TeledyN

Recorded Oct. 21, 2008 at the newly re-furbished Palais Royale Ballroom in Toronto. See the Sun Ra Archive for the personel and Live Music Report Review; alas my own review appears to have slipped through the timestream and just as sadly the CBC has removed all trace of the concert from their sounds archive (the audio was broadcast Jan 11 and Feb 24, 2009 on The Signal; I'm sure there are bittorrents around). There is also a thoughtful review in the Montreal Gazette to relate the presentation to Hymn OF the Universe by the visionary archaeologist and darwinian jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin.

A gift from John Jacobs:

1

The Other Worlds of Sun Ra on Into the Music

In the history of post-war jazz in the US, perhaps the strangest and most mysterious figure is Sun Ra. An outstanding pianist, composer, arranger and big band leader, he was also a science fiction philosopher, Afro Futurist poet and self-declared citizen of Saturn.

Sun Ra's life project mixed a fascination with outer space with his African roots and wildly expressive music, which continues to delight and inspire audiences almost two decades after he left the planet.

The Other Worlds of Sun Ra features writer and activist Amiri Baraka, who collaborated with Ra in the New York underground of the 1960s. Sun Ra's archivist and one-time drummer, Michael D. Anderson, gives an insider's perspective of playing with Ra and his Arkestra. There are readings from Sun Ra's pamphlets and poems as well as the voice of the man himself. And of course -- plenty of Sun Ra's weird, beautiful and other-worldly music.

More info and full playlist here:
http://abc.net.au/rn/intothemusic/stories/2010/2977933.htm

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Australia

Notes

Producers: Brent Clough and John Jacobs
Narrator: Aku Kadogo
Readers: Calvin Welch and Aku Kadogo

Individual Files

Audio Files	VBR MP3	Ogg Vorbis
The Other Worlds of Sun Ra on Into the Music	119.2 MB	29.3 MB

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TheOtherWorldsOfSunRa_files.xml	Metadata	1.1 KB
TheOtherWorldsOfSunRa_meta.xml	Metadata	1.5 KB

The following is a lengthy transcript of a lecture Sun Ra gave in 1979. I have a partial audio recording of the 70 minute lecture - unfortunately my copy cuts at 58 minutes, but I posted some good moments below. The topics covered are uncannily appropriate to alot of what has come up on this message board in the past couple of seasons.

Sun Ra speaking in 1979

I’m talking about equations. For a long time, the world has dwelt on faith, beliefs,
Possibly dreams.
And the truth.
And the kind of world you’ve got today is a world that’s based on those particular things.
How do you like it?
You have to judge a tree by the fruits, you see. And whatever people have been basing things on, it came out to be exactly what it is.
Like Iran, and the students over there. And they’re only products of what older people taught them, you see. Because they really don’t know anything, except the things they’ve dealt with in schools, and so they’re products of the schools, and they’re the products of religion, they’re not really the products of themselves, because they just got here on the planet. So really, they don’t have any right to express themselves on anything, except through older people.
Somewhere along the way, the older people, or so-called older people, made the mistake of not preparing the world for the so-called younger people. And the kind of world you’ve got today is facing imminent destruction by beings from other spheres.
Because the universe is very delicate, you see.
And everything you do here affects other beings… well, it is said that it reaches all the way up to God, and down to Satan. So if you’re in between these two great forces, you have to be sure that you’re doing something that is possibly pleasing to them.
If you’re in between two great forces, God and Satan, and you’re doing something neither one of them like, you in trouble.
All along, every now and then the cosmic forces drop down some words to man.
Like, for instance Reverend Sun Moon came over in America and said that America had to be very careful, because God’s agent had landed in America, and America was in danger of doing the same thing that people did when they rejected Jesus Christ. He also said that God didn’t want anything else to do with man… because He can’t trust him.
And he also said that Satan doesn’t want anything to do with him either because he can’t trust him!
Now, all these people come along talking things, they’re not just talking things of their own, because as long as man has been on this planet, he never has had a thought of his own. The thoughts always came from somewhere else. And he used it, and moves along with it, according to he always twists it to fit him, you see, instead of trying to twist himself around to fit something greater than himself. Man finally reached down and
started talking about ‘all men are created equal.’ And he tried to make all men equal, which is against the law of nature. Man also talked about ‘freedom’, which is also against the cosmo-law.
Because everything has to be turned now to where people talk about interdependence, not independence. Iran today is a product of seeking to be free, and seeking independence. So, if they could just separate themselves from the world completely, they would be independent. But the fact is, whatever they do over there affects us, you see. And that’s why they’re making a drastic mistake. Because you can’t really affect billions of people and do something that you want to do yourself, in a selfish manner, without regard for anybody. When you reach that point, you reach past the level of God, because not even God does a thing like that. Selfish people will never make it on Earth any longer, because there’s some more people getting ready to take over. These people are not selfish. They are people sent to help you.
Of course, you won’t have any freedom.
You’re entering over into 1980. You’ve got a book called ‘Big Brother’, and it’s telling you that big brother will be there to tell you everything to do, because you’ve gotten lost down here. I was reading in the paper the other day that they found out one of the moons of Saturn is a base for UFOs, you see. So the truth is finally coming out. I’ve been talking about Saturn for years. I don’t remember ever having been there, but I’m sure I’m a citizen of Saturn. But I have been to Jupiter.
Some things, when you tell people…
They know they don’t really believe it, so a lot of people have done things that they’re afraid to speak of, you see. But, in the meantime, governments have spent billions of dollars to go on out into Infinity. When I first told people about that, they didn’t believe it.
Now, I’ve had a lot of trouble out of the people who speak the universal language on this planet, namely musicians. They don’t seem to understand anything beyond the earth plane… some of them rose up to fame, and used their spirituality to get wealthy, that’s all they wanted…
I move along the spiritual planes of evolution. At first I was talking about music as the universal language. Now, I’m saying that music has stepped up to be the omniversal language, you see. That’s the eternal… well, the eternal everything, you might say. It’s dealing with something that was always here. It’s kind of hard for people to imagine a Being that is always Being… and… doesn’t touch upon the phase that you call ‘life’. Because this Being is greater than life. And greater than death. This Being only permits life to be. You’re living on a license down there. You have to have a license to do anything, you know. You know, you have to have certificates. Well, you’ve got your birth certificates, and then you’ve got your death certificates, you see. But you haven’t got a certificate to be. You don’t have a certificate to really own yourself. You belong to somebody else. You can’t determine how long you’re really going to live. You can’t determine anything. So as long as you can’t determine anything, it’s really ridiculous to say that you are ‘free’. If you can’t decide that you want to be, rather than to die, if you can’t conquer death, it’s ridiculous for you to be intelligent and say that you are ‘free’.
Because unless you can conquer death, you are not free. That’s your lord, and your master. That’s your limiter. That’s your governor on this planet, because all men bow to death.

