Sun Ra: Uncharted Passages - COMPACT DISCS

Title: Uncharted Passages
Artist: Sun Ra
Label: Modern Harmonic
Product Type: COMPACT DISCS
UPC: 090771827128
Genre: Jazz
Release Date: 2025-03-28
Number of Discs: 1

Sun Ra was a master of misdirection. Tape boxes wrongly labeled-whether by accident or design-are 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, ephemera-as 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 works-some recognizable, others not-was 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 café" called The Axis-in-Soho.

Tracks:
1.1 Axis Rhapsody
1.2 St. Louis Blues
1.3 Blue Play
1.4 Axis Nexus
1.5 Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child
1.6 Axis Entempore
1.7 Honeysuckle Rose - Enlightment
1.8 Space Is The Place
1.9 Axis Impromptu
1.10 Everything I Have Is Yours
1.11 At Sundown
1.12 June Night
1.13 Rumination