Spotted at Dusty Groove: a used Sun Ra Quartet "New Steps" (HORO) on CD

[Rooster_Ties]

Just saw this on the Dusty Groove site...

https://www.dustygroove.com/item/844308

It's a grey-market release (or so I've heard told), but it's very (very!) high-quality (I own one myself, back when they first became available), with surprisingly decent liner-notes, and it's on a silver-CD (not a CDR) -- probably as good as you're likely to ever see any of the Horo material on CD.

[jlhoots]

It's already gone.

[Gheorghe]

Oh yes, I have that record and love it.

See, when I was young, Sun Ra was starting to mix his usual free-jazz big band program with some standards, starting with old Fletcher Henderson Arrangements, and it must have been because of that renewed interest in straight ahead acoustic stuff. So word spread that Sun Ra plays a mix of his intergalatic stuff with some really swinging old stuff, and that´s how I heard him first.

And naturally we were running to the record stores to check out what Sun Ra records we might find and there was those two Horo Double LPs with very similar covers:

The "New Step" as a rare combo recording just with John Gilmore, and the "Unity" with the whole band. So we young "newborn" Ra-Freaks (smile) bought those two albums.

It was like if you listen to Mingus. You hear Mingus play some straight ahead starting thema and then out they go, and that´s how you "learn" about "far out" stuff, and same with Sun Ra. We all had to learn that there is more about jazz than just tappin your foot, but you need personalities like Sun Ra to reach that point.......