Secrets Of The Sun
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Secrets Of The Sun
''Secrets of the Sun'' is an album by the American Jazz musician Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra. The album is considered one of the more accessible recordings from his 'Solar' period. Originally released on Ra's own Saturn label in 1965, the record was unavailable for many years before being reissued on compact disc by Atavistic in 2008. 'Marking a transition in its development between the advanced swing of the early Chicago-era recordings and the increased free-form experimentation of its New York tenure, this album also reveals the first recorded versions of two Ra standards, "Friendly Galaxy" and "Love in Outer Space." Accessible, yet segueing into vanguard territory, this album highlights a fertile period in the Arkestra's history. Looser and more aggressive than its Chicago recordings, these pieces find the Arkestra pushing at the limits of harmony and tonality.' Troy Collins Increasing free-form experimentation The album is characterised by playful experimentation. ''Sol ...
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Sun Ra
Le Sony'r Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, May 22, 1914 – May 30, 1993), better known as Sun Ra, was an American jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, and poet known for his experimental music, "cosmic" philosophy, prolific output, and theatrical performances. For much of his career, Ra led "The Arkestra", an ensemble with an ever-changing name and flexible line-up. Born and raised in Alabama, Blount became involved in the Chicago jazz scene during the late 1940s. He soon abandoned his birth name, taking the name Le Sony'r Ra, shortened to Sun Ra (after Ra, the Egyptian god of the Sun). Claiming to be an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace, he developed a mythical persona and an idiosyncratic credo that made him a pioneer of Afrofuturism. Throughout his life he denied ties to his prior identity saying, "Any name that I use other than Ra is a pseudonym." His widely eclectic and avant-garde music echoed the entire history of jazz, from ragtime and ea ...
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John Gilmore (musician)
John Gilmore (September 28, 1931 – August 20, 1995) was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and percussionist. He was known for his tenure with the avant-garde keyboardist/bandleader Sun Ra from the 1950s to the 1990s. Biography Gilmore was raised in Chicago and played clarinet from the age of 14. He took up the tenor saxophone while serving in the United States Air Force from 1948 through 1951. He then pursued a musical career, beginning as a tenor saxophonist on a national tour with the Harlem Globetrotters in an ensemble that included pianist Earl Hines in 1952. In 1953 Gilmore met pianist and bandleader Sun Ra who had a profound impact on him as a musician. For the next four decades, he recorded and performed almost exclusively with Sun Ra; first as a trio, and then in the band Arkestra. This was puzzling to some, who noted Gilmore's talent, and thought he could be a major star like John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins. Despite being five years older than Gilmore, Colt ...
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1962 Albums
Year 196 ( CXCVI) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Dexter and Messalla (or, less frequently, year 949 ''Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 196 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * Emperor Septimius Severus attempts to assassinate Clodius Albinus but fails, causing Albinus to retaliate militarily. * Emperor Septimius Severus captures and sacks Byzantium; the city is rebuilt and regains its previous prosperity. * In order to assure the support of the Roman legion in Germany on his march to Rome, Clodius Albinus is declared Augustus by his army while crossing Gaul. * Hadrian's wall in Britain is partially destroyed. China * First year of the '' Jian'an era of the Chinese Han Dynasty. * Emperor Xian of ...
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Sun Ra Albums
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radiation, and is the most important source of energy for life on Earth. The Sun's radius is about , or 109 times that of Earth. Its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth, comprising about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. Roughly three-quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen (~73%); the rest is mostly helium (~25%), with much smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron. The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (G2V). As such, it is informally, and not completely accurately, referred to as a yellow dwarf (its light is actually white). It formed approximately 4.6 billionAll numbers in this article are short scale. One billion is 109, or 1,000,000,000. years ago from the gravitat ...
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Ronnie Boykins
Ronald Boykins (December 17, 1935 – April 20, 1980) was a jazz bassist and is best known for his work with pianist/bandleader Sun Ra, although he had played with such disparate musicians as Muddy Waters, Johnny Griffin, and Jimmy Witherspoon prior to joining Sun Ra's Arkestra. Biography Like his fellow Sun Ra bandmates, John Gilmore and Pat Patrick, Boykins attended Chicago's DuSable High School and studied under its famed music teacher "Captain" Walter Dyett. He also studied with Ernie Shepard, who would later work with Duke Ellington. Boykins joined the Arkestra in 1958, during the Chicago period, and travelled with them to Canada and then to New York City. Boykins has been described as "the pivot around which much of Sun Ra's music revolved for eight years, as well as one of the most determining elements in the sound of the Arkestra." This is especially pronounced on the key recordings from 1965 ('' The Magic City'', '' The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One'' and ''T ...
