Sun Ra The Magic City

Fasten your seat belt, please. Get ready for the full tilt, barely tamed, beautiful monster that is Gard Nilssen’s sixteen-piece Supersonic Orchestra. Audacious and experimentalist, like everything the Norwegian drummer and composer touches, Supersonic flouts convention and, in particular, realigns the longstanding relationship between pre-composition and improvisation in orchestral jazz. If You Listen Carefully The Music Is Yours, its debut, was recorded live at the adventurous Molde International Jazz Festival in 2019, where Nilssen was Artist in Residence. The band’s uniquely configured, all-star lineup features three drummers, three double bassists and ten horn players, most of them saxophonists. It is a big band, Jim, but not as we know it.

In 1977 at the culmination of a brilliant career, Ralph Bass recorded a series of ten very brief and informal sessions – a survey of the then-lesser-known talent on the Chicago blues scene. Bass had launched the careers of T-Bone Walker, James Brown, Little Esther and others. Delmark is proud to add these sessions, many previously available only as imports, to its renowned blues catalog. Many artists participating in the Ralph Bass series have since earned worldwide renown, including Lonnie Brooks, Jimmy Johnson, Carey Bell, and Eddy Clearwater. Though certainly deserving, Lacy Gibson has yet to achieve an equally exalted status in the blues scene — but he plans to be active again in music. Until he gets a new album together we can enjoy this late ’70s gem.