Excelsior Mill

The outsized sounds emerging from the Excelsior Mill organ captured here constitute a unique chapter in the Sun Ra story, a dizzying phantasmagoria that offers a whole new view on what Ra could do. It might thrill you; it might unnerve you; it might strum your heartstrings; it might spook the living daylights out of you. Most likely youll experience all of the above before the jolting musical jeremiad is done. The CD includes the full uncut show with music not featured on the LP version! When youre Sun Ra, you dont need synthesizers to evoke apocalyptic visions and interstellar excursions. You dont even need a band. Ra is most widely known for working with various iterations of his Arkestra, but he was no stranger to unaccompanied keyboard expeditions. His discography contains solo piano albums, solo Fender Rhodes records, and solo recordings on conventional organ, the latter going as far back as his home recordings from the 1940s. But none of those instruments ever offered Sun Ra the kind of sonic artillery that waited beneath his fingers and feet when he sat before the keyboards, pedals, and multicolored constellation of tabs controlling the Wurlitzer pipe organ. Mystic and magisterial, Ra comes off here like a cross between a demonically riffing 50s horror movie villain and a futuristic congregation leader delivering the interplanetary gospel. Brassy stabs provide the kind of punctuation that could be graphically rendered as an endless string of exclamation marks in 5

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Details

Format: CD
Artist: Sun Ra
Release Date: 24 May 2024
Genre: Jazz
Label: MODERN HARMONIC
Distributor: MGM Music