Legendary sax player, EVI master, and composer Marshall Allen, a vital member of the Sun Ra Arkestra since 1957 and its dauntless bandleader since 1995, celebrated his 100th birthday on May 25, 2024. The double album Live in Philadelphia celebrates this cosmic event with a double album, featuring Allen’s Ghost Horizons ensemble with Arkestras guitarist DMHotep in nine live performances, organized by Ars Nova Workshop‘s series of concerts at its home venue, Solar Myth between 2022 and 2024. These performances traveled the spaceways, alongside an all-star cast of rotating musicians including arkestra’s trumpeter Michael Ray and trombonist Dave Davis, William Parker, James Brandon Lewis, Immanuel Wilkins, Elliott Levin, Eric Revis, Chad Taylor, Yo La Tengo’s James McNew, The War on Drugs’ Charlie Hall, and Wolf Eyes.

Sun Ra moved the Arkestra to Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood in the late 1960s, the city he referred to as «Death’s Headquarters». Solar Myth is titled after one of the Arkestra’s myriad forms. Allen, who stopped touring outside the United States due to health issues. But he is still a productive centenarian. He found in Solar Myth a place where he could still play and spread the eternal gospel of Sun Ra and expand his legacy, with the same kind of creativity, urgency, and vitality that characterized his all career. The first Ghost Horizons performance took place in November 2022, with Allen and DMHotep joined by Arkestra’s trombonist Dave Davis, bassist Luke Stewart of Irreversible Entanglements, and drummer and recent Philadelphia transplant Chad Taylor. The album opens with their take on Sun Ra’s classic «Seductive Fantasy».

The music flows along sixteen pieces and explores the infinite, adventurous spaceways, with the same irresistible cosmic drive, covering a few classic Sun Ra’s pieces and one poem alongside Allen’s original compositions and loose improvisations. It shows how Sun Ra’s futurist, inclusive musical vision and seemingly futurist sonic experiences can adapt organically into diverse improvisational mindsets – Wolf Eyes’ textured electronic noisescapes and cryptic recitations of Wolf Eyes; to William Parker’s hypnotic, trance-like bass lines; the rock-tinged groove of Yo La Tengo bassist James McNew and The War on Drugs drummer Charlie Hall; and the Afro-Cuban percussion of the Ade Ilu Lukumi Batá Ensemble. Allen does not sound as summarizing his remarkable career, but as a musician who is ready to explore more fresh sonic territories and cosmic dreams throughout this millennium.

Eyal Hareuveni

from https://salt-peanuts.eu