Other Planes of There

The New Thing

Shortly after Other Planes of There had been recorded, the painter/musician Bill Dixon and the filmmaker Peter Sabino started to present concerts at the Cellar Cafe, a coffeehouse on West 91st Street, New York. They booked Sun Ra on 15 June, who turned up with a 15 piece Arkestra featuring Pharoah Sanders (replacing an errant Gilmore) and Black Harold. The crowd that turned up for this concert, and one for Archie Shepp, persuaded the promoters to instigate a four night festival of the 'New Thing', which would later become defined as Free Jazz. Without advertising - or electricity - Dixon organised over 40 musical acts, including John Tchicai, Cecil Taylor, Roswell Rudd and Jimmy Giuffre. Whilst there were no mainstream reviews, word slowly spread that Jazz had 'announced the arrival of its modernism.'

Sun Ra himself always distanced the Arkestra from Free Jazz - "My music is the music of precision. I know exactly the rhythm that must animate my music, and only this rhythm is valid, I have in my mind a complete image of my work..." - but benefitted enormously from the new interest these concerts generated. As well as being among the first to join the resulting Jazz Composers Guild, (a cooperative aiming to bring the new music to the public), the arkestra continued to play increasingly high-profile concerts throughout the winter of 1964. One of these, with the John Tchicai-Roswell Rudd Quartet, New Year's Eve 1964, was reviewed for the Nation;

'They present a reviewer with a difficult problem, how to render a sympathetic appraisal for what was one of the more exciting series without making this group seem either utterly insane or sickeningly corny?... [Sun Ra's philosophy] leads him to some really wild and original effects in his music, though it sometimes gets in the way, as when the musicians start talking in the middle of the piece about getting off at Jupiter and about martian water lilies. yet in these instances the spoken word itself will have a musical value, as Sun Ra's concept is well worked out, though the words will have no literary value to anyone except Sun Ra's people. His musicians were in African costumes, and they did a great deal of walking around under blinking, multi-colored lights... Yet, yet... well, you had to be there.' AB Spellman

This concert, part of the Four Days in December Festival, was recorded, and released some years later as Sun Ra and his Arkestra Featuring Pharoah Sanders & Black Harold.

One person in the audience at the Cellar Cafe sessions was Bernard Stollman, a lawyer and proponent of Esperanto, who was so overwhelmed by the new music that he dreamed up a plan to record all of the artists working within the new style for his label ESP-Disk. First up was Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity, followed by albums by Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders and the Fugs. Sun Ra would record the first of his contributions to the label on 20 April 1965; The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One.

12" Vinyl

All songs by Sun Ra
Side A:

1. "Other Planes of There" - (22.01)

Side B:

1. "Sound Spectra/Spec Sket" - (7.39)
2. "Sketch" - (4.46)
3. "Pleasure" - (3.10)
4. "Spiral Galaxy" - (10.01)

Musicians

Recorded at the Choreographer's Workshop, New York (the Arkestra's rehearsal space) in 1964.