(2020) Sun Ra - Celestial Love (1984, Reissue)



Review:
Jazz is the lodestar of Sun Ra’s music. He travelled many trajectories in his musical life, but always returned to the idiom, eventually. Recorded in September of 1982, Celestial Love was one such homecoming. The album was also the last one released on Ra’s own Saturn imprint and one of the final sessions at the New York studio that had served as a reliable Arkestra landing site for the previous two decades. Cosmic keyboard conflagrations and miasmic percussion orgies weren’t the order of the day. Instead, Ra dusted off a songbook that could almost be construed as mainstream on paper, gathering a pair of Duke Ellington originals, a mothballed standard, and a handful of originals that hew to the theme-solos framework of his more terrestrially attuned contemporaries. The eleven-piece band is skewed toward Arkestral loyalists with tenorist John Gilmore, altoist Marshall Allen, baritonist Danny Ray Thompson, and bassoonist James Jacson joining brass section newcomers Vincent Chancey on French horn and Tyrone Hill on trombone, respectively. Trumpeter Walter Miller’s associations with the leader date back even further to the 1940s. Ra tools each of the pieces with horn soloists in mind starting with the organ-powered shuffle that unfolds as the title piece over blowsy improvisations from Allen shot through with lurching intervallic leaps. “Interstellarism” retools the 1959 tone poem anthem “Interstellar Low Ways,” but keeps Gilmore and Allen as the tandem-release rocket fuel from the original. Resident Ra-sanctioned vocalist June Tyson appears on two odes to optimism:  a peppy synthesizer, horns and hand percussion backed rendering of “Sometimes I’m Happy” that’s a little wonky in terms of tuning, and the Charlie Chaplin directive, “Smile,” which fares better in terms of tonal cohesion and folds in a quick Gilmore affidavit to the assertion. The fraternal blues numbers, “Nameless One #2” and “Nameless One #3” follow another spirited organ shuffle that more than justifies its existence with an authoritative Gilmore solo drawing vividly on his and the band’s Chicago roots. Ellington’s “Drop Me Off in Harlem” is an added bonus complementing a take on “Sophisticated Lady” that gives Miller’s chops some starlight to shine in. Ra comps gracefully at his flank on electric keys before moving into a harpsichord-like solo that shows yet again how no matter how far into the void he might venture, jazz was always his home heliosphere.



Tracklist:
01 - Celestial Love
02 - Sometimes I'm Happy
03 - Interstellarism
04 - Blue Intensity
05 - Sophisticated Lady
06 - Nameless One No. 2
07 - Nameless One No. 3
08 - Smile
09 - Drop Me Off In Harlem


Media Report:
Genre: jazz
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits