Description
Yellow Vinyl Press. Sun Ra was a master of misdirection. Tape boxes wrongly labeledwhether by accident or designare legendary among Ra archivists. One can speculate about the artist’s intent or carelessness, but source misinformation abounds on Ra tape cases, album jackets, cassettes, ephemeraas well as in interviews. It’s as if Ra, in furtherance of his own mythmaking, wanted to keep historians guessing.
This project began as a misidentified tape discovered by Michael D. Anderson of the Sun Ra Music Archive. The 7-inch reel, which contained a live Ra solo piano performance of 11 workssome recognizable, others notwas of stellar quality, and was marked as a 1979 Carnegie Hall date. But the program on the tape did not align with known facts (e.g., titles played, concert duration) which were chronicled in a Newsday review of Ra’s appearance at Carnegie in September of that year. With a prod from writer/historian Ted Gioia and further research by myself, the tape was eventually identified as a mostly unreleased July 1977 performance by Ra at a downtown NYC “jazz caf” called The Axis-in-Soho.
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