Now, I’m talking about equations. A lot of people have come along talking to planet earth, and they want to do good things, but they didn’t have the license to do it, you see. They didn’t have permission from the Creator to do it. That’s why they failed, you see. That’s why the Russians would come up and say, ‘there is no God,’ because of all the troubling things happening here. But the fact is, the fact that things are happening bad here, is proof there is a God, because He’s the one supervising. And everything that happens bad to you, is straight from God. It’s right over in your Bible telling you that: ‘I will watch over you for evil.’ But since people don’t believe that, they have this Bible and they look at it, and they only look at the good things, but really, they should look at some of the bad things that God said would happen to this planet. And although a person might be of calmness, and he might be in Islam, they all bow to one master: Death.
What every person on this planet should do now, is to try to find out how they can be. They can forget the word, ‘life’. It never existed anyway, you see. And they can also forget about death, too, because it only exists because of life. So then you’ve got to rise up above life, because you can walk out in the street and look at the products of life…
When you see a person dying, you see the fruits of life. So this word, ‘life’, is very strange, indeed. Because it’s not really life. It’s something like… a dream. It’s something that came to be, temporarily, that should never have been. It’s a product of people’s actions, what they did, it’s like Karma, you see. People kept on doing things back in the past that were not pleasing to other Beings. And finally, they turned around and made it the law on this planet for you to be bad, and not to be good. And there came a time when it was against the law to be righteous, against the law to be good. You’re living in that time, now. There came a time when the Creator of the universe said, that only those who were wicked could be saved. And that’s why you’ve got the Christian church, that says Christ died to save the ungodly.
He left the righteous out, you see.
So, there comes a time where this great battle between the wicked and the righteous is getting ready to take place. You’ve got Iran over there, waiting for you.
Iran, that’s the righteous, you see. Of course, you are the wicked because it says that you are the Great Satan. And, it says that Russia is the sons of Satan, you see, so it’s right out in the open now. Well then you have one righteous nation, Iran, and there comes a case where the wicked are going to have to fight against the righteous. It’s always been predicted about Armageddon, you see. This is it. So whether you want to be part of it or not, you will have to get involved. It’s not a matter of religion or politics or nothing, it’s a matter of your survival.
If you bow down to forces that represents death, you’ve thrown this planet. This is your great decision. So then you have to do what you know to be right for yourself. And the only thing right for you to do, and to be, is to be, you see. Anything other than that is wrong. Because you are here, and you wouldn’t be here unless you intended to be, so you’ve got to make good use of that.
And your whole thing should be, well, you have to defeat death… the kind of death, uh… what they got. Of course in doing that you would enter over into another death, because if you get rid of what you are, that part being dead, you see. So it’s all death on this planet, never life, you see. It comes down, where the savior of this planet would be death… which would be called a ‘second death’.
You’ve got a lot of things over in the Bible, which tell you everything that could possibly be your potentials, but it’s in code you see. And by being in code, a lot of people have really ridiculed it. For instance, the communists said that religion is the opium of the people. And the Bible says, they got God saying, ‘I have drugged my people.’ So it’s quite agreement. There is no contradiction. The Bible says too, ‘I have drugged my people.’ It also says, ‘I have killed my people.’ It also says that liberty, the proclamation of liberty, is really destruction for people. That word is synonymous with destruction. As you look over history, you can see in America, the first man who said ‘give me liberty or give me death,’ got both of them at the same time. And the first black man who spoke up for liberty in America, Crispus Attucks, got killed. And all along the way when you just read history you see all the men who spoke up and stood for freedom got wasted. And they did not accomplish what they wanted to. And if you… all the honors in the world, fought for freedom for humanity, where are they now? They’re all dead. And they’re not free because they’re in the captivity of death, you see, nobody’s really dead, they go into captivity. Just like the police go out and get people and put em in jail, you’ve got a spiritual jail too, you’ve got another kind of police, namely death. Come and get people, middle of the night, anytime they want, put em over in jail…
… In Philadelphia, Jehovah’s Witnesses came by, and one of them was a woman, and I said, ‘You know, every woman on this planet should burn a candle for their sister Eve, to get her out of this trouble that she got into, and ask God to forgive her. And she was Jehovah’s Witness, she said ‘Well, Eve wasn’t sorry for what she did, and neither am I. She did what she wanted to do. She didn’t ask God for forgiveness, and I’m not either, because she did what she wanted to do.’ That’s what she said. And I said, ‘It is written that the world is in the condition it is today, because of a woman who wanted to be free.’ And I said, ‘I’m not against you, but this freedom that you set up for man isn’t working out too well, and man is getting weaker and weaker and weaker every day. He’s getting so weak that you don’t have any respect for him any more. Now, unless you do something for man to have some Spirit, he’s on the way out! You won’t have anyone on this planet to be equal to. And when he leaves, you’re gone too. So the best thing you can do is try to resurrect him or do something to stand him on his feet before it’s too late.’
And it’s almost too late. Because men are making a lot of errors now. In fact I heard today that they sent some bombs out yesterday. Well, the computer made a mistake. And these bombs are on the way. They didn’t name what country but you probably know what country.
