Customer Reviews

Space Is the Place

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is beautiful. My curiousity was succumbed to & I picked this up. Space Is The Place itself goes for 21 minutes w/ chanted vocals, spacey if a little bit cheesy keyboards, excellent sax work & a lot of philosophy in the lyrics. Sometimes it gets to be a bit much but I think the purpose is to overwhelm you. Track 2, Images is outstanding jazz & if it had been penned by someone more 'down to earth' might be a standard by now. Truly brilliant stuff. Discipline continues in a similar vein, slightly moodier but definitely well done & communicative. Sea of Sounds is very much free jazz, & the waves are quite turbulent indeed. Rocket #9 [takes off for the planet Venus] should be a big hit, more space themes but more compact @ 2 & 1/2 minutes. This is my 1st Ra album & I'm almost certain that great as this is, there is probably even better stuff out there, I want Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy in particular but in the meantime I'll be more than happy w/ this. Someone recently had an album which tributed both Sun Ra & Funkadelic & that makes sense as both will free yr mind & get you a ticket on the Mothership. all aboard!

sun ra was an experimental artist and an eccentric--he claimed to hail from saturn--who started out with big band bop in the 1950s, and then gradually moved into his own sound, "space" music, that melded bop with free jazz becoming an influential musician to people like ornette coleman, albert ayler, but also MC5, sonic youth, among others. what caught their ear is apparent here. on the one hand, sun ra stayed true to the standard songs jazz is built upon, engaging improvisationally with melody, chord structures, and modes; but at the same time pushing the envelope as to what constituted music, particularly in light of 20th century classical as well as the radical statements of free jazz. this blending leads to free forms that stay in touch with melody and, for lack of a better term, the singing nature of song structures. the title track reveals this well--it swings with funk, but at the same time is all over the place, somehow holding together, though. it is just plain fun for twenty minutes without getting dull or repetitive. the remaining tracks alternate between boppish tunes and free jazz shouts. to some, it may just sound confused, but with repeated listening and an open ear, there is much to explore and discover.

This is a CD release of the album "Space is the Place," originally on Blue Thumb. It is neither the soundtrack to the film of the same name, nor a spinoff. It predates the film by a couple of years. It is an essential Sun Ra release from the 1970s.

This is probably the best place for neophytes to Sun Ra to start. It contains music that is both reasonably "in" and completely "out," and the extraterrestrial "Space is the Place" is both dissonant and catchy simultaneously. The band is inspired and inspiring, with "Images" and "Discipline" sounding something like Duke Ellington if Duke had been from Alpha Centauri. "Sea of Sounds" is a sound sculpture that can't exactly be described; it must really be experienced. "Rocket Number 9" is an oddity that closes off the album in a not-so-serious way, dropping you back down to earth after the extended space excursions of the other tracks. This is music that is absolutely great to listen to with your eyes closed; it invites your imagination to conjure up all kinds of imagery. In spite of the fact that this is very much oriented towards free jazz, there is a great deal of structure here; it's just not obvious structure. Even more importantly, there is a warmth and a communal joviality in this music that is missing from a lot of free and avant-garde jazz, a sense of play and amusement that makes "Space Is The Place" a lot more accessible than most free/avant jazz allows itself to be. Highly recommended for either the advanced space traveller or those still contemplating boarding Rocket #9.

After watching the excellent film, I decided to go out and pick up the soundtrack. I certainly was not dissapointed. The opening "Space Is the Place" is a bit tedious, but who said art had to be entertaining? The album's other classic, "Rocket Number Nine", was subsequently covered by NRBQ. This is truly what galaxies thousands of miles away must sound like. Any avant-garde jazz fan or just 50s - 70s jazz fan in general must pick up this album. Greatest jazz album ever? Possibly.

Space Is The Place opens with its title track, a twenty-minute freeform freak-jazz-psychedelic-soul-funk meltdown, a thundering acid-bop meltdown full of squirming melodies, dramatically repurposed instruments, head-splittingly chaotic vocals, solos that seem to spin off in multiple directions at once, and layers of percussion that'll make you dance and have a seizure at the same time. It sounds primitive and futuristic and progressive and playful and high-minded and juvenile and logical and psychotic all at once, and it's a masterpiece. And that's just the first song on the album.

Flip the record over, and you've got four more gems. "Images" is the sound of post-bop teetering on the edge of free jazz. Led by Sun Ra's oceanic piano, the song swerves from a gorgeous theme into regions of near atonality before spiraling back into beauty again, with the kind of high-minded grace reserved for geniuses. "Discipline" is a rolling, apocalyptic drone, and "Sea Of Sounds" is sheer scorched earth freeform noise. "Rocket Number Nine" is willfully cheesy, utterly irresistible space-age jazz pop.

Classic freak jazz. Get it.

Not being a great conoisseur of Sun Ra's work, I still feel confident enough to say that, in spite of psychodelic "spices" that might seem trendy, in spite of "etno" components, this CD shows deep and profound jazz feeling on the part of the band leader and his musicians.

And even if youre not a true jazz fan you still might enoy this eccentric music.

Sun Ra is one of the most underrated composers of all time! Not only that, his arrangements are at times as phenomenal as the great Duke Ellington. There is so much happening on this disc it is hard to even try to describe it - it ranges from space noises to post bop ballads. 'Images has got to be one of the best songs in Ra's entire discography. It is hard to say whether his Ellington-like arrangement of the song on 'Jazz in Silohuette' or the unique fanfare heard on this album is better - they are both good versions. Sun Ra has discipline in his music and freedom in his music - not many groups of the 60's had both these qualities.

Space was always the place for this master--extraterestrial act aside, Sun Ra was one hell of an arranger and musician. But he never flew as high as on this album

Unlike a lot of his 1960s work, the title track here is distilled to a simple theme, played by the baratone sax. It is almost like the 1960s modal experments of Coltrane or Miles, except Ra is not filling the space--left by modes--with improvsation, but with electronic noises and voices and textures and layering. Masterful.

The rest here is the usual fun and games my favorate marsian dependably provides on almost every album: and this is not to belittle this work.

Only to say that like the Beatles or Zappa and few others, Ra is so naturally good, two toothpicks and a lamp are enough to create music, and I would even buy that.

For those about to leap into the Sun Ra catalogue, this is one of the essentials. The expansive title track is one of the most ambitious things Ra committed to vinyl-- and it works, despite its seemingly unwieldy length. It's hard to write about an album which needs to be heard to be believed... certainly it's one of the best jazz records of the 1970s. And two decades later-- Blur quoted from it!