Overtones

Ubiquity (1971). Roy Ayers' leap to the Polydor label inaugurates his music's evolution away from the more traditional jazz of his earlier Atlantic LPs toward the infectious, funk-inspired fusion that still divides critics and fans even decades after the fact. Although Ubiquity maintains one foot in Ayers' hard bop origins, the record favors soulful grooves and sun-kissed textures that flirt openly and unapologetically with commercial tastes. Several cuts feature the male/female vocals that would become a hallmark of subsequent Ubiquity efforts, while mid-tempo instrumentals like "Pretty Brown Skin" and "The Painted Desert" feature evocatively cinematic arrangements and intriguing solos that unfurl like psychedelic freak flags…

Sun Ra - Exotica (2017) {2CD Set Modern Harmonic MHCD-012}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 531 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 304 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 29 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2017 Modern Harmonic / Sundazed Music | MHCD-012
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Jazz Funk / Experimental Big Band / Progressive Jazz

A fantastic take on the music of Sun Ra – a set that looks at the way his sounds dovetailed with the exotica movement in American music of the postwar years! Given that he claimed to be from outer space, Ra was already pretty darn exotic himself – but his music also arose at a time when artists like Martin Denny and Les Baxter were taking global sounds and fusing them into more mainstream American music, including jazz – with results that have become legendary over the years!

Gain new perspective on two of the greatest achievements of human culture—music and math—and the fascinating connections that will help you more fully appreciate the intricacies of both. Great minds have long sought to understand the relationship between music and mathematics. On the surface, they seem very different. Music delights the senses and can express the most profound emotions, while mathematics appeals to the intellect and is the model of pure reasoning.

Études australes is one of several large works Cage wrote during the 1970s by laying starmaps over manuscript paper and using the placement of the stars to determine the pitches. Cage used the I Ching to determine some of the other musical parameters but left the dynamic levels, attacks, and tempos to the discretion of the performer, and this has led to extraordinary diversity in the lengths of performances. The original recording by Grete Sultan, for whom Cage wrote the piece, lasts 169 minutes, Steffen Schleiermacher's version is 203 minutes, and the fastest, at 112 minutes, is by Claudio Crismani. That gives some perspective to the monumentality of this 2011 version by Sabine Liebner, which clocks in at 260 minutes.