Now suppose that happened! You wouldn’t be sitting here now. At least part of New York would be gone. So you’re in a very delicate age. Everything is so delicate now. You’ve got to use your intuition. Don’t use your brain. Like what I’m telling you, don’t use your brain to try to decide whether I’m telling you the truth. It’s not going to help you, you see. I am very well disguised and concealed. So you can’t get to my mind. But, you could spiritually get onto the right kind of frequency just like tuning into a radio, and then you would know… you wouldn’t believe that I’m telling you the truth, you would know that I’m telling you the ultimate in truths, you would know that I’m opening an exit for you to get out of this before it’s too late. Because you are going to get destroyed on this planet unless you do something quick. Anytime you’ve got computers up that can make mistakes that can kill millions of people, and you too, you got to look at what you’re doing; something’s wrong. Or maybe something’s right, since it’s possibly against the law for you to do anything right, you see. When a long time ago it’s all predicted, people were told to do right by God. Of course they broke every law. You have to go by these books, you know. You’ve got these books that say they’re the Word of God. And, actually that is the truth, it is the Word of God, but not the ‘word’ like when I’m speaking, you see. It’s not that kind of word. You’re spelling it wrong. You’ve got to spell it another way, and then you would understand a little better what the ‘Word of God’ means. Now, if you spell it ‘Wered’, you’d get some light. Because it’s the Wered of God. Anything that’s ‘were’, like you say ‘if I were’,’what if,’ and ‘if I wish’, you see, it becomes as though into an abstract. So if you take the Were, and you make it past tense you see… that’s been the trick on this planet.
Now when something is Wered, it’s executed. The word ‘execute’ is a strange word because it means to put into action, and it also means to kill. You’ve got a double word, ‘execute.’ But even business today, they talk about executives. So now you’ve got this executed. It’s like I was…
One time, they had this meeting in Washington that nobody knew about. They had the Muslims, the Christians, they had the Jews, and they had the Black Muslims there too… they had the Catholics there too. The Protestants and the Catholics. I was there too. I wasn’t supposed to be there because I’m not a preacher or anything like that, I’m not even righteous. I still was there. And… they were talking some things about how to get together. It didn’t make the newspapers, but in the process, the black minister got up and was talking about Christ and all that, and the rabbi got up and said, ‘Black people say that the Jews killed Christ. You’ve got to stop saying that.’ It’s very bad relationships to be teaching against the people something like that. So the black minister got up and said, ‘We’re not teaching that the Jewish people killed Christ, we’re teaching that the leaders, the Pharisees…’ so then the rabbi said, ‘Well, I’m a Pharisee, I resent that too. You have to stop teaching that.’ He walked out of the meeting. He said, ‘Well, what does it matter that one man died, anyway?’ Same thing the Bible said, you see. I saw it re-enacted right before my eyes, at the Catholic University. He said, ‘What does it matter, one man, as long as it’s been going on? Forget him, it’s of no consequence. If he’d been the Son of God, couldn’t nobody have killed him anyway.’ He walked out of the meeting. So the black minister got up and said, ‘I’m still gonna teach the black people that the Jewish leaders killed Christ.’
So he stood there and he put his finger tips together and he said, ‘But I have often wondered why God would let his Son die. I don’t understand it. I haven’t got an answer.’
So after the meeting, I spoke to this black man, and I said, ‘It’s because you sinned that God’s Son was crucified. He was executed, because it was done by law. You shouldn’t say crucified, you should say executed. That meant, was put into action. In other words, the Wered of God was executed….’
Now you can tell that supposedly Christ ‘came to pass’. They always said in the Bible, ‘it came to pass’ such and such. Okay, if it came to pass, then it was Wered. It’s like a wish coming true, you see. If you say, ‘If I was so-and-so and if I was this,’ and instantly it becomes reality, it becomes Wered, because it has to go into the past tense. So if you deal with this Wered like that, you’ll have a better understanding of the ‘Word’ of God. It’s the executed of God. And then get over here and see how his S-O-N gets into the abstract diagonal S-U-N. Now, it’s written in the Bible, ‘Take words, my people and return to me.’ But of course nobody ever sees that. But it does say that. That’s what they asked me at this meeting they had at Catholic University. Two women stayed after the meeting and they asked me, ‘What must we do?’ I said, ‘It is written, take words my people and return to me.’
You’ve got to put these words together properly, like for instance if you put some chemicals together, you know if you put some of them together they become deadly. That’s the way it is with words. You can put certain words together, and they become deadly for you, and deadly for a nation, and deadly for everybody. I mean, words produced the atomic bomb. Symbols. Words. That’s the way they got it first. First they put down symbols, letters, words. And then, they were able to produce that, you see?…
Now, whatever you are living here, there was a blueprint. And it’s equational. And these equations are about to kill you, unless you get some more equations.
Now for some time I’ve been talking about altered destiny. That’s the substitution of a destiny for the one you’ve got. Because the one you’ve got is spelled D-O-O-M, and it’s knocking at your door. Therefore it is impossible for you to get out, because there is such a thing as Karma. So then what should you do?
You must appeal to God’s impossible department. Because the possible can never save you. And the truth cannot save you, because the truth is what you do every day, it’s what you’ve done in the past, it’s what you think every day, and it’s what you read in the newspapers, everything out there that’s happening is the truth. And everything that happened in history is the truth. That’s not any good.
You see, I was sent to this planet by… well… a Creator you know nothing about. And I was trained by this Creator, in music and everything else, to talk to you right now. I’ve been to some other planets. I’ve talked to some other beings. I’ve seen some dances you’ve never seen, I’ve heard some music you’ve never heard. About three months ago I had a vision that I saw some materials that would… well, it defies description. I saw some jewelry that’s like nothing you’ve got on this planet. It was like a big supermarket, the supermarket of the Omniverse, and everything in the Omniverse was in this market. I didn’t see any walls because it was so big, there were no walls…

