Friendly Galaxy #2 by Sun Ra
This isn't the version I wanted to find...this is the original studio recording from the 1965 Secrets of The Sun album. The version I wanted to find was the live recording from the 1971 double album Nuits de la Foundation Maeght recorded in St. Paul-de -Vence. The live version of Friendly Galaxy #2 is simply one of the most sublime improvisatory orchestral compositions I have ever heard.
4 comments:
Sorry my friend ... I just don't get Sun Ra. Perhaps a bit too avant garde for my tastes. Even when it's playing in the background all my thoughts become jumbled and scattered ........
My relationship with this particular composition is sort of interesting. The live recording I mentioned in the post is incredible to me. I was obsessed with it in the early 70's when I was an art major at the University of Toledo. I had a 16mm movie camera and was playing around with it a lot. I discovered that when I set the camera on a tripod in front of color television and filmed "static" and then viewed the film of the static, the static was redefined by the mechanical aspect of film. It was broken down into a more ordered seemingly less random progression of patterns. I was watching some of my video harvest one night, I suppose I was under the influence....and I had the live version of this piece on record player....suddenly, time stopped...It was amazing, everything synched perfectly. I felt I had discovered a new psychic principle of physics! I repeated the experiment over and over again and realized that it was how our brains worked. How perception worked. Our brains want to find relationships between sound, beats and sight. I started to show the films and play music for groups of friends and they all experienced the same thing. Most people thought that I had deliberately created the image and synched it with the music. It didn't matter where I started the film or the music, it just automatically synched! I used this as my "final" for my design class that year and even my design teacher thought I was a technical genius. Yeah, sure, a stoned out kid with a movie camera and broken color television...I'm still fascinated with this phenomena......everything synchs if you let it, your brain creates the links.....It's a powerful tool for many things.
Remember when Dark Side Of The Rainbow was a freak thing and generally a secret? Maybe I'll try to find some TV 'fly races' videos and give this Sun Ra guy another chance .... with an altered perception, perhaps.
Totally agree that version has been a highlight for me for many years- along with the stunning horn arrangement of "Spontanous Simplicity" found on that collection.
Highlights are many- the mindbending organ intro, the gorgeous flute choir, one of Alan Silva's best solos ever, the mournful piano line in the background toward the end- I'm sure its somewhere on the tube
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