chaos"; the NZZ said catastrophic kitsch. Berendt, who had five hours of tape, cut it into a forty-minute LP for MPS in 1971 with retitled and spliced tracks (Watusi, Egyptian March is the 1957 Watusa; the Berlin suite is an edit of pieces that were not consecutive). The full 127 minutes surfaced in 1998 as Black Myth / Out in Space; Berendt was not pleased. The Penguin Guide rates the Donaueschingen material the finer half; AllMusic gives the complete edition four stars and Sun Ra at the height of his powers.

This CD is the original 1971 LP programme.

Japanese CD edition from Solid's MPS series.