Sun Ra: Heimstad--Sun Ra Meets Pierre Boulez

Most will remember John Cage  Meets Sun Ra (Meltdown Records, 1987), drawn from a June 8, 1986 concert at Coney Island, at the initiative of producer Rick Russo to promote his new label. Cage did not know Ra, Ra barely knew Cage, and by most accounts the encounter was a non-encounter. A similar experience brought Ra and Pierre Boulez together that same year. The tapes were lost, recovered, and remastered in 2024: yielding the album Heimstad: Sun Ra Meets Pierre Boulez.

Towering figure of contemporary music, Boulez was touring the United States with Ensemble Intercontemporain and was at Coney Island that night. He was not known for any passion for jazz, a music that sat uneasily with his conception of musical art as total structural mastery.

The concert was to upend his thinking. Cage introduced Boulez to Ra, and after the crowd dispersed, the two improvised on the stage DX7 around Ra's composition "The Second Stop Is Jupiter." They decided to reconvene in the studio for three days at the Power Station in Manhattan.

Ra's early composition "Angels and Demons at Play" was committed to tape in a single take, followed by "Rocket Number Nine," first recorded exactly 26 years earlier (less nine days). The three chapters of Structures, Book I, Boulez's two-piano work, followed.

That Ra swings like a demon on his own compositions as well as on Boulez's will surprise no one. More striking is the relentless groove Boulez brings to four of these pieces (the first chapter of his Book I being treated as a romantic jazz ballad), marking a turning point in his career. His musical world would bear the mark of this encounter forever, as is apparent in his masterpiece Anthèmes II (1997) for violin and electronics.

"Little Joe from Chicago," Mary Lou Williams' boogie-woogie, and Ra's "Ode To Mary Lou" were recorded with Ra at the piano and Boulez on the Fender Rhodes Mark V, after the two discovered a shared passion for Williams' music. On "Little Joe from Chicago," Boulez reveals himself as an inspired bluesman, though one might note a minor slip in the walking bass in the seventh measure of his solo. According to a witness, Ra struggled to dissuade Boulez from abandoning his brilliant compositional career to come and settle in Harlem to serve alcohol at rent parties (a practice that had become marginal in 1986).

The album closes with 57'63", co-written by Boulez and Ra, a tribute to John Cage's 4'33", in which the music emerges live by the audience. For this composition, Boulez had insisted on bringing over from Oslo Jan Erik Kongshaug, ECM Records's cult sound engineer, celebrated for his acoustic clarity. Through Kongshaug's artistry, the composition, initially planned to run 41'26," was stretched to 57'63" of a resounding ECM silence.

The harmony and rapport reigning in the studio were such that Ra and Boulez decided the record would be released under the name Heimstad, from the Old Norse heimstaðr, suggested by Kongshaug, evoking the common ancestral home of Ra and Boulez. An indispensable document.

4.5 stars: a near classic, if only Boulez had swung harder. Next to be reviewed: Twyla Tharp Dances to Sun Ra—The Basement Tapes.

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