A few years ago, John Corbett and his wife, Terri Kapsalis, donated a treasure trove - a historical cornucopia of sounds, articles, ephemera, and images that had been tossed into boxes, made ready for disposal, and subsequently rescued from Alton Abraham's estate - to the
University of Chicago and Chicago's
Experimental Sound Studio (ESS). Corbett and Kapsalis mention the event during the
Duke University Sun Ra Symposium in 2009.
Since, ESS has allowed limited access to the archives and I am aware of three artists' works spread over four releases. I believe that these pieces are available for purchase online and due to the fact that most have only been recently released, I am hoping to draw attention to their efforts by offering streaming audio of the works but will not be offering downloads. Please support them with the power of your purchase.
First out of the gate was Audio/Video artist Brian Harnetty. Brian Harnetty is a musician and artist from Ohio, and his work
involves overlooked elements of sound. Many of his pieces transform
found material––including field recordings, transcriptions, and historic
recordings––into personal sound worlds. For the past several years,
this has led to a focus on projects with specific archives, including
the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky, and the Sun Ra/El Saturn Creative Audio Archive in Chicago. His music and
installations have been performed and shown in America and Europe. Recordings are available on Atavistic Records, Ruminance (Europe), and Scioto Records.
brianharnetty(dot)com
When Brian Harnetty was commissioned to work with the Sun Ra/El Saturn archives in Chicago, his goal was to develop a series of conversations with Sun Ra through the many recordings in the collection. On one level, the resulting pieces combine these diverse materials to create a sonic collage. On another level, Harnetty uses these elements to reveal multi-layered stories, drawing out the many connections and complexities of the Sun Ra archives.
For this 7" single, entitled "The Sociophonic Key," Harnetty has created a stand-alone work drawn from "The Star Faced One," a 2010 sound installation at the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Despite the variety of samples used many subtle relationships are heard––both literal and fantastic––from Sun Ra rehearsing a group of children fading into an answering machine, to the intensity of a gospel preacher alongside the Arkestra’s invitation to join them in outer space.
"It is a huge, rambling collection of recordings that are only loosely held together by the presence of Sun Ra," explains Harnetty. "There are rehearsals, live concerts, lectures, TV shows, and so on. I spent most of my time listening closely, as a fan and out of curiosity, searching for correlations, links, and routes of connection." In the end, these recordings create networks of reference and dialogue that both point to the past and imagine new futures.
Visit Bandcamp to purchase.
Late last year, on Cuneiform Records, Living by Lanterns released the CD Old Myth/New Science.
"While New Myth/Old Science deliberately avoids any obvious Ra intergalactic tones, it’s joyful enough to make a visitor from Saturn smile." – DownBeat
Co-led by Mike Reed and Jason Adasiewicz, two of the fastest-rising young stars of Chicago's insanely vibrant jazz scene, Living by Lanterns was formed specifically to bring together four of Chicago's and four of New York's leading players for a special and unique project concept.
Commissioned by Experimental Sound Studio (ESS), the music was created in response to material contained in ESS’s vast Sun Ra Audio Archive. Rather than a Sun Ra tribute, Reed and Adasiewicz have crafted a melodically rich, harmonically expansive body of themes orchestrated from fragments extracted from a rehearsal tape marked "NY 1961", featuring Ra on electric piano, John Gilmore on tenor sax and flute, and Ronnie Boykins on bass.
The tunes on Old Myth/New Science were written by the co-leaders based on the 1961 tape. That tape contains no compositions per-se, but there are a lot of stream-of-consciousness ideas and some of these ideas were teased out, hugely expanded upon and turned into the pieces heard here.
"The tape is clearly these ideas they’re hashing out,” Adasiewicz says. “Some of this stuff sounds kind of squirrelly. Some is insanely beautiful....it became our personal arrangements."
"After figuring out the band, the first step in the process was to completely dismiss the idea of commenting or honoring Sun Ra," Reed says. "The more interesting idea was of creating new music using someone's unfinished, unwanted and abandoned material."
Reed and Adasiewicz fully considered the possibilities of taking this very unrefined material and teasing out raw ideas, bits and undeveloped fragments from it, and developing and composing them into full compositions that the band perform and make their own. The music is rich and exciting; full and sparse; mysterious and inviting; challenging and tuneful! And what a band!
Greg Ward – alto saxophone
Taylor Ho Bynum – cornet
Ingrid Laubrock – tenor saxophone
Tomeka Reid – cello
Mary Halvorson – guitar
Jason Adasiewicz – vibraphone
Joshua Abrams – bass
Tomas Fujiwara – drums
Mike Reed – drums, electronics
For Mike Reed, there’s something inherently amusing about assembling such a talent-laden crew to explore music that was discarded by Sun Ra. "We are bringing all these people together to make their mark," Reed says. "That was the premise. With so many leaders in the group and rising stars and collaborators, everybody is trying to make their way through this life. We’re working in the shadows and you have to put a light on."
