Lights on a Satellite: Live at the Left Bank in Bloomington, MN

Sun Ra and His Myth Science Cosmo Swing Arkestra
were on fire when they took the stage at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore on a late July night in 1978. In a concert presented by the Left Bank Jazz Society,
Ra
, along with mainstay collaborators
June Tyson
,
Marshall Allen
John Gilmore
, and a band that included over a dozen other players, blazed through the kind of interstellar jazz experimentalism they were innovating in real time throughout the '70s and beyond.
Lights on a Satellite: Live at the Left Bank
collects recordings from this inspired performance and releases them for the first time. After warming up with a spotlight on percussion and rough, minimal synthesizer playing, the band launches into the large group improvisation of "Tapestry from an Asteroid," a tune that moves from a standard vocal introduction to walls of instrumental chaos, ending with space-age solo electronics from
. It's a perfect display of
Sun Ra
's masterful control, moving organically from cluttered noise to almost pristine synth symphonics. This control continues throughout the concert, with moments of playful sweetness like an out-there rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," loose and stumbly romping on "Space Travelin' Blues," a cyborg reading of
Thelonious Monk
's "Round Midnight," a few spaced-out standards, and
Arkestra
staples like "We Travel the Spaceways." Other standout
originals include the woozy and melancholic "They Plan to Leave," a tune where multiple vocalists croon, howl, and harmonize a tale of outsiders conspiring to escape from Earth. The performance of "Lights on a Satellite" here is one for the books, with the group moving like a unified organism around the sadly lovely ballad. It's thrilling that even with the endless hours of archival
material, there's still new previously unreleased recordings of this high caliber coming out 30 years after
himself left Earth for a different planet.
Live at the Left Bank
is a top-tier document of what
and his band were capable of at the height of their powers, and a must-hear set for anyone enthusiastic or even curious about their music. ~ Fred Thomas