Day 174: Sun Ra - Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy
I forgot to listen to an album today, so I thought I’d go for something short but slightly spacey to listen to while I paint. It’s a custom paint by numbers of a photo I took — I’m saying that to temper expectations of me secretly being a talented painter, but I also can’t just say “I’m doing a paint by numbers” because that makes me sound like a child. Very tricky. Anyway, I heard a lot of talk about Sun Ra on the radio today, so I thought I’d go for his 1967 release, Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy.
Album cover courtesy of Saturn
Sun Ra was an American composer, jazz musician and poet from Birmingham, Alabama, who was known for his avant-garde cosmic Afrofuturist jazz. When he was young, he went to university for music education, but he dropped out after a year because he had some sort of a trip or vision where he saw himself landing on Saturn and being told by aliens to stop attending university and start speaking to the world through music to preach peace, because people will listen.
If yesterday’s album was hyper-accessible, this is just about the opposite. My painting partner told me to just put my album on and we’ll listen to it together. During the first song, I had a version of that moment where you’re given the AUX and you can tell from the that nobody is really feeling it that much, you went a bit too far. “I guess this is kind of what you could imagine space sounding like”, I said, trying to sell it. At the very least, he didn’t tell me to turn it off.
By “Adventure Equation” we were cooking, it was setting a mood nicely. That song has discernible rhythm and patterns, which was working for what we were doing. However, I think it was the wrong setting for this album: despite it being a fairly good mood-setter, something rhythmic would have worked a bit better to paint to. But it kept me interested and in another setting, I think I could have had more fun with it. I also think there’s better albums for my purposes in Sun Ra’s discography, but what can I say, the name drew me in.
While I was listening, I was thinking that the thing I like about these cosmic jazz guys is that with improvisational jazz, you would think that you just have to let go and see where it takes you, but with cosmic jazz, they’re probably channelling something higher or some variation of that they believe in, and what you hear is the result of that. I can see a way for my esoteric interests to meet my music hobby here, and that’s definitely an avenue I’d like to explore. Had you asked me before this project if cosmic jazz would interest me, I’m sure I would have said no, but I would have been scared of jazz and its reputation. It’s nice to see that I’m not there anymore.
It was cosmic tones, it was mental therapy – it did what it says on the tin. There were no skips per se, but I can see why “Twilight” was left as a bonus track, because that one was genuinely a bit grating. All in all, though, it was an 8/10.