Great Albums: Sun Ra – Space is the Place

Sun Ra came into my orbit twice on the same day last week, once on a poster on a character’s wall in the TV series Treme and then as a track in a podcast from the The Heliocentrics’ drummer Malcolm Catto.

I believe these coincidences should be taken seriously, and a quick Google search revealed that Sun Ra was not only a giant of 20th Century jazz, but also his eccentricities made David Icke seem positively conventional. Sun Ra was convinced that he was the reincarnation of the Egyptian sun God Ra and that he was from Saturn. How could you not be fascinated?

On Twitter, DJ Wrongtom steered me towards Sun Ra’s influential 1972 album Space is the Place as an ‘accessible’ entry point into his vast back catalogue of over 100 albums

I’ve seen Space is the Place variously described as ‘avant-garde jazz’, ‘surreal jazz’ and ‘space jazz’, but I prefer my own description of ‘entropy jazz’ as the entire record slips relentlessly from order to chaos.

The highlight of the album is the 20-minute opening title track, which begins in perfect Newtonian harmony and progressively falls into quantum turmoil. It’s the musical equivalent of watching the computer code tumbling down the screen in The Matrix, and knowing there must be a pattern in the confusion if only you could see through the clutter. But here the pattern is submerged beneath the untethered improv; the chaos of the squabbling horns; the splashes of colour from Sun Ra’s keyboards; and the gravity of his crazy tribal rhythms.

The pleasure in listening to Space is the Place is to be found in closing your eyes embracing the disorder, and letting Sun Ra’s strange and profound music carry you off into the cosmic outer reaches from whence it came 

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