A suggestion of something to listen to on 03/04/2020
Sun Ra, ‘Pleiades: A Jazz Symphonique’
Album of the Week #46

Pleiades’ is one of the earliest existing Sun Ra compositions, first recorded on a home piano demo by 34-year-old Herman ‘Sonny’ Blount in his sweltering South Side Chicago apartment in August 1948. Blount had moved to the Windy City in 1946 and began musical dues-paying that found him writing arrangements for sundowning big bands and wild R&B shouters, fronting small combos in dancehalls and dives, and making a local name for himself as an ambitious composer/arranger-for-hire. That vintage demo, recorded in solitude and redolent with sandpapery surface noise, opens this album.
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