Published on Apr 11, 2005
While I have been developing a healthy taste for jazz over the
last few years, I freely admit that some artists’ work continues to
confound and frustrate me – John Coltrane being a prime example.
While I’ve made sincere efforts to discover the magic that so many
others have seen in his music, I haven’t seen that magical spark
yet, though I keep trying.
In a way, the same could be said for Sun Ra, an artist whose
work I admit I am mostly unfamiliar with. To be fair, though, his
style of music is very much an acquired taste; refusing to accept
even the most basic rules of music, Ra constantly pushed the
envelope of both modern music and free-form jazz by pushing his
music far past any established limits, taking the listener on an
often extremely bumpy ride. As Ra says in “Statement,” one of the
audio tracks included on the recently-released DVD
The Magic Sun, his audience is taken on a trip with his
music, whether they want to go or not.
The crux of this DVD is a 17-minute film by Phill Niblock, which
was shot in the mid-’60s, a period when Ra and his Arkestra were
centralized in New York. Music as extreme as Ra’s called for as
extreme of a film style; Niblock shoots this as a negative,
focusing on close-ups of the musicians’ faces and hands as the
music unfolds.
When I first heard of this disc, I e-mailed my friend at MVD and
said, “This has to be a typo, right? A 17-minute film?” I was
assured that the timing was correct – and, I’ll be honest, the
music and visuals are so extreme that the first time I tried to
watch this DVD, I didn’t make it through even three minutes’
worth.
Make no doubt about it: the music featured on
The Magic Sun starts out seeming like so much atonal noise
corresponding to some bizarre visuals. Yet, as the music dissolves
into a percussive rhythm that the other instruments seem to envelop
while following their own unique beats, the visuals tend to explode
into their own cataclymic take on what is happening musically. In a
sense, it is as if the music represents the solar flares and
eruptions that occur, while the visuals suggest there is some order
behind the confusion. After a while, Niblock’s movie becomes less
about the actions and views of the musicians, but more becoming
almost visual portraits of the music. And, while I admit this isn’t
a disc I’m going to be putting into the DVD player for repeated
viewings, it does deliver the message fairly well.
Of course, this is assuming one is able to get through the early
cacophony of
The Magic Sun. I freely admit this will be challenging for
even the most devout free-form jazz fan – but, in a sense, I felt
that what I was listening to was akin to the birth cry of the style
of music that Miles Davis would find himself exploring in a few
short years. It’s almost as if
The Magic Sun and its lesser-known composer was the
precursor to Davis and
Bitches Brew. Think about it: both feature styles of music
that seem like they’re on the verge of implosion, yet they somehow
come together and form a sphere of music that, while very much
challenging the listener and their views of just what jazz is, are
able to convege into something both unique and recognizable, albeit
a little uncomfortable.
By no means is
The Magic Sun a DVD that all jazz fans will enjoy, and even
the die-hards will find themselves perplexed at times. Yet
something about this disc feels right, despite the near anarchy
that it seems to threaten to spawn. Ra may never have become as
famous as Davis, but I’d venture to say that without Ra, Davis’s
music might not have developed in the manner it did.