Colter Walls: Sun Ra - A True Birthday

At about the same time he founded the Arkestra. The group’s earliest recordings from these years sound surprisingly like traditional big band tracks when compared to their later works, yet even here there are subtle innovations and hints at what was to come. One early track, “India” (from the album Super-Sonic Jazz) makes use of electric piano long before the first “fusion” albums of the late 1960s. Another, slightly later recording, “Brainville,” features an oddly insistent baritone-sax note amid the Arkestra’s other, Ellingtonian accents. Perhaps most affecting is Ra’s solo keyboard track, “Advice to Medics,” titled after his history of playing for what his biographer John Szwed describes as a therapy-through-music group that “included catatonics and severe schizophrenics.” (The biographer reports that one patient, breaking a years-long silence, approached Ra to ask: “Do you call that music?”)


Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.