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Pat Patrick (musician)
Laurdine Kenneth "Pat" Patrick Jr. (November 23, 1929 – December 31, 1991) was an American jazz musician and composer. He played baritone saxophone, alto saxophone, and Fender bass and was known for his 40-year association with Sun Ra. His son, Deval Patrick, was formerly governor of Massachusetts. Early life Patrick was born in East Moline, Illinois, to Laverne and Laurdine Kenneth Patrick His father (1905–2001), a native of Kansas, worked as an iron moulder at a factory at the time of his son's birth. Patrick first learned piano, drums, and trumpet as a child, and then switched to saxophones. He attended and studied music at DuSable High School in Chicago, where he met future bassist Richard Davis and future saxophonists John Gilmore and Clifford Jordan. Patrick was baritone saxophonist for the Regal Theater's house band while still at school. "In 1949 he enrolled at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, but he soon returned to the Chicago area to study at Wils ...
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Marshall Allen
Marshall Belford Allen (born May 25, 1924) is an American free jazz and avant-garde jazz alto saxophone player. He also performs on flute, oboe, piccolo, and EWI (an electronic valve instrument made by Steiner, Crumar company). Allen is best known for his work with Sun Ra, having recorded and performed mostly in this context since the late 1950s, and having led The Sun Ra Arkestra since 1993, after Sun Ra's death. Critic Jason Ankeny describes Marshall as "one of the most distinctive and original saxophonists of the postwar era." Biography Marshall Allen was born in Louisville, Kentucky, United States. During the Second World War he enlisted in the 92nd Infantry Division and was stationed in France. Allen studied alto saxophone in Paris and played in Europe with Art Simmons and James Moody. He is best known for his mastery of pyrotechnic effects on the alto – he has said that he "wanted to play on a broader sound basis rather than on chords" (1971 interview with Tam Fi ...
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Calvin Newborn
Edwin Calvin Newborn (April 27, 1933 – December 1, 2018) was an American jazz guitarist. Career He was the brother of pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. (1931–89), with whom he recorded between 1953 and 1958. They also formed an R&B band, with their father Phineas Newborn Sr. on drums and Tuff Green on bass. The group also included Willie Mitchell and Ben Branch. The group was the house band at the Plantation Inn Club in West Memphis, Arkansas, from 1947 until 1951. The group recorded as B. B. King's band on his first recordings in 1949, and also the Sun Records sessions in 1950. Newborn gave guitar lessons to Howlin' Wolf and was friends with Elvis Presley, who frequented his gig at the Plantation Inn Club two nights a week. Presley also used to eat at the Newborns' house and browse their music store for gospel records. The group left West Memphis in 1951 to tour with Jackie Brenston as the "Delta Cats" in support of the record " Rocket 88". It was considered by many to ...
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Compact Disc
The compact disc (CD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in October 1982 in Japan and branded as ''Compact Disc Digital Audio, Digital Audio Compact Disc''. The format was later adapted (as CD-ROM) for general-purpose data storage. Several other formats were further derived, including write-once audio and data storage (CD-R), rewritable media (CD-RW), Video CD (VCD), Super Video CD (SVCD), Photo CD, Picture CD, Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-i) and Enhanced Music CD. Standard CDs have a diameter of and are designed to hold up to 74 minutes of uncompressed stereo digital audio or about 650 mebibyte, MiB of data. Capacity is routinely extended to 80 minutes and 700 mebibyte, MiB by arranging data more closely on the same sized disc. The Mini CD has various diameters ranging from ; t ...
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Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisationa ...
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All About Jazz
''All About Jazz'' is a website established by Michael Ricci in 1995. A volunteer staff publishes news, album reviews, articles, videos, and listings of concerts and other events having to do with jazz. Ricci maintains a related site, ''Jazz Near You'', about local concerts and events. The Jazz Journalists Association voted ''All About Jazz'' Best Website Covering Jazz for thirteen consecutive years between 2003 and 2015, when the category was retired. In 2015, Ricci said the site received a peak of 1.3 million readers per month in 2007. Another source said that the site has over 500,000 readers around the world. Ricci was born in Philadelphia. He heard classical and jazz from his father's music collection. He played trumpet and went to his first jazz concert when he was eight. With a background in computer programming, he combined his interest in jazz and the internet by creating the ''All About Jazz'' website in 1995. The website publishes reviews, interviews, and articles pe ...
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Allmusic
AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the database was first made available on the Internet in 1994. AllMusic is owned by RhythmOne. History AllMusic was launched as ''All Music Guide'' by Michael Erlewine, a "compulsive archivist, noted astrologer, Buddhist scholar and musician". He became interested in using computers for his astrological work in the mid-1970s and founded a software company, Matrix, in 1977. In the early 1990s, as CDs replaced LPs as the dominant format for recorded music, Erlewine purchased what he thought was a CD of early recordings by Little Richard. After buying it he discovered it was a "flaccid latter-day rehash". Frustrated with the labeling, he researched using metadata to create a music guide. In 1990, in Big Rapids, Michigan, he founded ''All Music Guide' ...
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