The late, great Sun Ra operated his jazz Arkestra through much of the seventies and eighties until his ultimate and untimely return to the Saturn of his ‘birth’. Ra (aka Herman ‘Sonny’ Blount) was renowned as an iron disciplinarian who inspired either devotion or scepticism amongst the players in his band. In the early 1950s, he was experimenting with electronic instruments, and two bassists, one on an electric bass. He was one of the first people to establish his own record label for distributing his own records. He also liked to dress himself and his band as figures from Egyptian myth. Ra emphasised the sense of jazz as outsider art with deadly irony and deadly seriousness.
Jerry Dammer’s Spatial A.K.A, which started as a Sun Ra ‘tribute band’, performs a suite of Ra originals including ‘I’ll Wait for You’ (about the afterlife!!), ‘Jungle Madness’, ‘Discipline’ and ‘Retrospect’, ‘ Soul Variations on Land’ and melds Ra’s ‘Nuclear War’ with Dammers’ own ‘Man at C&A’ as performed by Dammers previous band ‘The Specials’. At the end of this show, the band tramped off stage to dance around the Philharmonic Bar while singing ‘Space is the Place’.
Spatial A.K.A have all the potential to do real justice to all this wonderful music, but I had the distinct impression that this two and a half hour set, the third in three days between Manchester, Edinburgh and Liverpool, towards the end of a month-long tour, was a gig too far. There was none of the nudging jokiness of the usual big band camaraderie, and several of the players sat in stolid silence between riffs. The band is full of the cream of British jazz: Finn Peters’ warm, rich flute, Empirical’s Nathaniel Facey on alto, Denys Baptiste on tenor, Jason Yarde on soprano, Larry Stabbins (ex Working Week) on tenor, and the technical riches of Zoe Rahman on piano. But the solos were often curtailed, and Facey, surely one of the most talented altoists this country has ever produced, sat stony faced until the riches of Alice Coltrane’s ‘Journey’ produced his characteristic stabbing fluency. In this latter tune, Rahman moved effortlessly into the sheets of sound that Alice Coltrane’s husband John developed as his signature.
Dammers also uses two basses, and three percussionists so this is a band that can drive, and the rhythm section certainly did; impossible to sit still with this lot on stage. The stage, itself, was decorated with ‘aliens’ accoutred with musical instruments, and the band wear their King Tut headdresses, spangly jellabas, and Elton John shades with considerable aplomb. Catch them when they’ve had a bit more rest between gigs and you’re in for a real treat!
Ian Pople