No sun, no day

Sun Ra is pictured on the night in the 1980s when he  played the Palomino in North Hollywood, Calif., as are the other band members. The review is of a later show after Mr. Blount departed the sublunary firmament.

he Sun Ra Omniverse Arkestra knew all along that space was curved, or perhaps "bent" would be a better word for it, to judge by the vocal output with which they began their docking at the aptly named satellite on Robertson Boulevard.

"When there is no sun, there is no day," they sang as they trooped joyously onto the rickety stage in their adorably chintzy Halloween costumes, black capes for the reeds and red ones for the brass. But was it so?

With their founding father Sun Ra having passed on not long ago and the great tenor saxophonist John Gilmore having joined him wherever he went a short time later, the remaining members of the Arkestra might be expected to give off a diminished aura. Based on Sunday night's doings, that assertion would be hard to prove in a court of law.
 

he performance of Marshall Allen, now the musical director, was quite flawless from the Saturnine point of view. Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss," for instance, became the wail of a space dog, icy and hair-raising, with the band raucously backing him like pie-eyed pipers.

Trumpeter Kwami Hadi's vocal on this was madcap and satirical, in contrast to his instrumental work this night, which was rough-hewn but straight ahead bebop. The other trumpeter, Michael Ray, was a wonky Miles Davis.

The witty guitarist Bruce Edwards might be accused of being a little too earthly, but the space cadets on the other horns left him very little room to get ditzy in.

It would be hard to top the alto work of Noel Scott, who mated Charlie Parker with Ornette Coleman and Mr. Cleanhead in an electrifying and chaotic solo on "United."
 

rombonist Tyrone Hill proved pretty much insurpassable in nudging and shoving whenever the boys showed signs of leaving the ruts and chuckholes and getting up on the boring thoroughfare of tonality. He helped a lot with the rhythm, but there is no one like John Ore for turning the bass fiddle into some sort of giant mutant gourd that distorts every other note.

The players, who still live communally in the Sun Ra house in Philadelphia, had plenty of room to stretch out -- or morph out like the villain in "Terminator II" -- during the numerous instrumentals, which were other dimensional versions of stuff Sun Ra might have written for Lunceford or Basie in the old days before he went crooked.

But it was on the vocals that all these omniversifiers truly excelled, including the triumphant "Space Is the Place," which it must be if the beat out there is like this, and if the angels can take tenor solos such as Yah Ya Abdul Majio.