… This planet could never really be condemned by a righteous person. Only a wicked person can condemn the wicked. When a wicked person come up and tell the wicked, ‘you wrong,’ they’re in trouble. When a righteous person tell the wicked they’re wrong, what does it matter? After all, righteous people don’t know anything about being wicked, so how do they know if it’s right or wrong?
Then you come down to the part where you have to get down to business. You’ve got to be concerned about what every one does on this planet, because it’s going to affect you…
Every word a man says, everything a man or woman does on this planet is going to affect everyone. So then, you can’t isolate yourself anymore. You got to really get over into the scene… if you don’t stand up and do that, you’re going to get destroyed. It’s simple as that, you know.
… you might say, you’ve outlived the Bible, which was your scenario. Now, black people have been saying a long time, ‘When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there’ but they didn’t know it was R-O-L-E, not roll. And so they had a part to act…
They all were acting parts in this play, this drama, you might call a passion play.
Passion = Desire = Aim = Wish. You’ve got to deal with words that came from ancient days. You’ve got to go back to the Gilgamesh Epic, and Assyria. Go back and read what they’re talking about, because it’s affecting you. It’s talking about God gave you the gift of death, you see. In the meantime, if you go out to Bahai temple, in Chicago, they’ve got all these 13 different doors, different religions symbols. And it’s got something about God made death a message of joy for humanity. Now you’ve got this message of joy.
You’ve got these words, and so people are saying, when they’re really happy, ‘that leaves me breathless.’ But if you’re breathless, you’re dead, you see. These words will tell you that breathlessness means ecstasy. That’s right, passion means ecstasy too. So you’ve got this ecstasy play, the picture of God’s Son on the cross dying.
Just a play. I read somewhere when Christ was dying, he spoke in a loud voice where everyone could hear him, like an actor projecting the words.
This planet… has really been hoodwinked, you might say. You had a cosmic being who came along with intent to deceive you. You’ve got a Bible that says, ‘I will send them a strong delusion so that they will believe a lie.’ You’ve got a Bible that says, ‘Oh Lord, you have greatly deceived these people, telling them they will have peace when the sword reaches to their very soul.’ It’s right in the book, you see. So then you can believe it if you wanna, or not believe it. It’s still the truth. It’s the kind of truth you’ve got to rise up above. The kind of truth you have denied, is for you…
What makes a man or woman righteous is obedience. That most certainly is not freedom. So righteous = obedient.
I was telling some people, ‘You broke all the commandments, except one.’ This was at a school and all the students gathered around me very eagerly and asked, ‘which one we didn’t break?’ because they were ready to break that one too. And they insisted I tell them, so I said, ‘You haven’t broken the law that says everybody has to die. You haven’t broken that law yet. You have to break that one. And when you break that one, you’ll be a complete sinner. You have to break that law, and then you’ll really be cookin, you see!’
I’m still talking about equations. The word ‘kill’ is also about something very nice. For some time in the black community, they say ‘that really kills me’ if they’re enjoying something. So I’m not talking things that I think about, I’m going by the words people said.
…All of this… has been going on for thousands of years, and you’ve never seen that very simple things could change this scene. Like for instance, some people told the Israeli government that we should… we should, uh, have the trial of Christ over again, and exonerate him! And say he’s innocent. And some people, they said, ‘the reason we have so much trouble is about this Christ. We should say that he’s an innocent man.’ But some people opposed it. Now, I think it was a good idea, you know, couldn’t hurt anybody, you know. But, uh, people don’t… people think everything is complicated. It’s very simple. I mean, if Adam and Eve could get in trouble for simply by eating an apple…
You can see how simple it is.
So they got in trouble doing that, which is very simple…
It means that whatever it takes to get out of this is also simple.
Because you’ve got the kind of universe that is balanced.
And most certainly, you wouldn’t have a simple thing getting people in trouble without having another simple thing over here getting them out of it.
It’s a balanced universe.
There’s nothing wrong here, except that you’s not using the proper equations.
And you’re not going to the proper people to get no results, you know…
There’s very little that the men can do, you see.
It always comes down… to the boys.
Cause there ain’t nothing worse than the boys.
Because they always gotta be thinking about something bad to do, like pulling… butterfly…fly’s…wing…wings off…
They’re always doing something bad, the boys.
But we can take everything here that’s bad, and convert it!
For instance, we’ve got this electrical device here. And how does that come to you?
Through a dam!
Not through a blessing.
See the word damn, the word dam, you put a dam up. And you banish something, you holding something in check. You’re saving something too. And that’s what the word dam means. It means, to save something. So, you can be damned, and be saved. You see, it’s all sick stuff. You can be blessed and die, because it is written, ‘blessed are those who die in the name of the Lord.’ So you’ve got a strange case where you’ve got to make a choice now. You have to make the choice, which side you gonna be on.
For a long time, people have been trying to avoid this war over there with Iran here. Because it was predicted that Armageddon would be fought over there. And all the governments of the world strove all they could to keep from having any trouble over there. But because of the Bible, there will be one last war to be fought. Now, it look like it’s about to happen, you know. It’s knocking at your door.
It’s not what any human agency is doing. There’s some outside forces that’s compelling you… to make choices.
The only thing you’ve got left now… choices.
And it’s written over in the Bible, ‘I have placed before you life and death. Choose life, so that you can live.’
