Sun Ra

One of the key but underappreciated episodes in avant-garde jazz, Sun Ra's Atlantis sounds far out even today. Rather than a full-on assault on the senses, Atlantis is an exercise in build-up, with long, almost forlorn passages of Ra on electric keyboards setting a vast echo chamber for his Arkestra to spring forth within. Captured during one of the most adventurous periods for Sun Ra, *Atlantis* features the orchestral perfection of the best big bands of the century-and then proceeds towards mutirhythmic explosions of intensity, all of it couched in Sun Ra's mixture of interglactic mysticism and heaping doses of experiments in tone, tempo, and texture. --Andrew Bartlett