Sun Ra And His Myth Science Arkestra - When Angels Speak of Love (2019 Remaster) (1966/2019)

When Angels Speak of Love, released in 1966 on Sun Ra's Saturn label, is a rarity, there having been limited pressings (150 copies, by one estimate), which were sold thru the mail and at concerts and club dates. The tracks were taped in New York during two 1963 sessions at the Choreographer's Workshop, a rehearsal space/recording den with warehouse acoustics. Ra spent countless hours at the CW from 1961 to 1964 sharpening the Arkestra during exhaustive musical huddles. John Corbett calls this "one of the most continuous, best-documented periods of Ra's work"; much tape from these seminal sessions has survived and been issued on LP, CD and digitally.

William Ruhlmann at AllMusic observed, "Sun Ra's music is often described as being so far outside the jazz mainstream as to be less a challenge to it than a largely irrelevant curiosity. But When Angels Speak of Love is very much within then-current trends in jazz as performed by such innovators as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Walter Miller's trumpet on 'The Idea of It All,' for example, indicates he'd been listening to Miles Davis, even as John Gilmore's squealing tenor suggests Coltrane; and, on 'Ecstasy of Being,' what John Corbett calls Danny Davis' 'excruciated alto' suggests Coleman. Ra himself plays busy, seemingly formless passages that are reminiscent of Cecil Taylor. This is a Sun Ra album that is more conventionally unconventional than most, with tracks you could program next to those of his 1960s contemporaries and have them fit right in."

Known Saturn LP copies of When Angels Speak were pressed in mono (as was a CD on Evidence), but stereo versions of three tracks have surfaced. Two (the title track and an abridged version of "Next Stop Mars") were included on a 1989 Blast First/Restless Records release. In 2016, a stereo "Celestial Fantasy" was discovered in Michael D. Anderson's Sun Ra Music Archive on a session reel.

The mono version of "Next Stop Mars" clocks in at 18 minutes, but the stereo version just 12. Rather than having been cut for space constraints (Ra would have scoffed at the notion that space has constraints), the abridgement might be Ra revisionism. The bandleader was involved with the BF/RR project, having provided tapes (the whereabouts of which are now unknown). The fade is organic, occurring during a rumbling piano sustain after the band stops playing. Perhaps Ra exercised a composer's prerogative, having decided that from a vantage point of 26 years' reflection, the piece had climaxed at the 12-minute mark (or that by 1989 advanced interplanetary rocketry had helped the Arkestra more quickly reach Mars).

We found pitch and speed differences between mono and stereo mixes. In fact, there were pitch variations within particular versions—the mono "Celestial Fantasy" alters pitch in the final 40 seconds. For this digital edition, all pitch variants have been roughly normalized (if the word "normal" can apply to anything associated with Sun Ra). But we extend a caveat: if you're hypersensitive to pitch, don't listen to Sun Ra.

Tracklist
1. Sun Ra & His Arkestra – Celestial Fantasy (Saturn mono) (05:50)
2. Sun Ra & His Arkestra – The Idea of It All (Saturn mono) (07:29)
3. Sun Ra & His Arkestra – Ecstasy of Being (Saturn mono) (09:50)
4. Sun Ra & His Arkestra – When Angels Speak of Love (Saturn mono) (04:32)
5. Sun Ra & His Arkestra – Next Stop Mars (Saturn mono) (17:56)