Of course, you’ve got the book going in the trashcan now, because you’ve gotten so sophisticated that you don’t think something that was here a long time before you got here has any relevance whatsoever to you, but it does! Anything that got here before you, you should respect it. Because it knows more than you, you see, and there was a book… if you get it now it tells you all about human nature, you see. And you don’t have to be religious to see that it’s telling a lot of truths, you see. And since you’re not all over the world at the same time, you can’t really say that it’s not the truth. Now you have to be broadminded. And, in being broadminded, you’ve got to give your intuition a chance! You’ve got to know things that were hidden for ages. For instance, everybody’s talking about 666. That’s the beast. Everybody been warned against it. But if you get way back in the ancients, way back before history, it would tell you that 666 is the number of the Creator of the universe, you see. Something’s wrong here, then.
Now… the word ‘beast’ can also be spelled b-e-I-s-t, you see. Yeah. So yall been duped again. The b-e-I-s-t is also a beast. The beast is someone that is for beings, you see. So you jump over to ontology. That means science of being. And you’ve got to jump all the way back to ancient Egypt and you see this word Aun, which means Sun, right there. Because the Sun is always on, you see. It’s never off, you see. Anything that’s a light that you can see is on. And you say that. ‘Turn the light on. Turn the light off.’
The Sun never goes off. So the ancient Egyptians saw that and they said, AUN, for the name of the Sun. And it’s like that today, you see. And it keeps moving Aun and Aun and Aun and Aun and never… it keeps Aun traveling all the time, and it stays Aun all the time. So in that way, you’ve got to get Aun back to the Sun.
Anyway, when the white race took over they took down all the Sun symbols, you know, in every nation. And every nation fell to the white race. They fell, they took the Sun symbols down.
The Sun is always there, you see. And it’s very important what kind of symbol you got…
You probably haven’t realized how important the symbols are, but you can put up the right kind of symbol, and it reaches all the way out into the cosmos. You could actually get aid from other planets if you put up the right kind of symbol.
So you have to be careful what kind of symbol you put up. Very careful. Because these symbols also moved forward, and move backward. For instance, you take the word S-U-N, and turn it backward, phonetically that’s news. So you’ve got the “good news”, you know? But you didn’t get the Sun. You got the news. And that’s Sun backwards. So everything goes backwards here, you see. You keep on going backwards…
Now, we have to deal with the English, you see, because we are Englishmen, we speak in English, and you go all the way back to England and you find out that when the English was first seen, the Roman emperor said that, uh… they were painted blue, you see, and the emperor said, he wanted to know, ‘what kind of men are these?’ And the soldier said, ‘well, they call themselves Angels!’ Now, that’s right down in history. So history got the word, ‘England’, which is really where they sent the Angel race. Englishmen, you know.
When I was in Chicago [in the 1950s] I would always go out in the park, every day, and listen to black people talk different things…. It was really wonderful in Chicago, a true democracy in the black community where everyone could express their opinion, everybody was saying what they wanted to say, you know. I’d always be in trouble with them because I was always talking about outer space, you see.
One minister told me, ‘well, that would nullify the Bible if people went into outer space,’ and I said, ‘well, they going, you know, it makes no difference, they going out there, and they going even farther, and some beings are coming here.’ All this, 25 years ago.
So then I took my songs and I tried to enlighten the black community by singing ‘Rocket Number Nine Take Off For The Planet Venus,’ by singing, ‘We Take A Trip To Space, the Next Stop Mars,’ you see. All the while I was doing it, I didn’t realize that Mars is the fourth planet sphere, the next planet, you see. And then you’ve got Venus, and then Mercury, you see.
Then, as I kept on progress I found out that Mercury was the first planet… it’s not only the first planet, it’s the first haven. A haven is like a… it’s a post, you see, like a boat coming in and you have to dock there. If you go into space, that’s a sea of space out there. So anytime you come to a planet, that’s a haven there you see, you can dock there, you see. So, now Mercury’s haven one, Venus is haven two, Earth is haven three. This planet is number three. But haven also means heaven too, you see. Because in Hebrew, ‘h’ is equal to ‘he’…
Have we got any basis for that? Of course we have. Because if you take the word ‘earth’, and write it the way the English wrote it, some time ago, it’s something like e-o-r-th-e. Go back to Shakespeare. Even today you use earth. You’ve got the ‘a’ there, see, because of the alpha and the omega. Any time you see an ‘a’ you put an ‘o’… although you don’t need the ‘a’…
Phonetically it would be spelled e-r-t-h. If we permutate that we got t-h-r-e and what is that? Three, of course. You know.
So then, this planet is named after three. Because it is three. Of course the way it’s spelled now is e-a-r-t-h, and if you permutate it now, it would be t-h-e-r-a. And that’s the Ra.
That’s my name…
You talk about the “new earth”, and now you got me and I say I’m from outer space and that’s the Ra, you see, you permutate it, and that’s alright to permutate anything, if the alpha is equal to the omega, you can switch things around…
So part of it… if you change the name of this planet, if you do it with the name, then it won’t be here when God gets ready to destroy it. Also, if you change the name of man from man to something else, you will have obliterated man. If you change the name of woman to something else, woman trying to do that anyway, you know. Her mistake is that she’s trying to be man. And she’s going just like him. Well, call herself something else! In Chicago I met a woman, she said, ‘Don’t call me no woman, because woman means woe to man, and I like men. So, just call me a female.’ And also, she said… she did astral traveling. She traveled to the kingdom of Satan. And he told her, ‘I don’t allow women in my kingdom. Get out as soon as you can before you will never be able to get out of here. I allow very few men in my presence. The only men I allow in my presence now, are Englishmen.’
Now, you’ve got a case where the English ruled the world, you know, as long as they had Egypt. It seems that everybody who gets Egypt rules the world. America’s got Egypt now, you see, so it’s actually stepped into the shoes of ruling the world…”

