Sun Ra

Surprisingly, this remarkable and magnificently captured performance has never been issued on LP (or CD) before. Sun Ra and his larger than usual Arkestra are caught live here – dancers and all – sometime during 1971 at the Théâter du Châtelet in Paris, France for what is surely one of the Arkestra's finest concert happenings – particularly during this period.

While Ra's Arkestra was recorded live several times during 1971, the personnel and the instrumentation presented here are closest to a October 14, 1971, performance that was captured in Helsinki, Finland and issued on a CD/DVD I have not heard called Helsinki 1971 – The Complete Concert & Interview (Transparency, 2009). So it's a reasonable guess that The Paris Tapes were probably made around the same time, even though the Helsinki disc dubs the Arkestra as "Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Solar Research Arkestra" while the Paris disc credits "Sun Ra and His Mythic Science Arkestra." (Notes writer Chris Trent indicates that the Paris concert came six weeks after the Helsinki concert, but that's probably not right.)

What is here is simply stunning. Ra's El Saturn Records must have had some intention of issuing this exceptional performance, or parts of it, at one time or another because the sound is stunningly well realized. The presumption is that someone in the Arkestra's camp recorded the concert. It surely doesn't sound like a bootleg. Someone recorded this music quite beautifully, stored it especially well and somehow, some four decades later, we can now hear what must have amazed that Parisian audience in 1971.

Here, London's Art Yard label collaborates beautifully with Amsterdam's Kindred Spirits to issue The Paris Tapes, a spectacular addition to the already massive Sun Ra discography. The Kindred Spirits LP features two Arkestra standards from the concert, "Space Is the Place" and "Watusi" and the rather too repetitive and dull Latin-based "Somebody Else's Idea" (an extremely obscure Ra number featuring June Tyson's lead vocal). The Art Yard CD presents the full two-hour and twenty-minute concert over two discs, jam-packed with some of the Arkestra's most compellingly captured and lively music