Filmmaker Cauleen Smith wraps up her 2-year Chicago residency and research on Sun Ra with her exhibition The Journeyman - an installation, recording studio, and library about artistic process, research and the relationship between an artist and the subjects they revere. The exhibition will be accompanied by the release of a limited edition vinyl record mixed by Smith that includes recordings she made over the course of her project in Chicago and materials found in the Sun Ra archive at Experimental Sound Studio.
Experimental filmmaker Smith has been a “long-term” resident of threewalls’, first joining us in 2010 as part of the Studio Chicago program in conjunction with the Sullivan Galleries at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Initially Smith intended to extend her on-going film work on jazz, radical black creativity, and the American urban matrix to a work on Chicago and the legend and impact of phenom Sun Ra. Her research led her down a winding path to residencies at the University of Chicago, Center for Race and Culture, and Experimental Sound Studio’s Sun Ra archives.
Between time spent in Chicago and teaching in San Diego, Smith produced The Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band, a series of marching band flash mob street performances inspired by Sun Ra’s Arkestra where Chicago Southside high-school marching bands would play a single Sun Ra song arranged for them by local musicians and composers. This series was recorded as part of a number of short films that Smith made while in the city, culminating in two exhibitions: A Seed is a Star, on exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (May 12-September 16th, 2012) and The Journeyman at threewalls. Both exhibitions cultivate a specific, immersive experience or manipulation of space, with her exhibition at threewalls’ generating the character of research, with study, listening and recording spaces butted up against each other in a meditation on the process of research, creation and the making of myth– both in homage to Sun Ra’s own intensive auto-didact methods and Smith’s experience studying his extensive archives.
Cauleen Smith (born 1967) is a filmmaker whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the black imagination. Smith’s films have been featured in group exhibitions at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; and the New Museum, New York. Beginning in 1994, she wrote, directed, and produced her first narrative feature film, Drylongso (1998), which was selected for the American Spectrum of Sundance Film Festival, and won best feature film at both the Urbanworld Film Festival and the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival Smith earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Please visit Three Walls for more info.
Most recently, Atavistic has released Brian Harnetty's CD, The Star-Faced One, arranged from pieces culled from his audio visual installation. From Brian's Website:
(It is) an album-length version of a 2010 sound installation based on the Sun Ra/El Saturn Audio Archive, which was commissioned with the generous support of the Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago. The title is borrowed from a poem by Konstantine Balmont (via Igor Stravinsky), which is appropriate for the illusive and enigmatic Sun Ra:
“His eyes were like stars, like flames which furrow space. His visage was like the sun when it shines at its zenith. The luminous colors of the heavens, purple, azure, and gold, dappled the gorgeous robe he wore to be reborn among us....”
On one level, this piece is a way to access a vast collection and explore the many facets, dichotomies, contradictions, and beauty contained within. The collection in itself is already a kind of large-scale composition, a finite world that points to the universe. My contribution is but one of many pieces that can come from it.
I am not a jazz musician. I cannot lay claim to Sun Ra’s history, nor can I ever fully understand him or his music. But I can listen, intently, and enter a dialogue, bringing my own knowledge and thought and experience. How to enter a dialogue with Sun Ra? Start playing along, always listening with imagination and empathy....soon, your own voice emerges, runs along side, converses with, connects, while all along staying independent; they are “co-habitating” together.
In this conversation, there is also the gift economy: finding a way to bring the archives out of the defined world and into the daylight, to hold them, and pass them on. Their energy lies in the exchange, and is how they can stay alive and in motion.
This recent release is available at Amazon and elsewhere.
“Brian Harnetty’s The Star-Faced One travels the peculiarities and particularities of a collection of interplanetary fragment-gems: the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection in the Creative Audio Archive at ESS. His excursion into this unsystematic cache of rehearsal tapes, recitations, studio recordings, concert documents, and unlabeled appropriations, accidentally handed down to us through an unforgiving yet generous history, stakes no claim to Sun Ra’s legacy––something which speaks for itself over and over again––but instead takes a joyful listener’s ‘cosmic pathway’ into its own unique imagistic swirl. Brian and his musical collaborators proceed in a spirit of serious play, respectful intrusion, and insistent openness, releasing hi-, lo-, and mid-fi sounds from the past into a new future of revelatory listening.”
Lou Mallozzi
Director, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago
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