I was searching for a quote by Sun Ra on how the 'righteous' know little of how to be wicked, and so have nothing to say, and in the quest for that quote discovered this transcript of the famous surviving recorded lecture. I thought it the sort of thing that deserved to be dual-homed on the internet, so here it is.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m frustrated. I get frustrated when I read articles about how young people don’t listen to jazz anymore — as an elementary or junior high school student, how on earth was I supposed to find it on my own?

This realization began gnawing at me the moment I was accepted into the upper jazz band at West Ranch High School — I was playing piano for my junior high culmination ceremony and I got a tap on the shoulder from the junior high band director. I’d never spoken to him before. He only had one question for me: “Where were you?” He’d been managing a jazz band at the junior high, but the first time I’d ever heard about it was on the last day I would ever be attending the school. It was as if that jazz band was some secret that only the select few could know about — it was hidden from everyone but the band kids under the cover of football and spirit days and  honors classes at the junior high. Even later, I discovered that the neighbor that I’d been living next door to for eight years was a jazz fanatic — halfway into my sophomore year of high school.

Jazz isn’t supposed to be a secret. It’s intended to be shared — even my jazz teacher sometimes tells me that improvising is a compilation of everything you’ve ever heard. That’s why I smile when I hear about people like Jason Parker combating the whole “jazz is dead” notion by sharing their music with young people like me who didn’t have immediate access to it. Whether you’re a jazz musician, a jazz instructor, or just someone who’s got a penchant for jazz, please don’t give up on us. Please don’t conclude that we’re uninterested; please don’t assume that we’ll think jazz is boring. Granted, it’s probably a better idea to hand us Kind of Blue before you give us Vijay Iyer (even KKJZ’s Leroy Downs told me with a chuckle that “the world’s not ready for Vijay”). But by handing a kid a jazz record or taking him to a jazz show, you’re giving him a chance to discover something he never knew existed. He might not like it, and he might love it. Believe me, coming from my experience with jazz as that teenager who’s supposedly not listening to it anymore — it’s more than worth a shot.

Yes, I'd heard jazz before 1970, lots of it, it was everywhere in the 60's. James Bond movies, Peter Gunn and Pink Panther (or any Mancini soundtracks), my first real inspiration for musicianship probably came as much from a mesmerized pre-school watching of Rhapsody in Blue as from the jacket images on the rockabilly records my mother played, but it wasn't until Kenn played that Benny Goodman LP ... ironic in a way since Benny himself had lived a jazz-deficient existence before hearing the New Orleans sound at about that same age.

But the difference was, in 1970, out in the prairies, there was no obvious path for jazz instruction outside of a few scattered books like the Mickey Baker series, and it's here were I see another issue in Rachel's young-person's quest for jazz literacy: in order to teach jazz, teachers need to have jazz teaching resources.

This is of paramount importance. In the late 1950's, during the lean years for the waning big bands, a group of the old-school players established an innovative teaching project, the Lennox School of Jazz -- most of today's 'stars' in the jazz recording industry are alumni of the Lennox school, and among them one Jamey Aebersold.

Aebersold may not be a household name to the Jazz listeners out there, but in the practice of jazz post-Lennox there are two ubiquitous artifacts of mass production that shaped the landscape of jazz history more than any other, one of them the immortal handwriting of some unknown Berklee student who leaked their book of head charts out across the newly-invented photocopies network (aka The Fakebook, once upon a time sold to us by the same bloke who sold us other contraband) and, a bit later down the timeline, the Aebersold Jazz play-along books.

110 affordable volumes, maybe more by now, each with a play-along record featuring a rhythm-section accompanment, and covering a truly olympian spectrum of styles. This was the shape of jazz to come, the jazz that was to spread out into the world and into pubs, dance halls and venues across the planet.

But that was the thing: the only Jazz method taught was the Aebersold method, and it is a very good method worthy of mastery by anyone of any genre, but it is only a niche and, in many ways it is a snapshot, a freezing in time of the state of the jazz around the Lennox era. Bossa Nova, Swing, modal Bop, even up to exotic scales, it is all about playing the changes.

Miles said to 'Trane one day, "what happens when we can play all the changes?" and its that whole realm of the reality of the space of Jazz that seems exempt in the Aebersold method. It takes you all the way to Giant Steps but does not leap into Ascension; like the Zen saying that says how the reading of the Sutras can inch you up and up and up the pole, but at the end, you still must leap off ... so why not leap off from the start?

Sure there's the old joke about the incumbent roosters, one plays some Parker licks to audition, the next plays an Ornette solo and so forth until the old master Rooster calls them a bunch of young clucks and wakes the day with a simple Cock-a-doodle-doo adding that, before you can get anything going, you gotta know the Standards, but how many of the Standards bearers can play like Kid Ory, or like Mr Jelly Roll, or even care. Thing is, just as the Amish chose the 19th and not the 16th century to freeze their timeline, there is no real reason to base our approach to Jazz in 1955, other than the inertia of material.

There is hope, though, a new hope in the recent goings on at the Banff Centre where we've seen the likes of Darcy Argue and Ethan Iverson as guest instructors in a way very reminiscent of the Lennox School approach. It is a hope that is springing new shoots all over the place and if not revitalizing the jazz (I think the vitality was always there in the underbrush) Banff has been bringing it out and packaging the transmission into forms the kids can take home. Not enough to urge the local pub jazz trios to step beyond the comfort zone of the changes but definately enough to alert the Rachels of the world that there may be intelligent life out beyond Mancini themes and Weather Report.

I've heard too how the Sun Ra House has become a part-time school for the advancement of jazz music; I hope someday to see their method franchised the way the Shao-lin Monks have franchised their path to kung-fu excellence!

And who knows, maybe there's another Jamey Aebersold somewhere outthere, signed up for the next session, inspired to create new and effective packaged methods for teaching the New Thing, using the new media the way Jamey leveraged the old-world cheap/portable LP/Cassette/CD, maybe using real-time connections to bridge that great gap of geographic space between Lennox Avenue and Portage and Main, someday delivering that space fire tone science to the gradeschool!

It's been a long time since I'd encountered software that was useful, let alone find something useful and a joy to use. This past weekend I found it, and while it may be old news to many of you musician readers, it was welcome news to me: it all started on a link to the Linux Edition of a 30 day trial-edition of the $50 $39** (US) Transcribe!

From the Seventh String website:

Transcribe! offers many features aimed at making the transcription job smoother and easier, including the ability to slow down music without changing its pitch, to analyse chords and show you what notes are present, and the apability of adding markers and textual annotations so you can easily navigate around the track. Transcribe! also has a piano keyboard displayed on screen which you can click to play reference notes.

It is important to understand that Transcribe! does not attempt to do the whole job, processing an audio file and outputting musical notation or midi - this would be nice, but is a currently unsolved research problem. The spectrum analysis feature is very useful for working out those hard-to-hear chords, but you must still use your ear and brain to decide which of the peaks in the spectrum are notes being played, which are merely harmonics, and which are just the result of noise and broad-spectrum instruments such as drums. If you have never worked out even a simple piece of music by ear then Transcribe! will probably not help you, but if you do sometimes work out recorded music by ear then Transcribe! can make the job a lot quicker and easier.

Useful, designed for the purpose and upfront with realistic expectations? The demo is free and, so far as I could tell with a day's play, it is solid and un-crippled. For the curious there is a Linux GTK demo and for completeness also an edition for Mac OS/X and the requisite Microsoft Windows version; check it out. Screenshots suggest the program is pretty much identical across platforms although only the Windows and OS/X editions permit deconstructing soundtracks directly off videos (Linux users can peel the sound out with mencoder).

And it's all true. Well, so far as I could tell. I loaded it up with a test file, a transcription I've been putting off for years just because I know how tedious it would be to step through using Audacity (which is a very good program, but ...) I selected the mp3, and there it was, the waveform, the fourier plot with peaks dropped to keyboard, and a side window taking a best guess at the harmonic structure of this particular moment in the file. I swiped across a phrase, a single orchestral chord, played it back at 35% speed, set the A-B repeat (very useful also for practicing difficult passages, or for learning foreign languages or transcribing voice!) and then tested my best-perception guesses of the detected tones by poking the keyboard sine-tones. Now this is software that works with me!

I didn't read no manuals. I didn't need no stinkin' manuals. Ok, I probably will later, but it was Sunday afternoon, the kids were busy, the house was quiet and this was just plain fun. Too much fun. And then ... what's this? It says 'EQ'. Ok. But it isn't just any EQ, it is an EQ with presets, and with intelligent domain-appropriate presets! So nice. Want to know what's groovin' in the bass lines? click Ok, what's all that high-end horn piccolo stuff? click Give me that tenor line. click -- it's like karaoke mode for a jazz ensemble! Let me see those famous 'corrected' harmonies Sonny put into the Fletch charts, yeah, that's the one, now ZOOM it up, slow it down ...

It's like having a microscope for music

I only really touched the surface of this thing, and I still have to work out how I'd work-flow from the analysis screen to actually putting notes on paper (I may use paper and pencil for the first sketch, then clean it up in Rosegarden later) but from just this afternoon's session already I know what I want for my birthday this year! The price is more than fair, it works out to be about $54** CDN, and unlike a lot of proprietary Linux cross-port software, this one is intelligently packaged, done by someone who took the time and care to do it right. Even the help pages are useful!

Finally, a disclosure that really doesn't change much: knowing how transcribing tunes and arrangements is largely a thankless task done by musicians and copyists who are not the best paid to begin with, Seventh String offers a very generous Affiliate Program, its how they spread the word directly from one musician to another; I was all set to post this review yesterday and with no less enthusiasm (the kids can attest to how much fun I was having) and I would have posted then except that I found the affiliate details and thought hey, who knows, maybe one or two of my musician readers here wouldn't mind helping pay down the cost of my copy at no extra cost to themselves and score a pretty nifty piece of pro-gear software in the process. I'll likely just spend the money on music anyway, so it's still all in the family :)

So here it is, the commercial message: to pick up a copy, or for more information, the 30-day demo downloads, screenshots, transcription methodology tips here are the product pages:

• Transcribe! for Linux
• Transcribe! for OS/X
• Transcribe! for Windows

John Norris died yesterday in Toronto at the age of 76. He was the founder of the Canadian jazz magazine Coda, and of Sackville Records. Norris was a benevolent and resolutely independent spirit in music north of the border. He steadfastly resisted

technological demands of not only the 21st century but also many of the 20th. To the frequent frustration of his correspondents, he eschewed both computers and fax machines, but he somehow managed to keep up with music and produce valuable recordings. His roster of Sackville artists was varied. It included Ed Bickert, Don Thompson, Benny Carter, Terry Clarke, Julius Hemphill, Ben Webster, Dick Wellstood, Archie Shepp, Ralph Sutton, Jay McShann, Ronnie Matthews, Geoff Keezer and Junior Mance, to name a very few.

John Norris was the stuff of legends, a CV that should frighten those standing in his shadow. Back in the 70's Winnipeg, the Norris legacy set down when I was a babe in arms was still the gold standard of jazz record stores that I could only ever hope to be the "best jazz store west of" and only dare be a peer empressario in my wildest flights of fantasy. Even by the 80's when Sams Upstairs was part of every payday ritual there were still the remnants of an earlier Age of Enlightenment in those stacks, gems unbelievable in today's world of Towers and HMV bins. John Norris was here writ across the bins like G.I. graffitti.

John Norris. Critic, editor, broadcaster, promoter, record producer, b West Clandon, Surrey, England, 9 Jun 1934. While a clerk in London, he operated his first jazz club. Moving to Canada, he operated the Montreal Traditional Jazz Society 1956-7. In 1957 he settled in Toronto, where he operated the Traditional Jazz Club of Toronto, opened the Galleon jazz club, and promoted concerts. In 1958 he established the magazine Coda, serving until 1976 as editor and thereafter (with Bill Smith) as co-publisher. Norris was the manager 1962-8 of the jazz department of the Sam the Record Man store on Yonge St., Toronto, and developed there one of the most extensive stocks of jazz recordings in the world, rivalled later by the combined retail and mail-order operation of the Jazz and Blues Centre, which Norris and Smith established in 1970.