Sun Ra – Uncharted Passages Yellow Vinyl LP

From Sun Ra comes Uncharted Passages, a jazz album on Modern Harmonic. This is the vinyl edition, a 2-LP set, pressed on yellow vinyl. This edition was released on March 21, 2025.

Sun Ra was a master of misdirection. Tape boxes wrongly labeled-whether by accident or design-are legendary among Ra archivists. One can speculate about the artist's intent or carelessness, but source misinformation abounds on Ra tape cases, album jackets, cassettes, ephemera-as well as in interviews. It's as if Ra, in furtherance of his own mythmaking, wanted to keep historians guessing. This project began as a misidentified tape discovered by Michael D. Anderson of the Sun Ra Music Archive. The 7-inch reel, which contained a live Ra solo piano performance of 11 works-some recognizable, others not-was of stellar quality, and was marked as a 1979 Carnegie Hall date. But the program on the tape did not align with known facts (e.g., titles played, concert duration) which were chronicled in a Newsday review of Ra's appearance at Carnegie in September of that year. With a prod from writer/historian Ted Gioia and further research by myself, the tape was eventually identified as a mostly unreleased July 1977 performance by Ra at a downtown NYC "jazz café" called The Axis-in-Soho. A1. Axis Rhapsody A2. St. Louis Blues B1. Blue Play B2. Axis Nexus B3. Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child C1. Axis Entempore C2. Honeysuckle Rose - Enlightment C3. Space Is The Place D1. Axis Impromptu D2. Everything I Have Is Yours D3. At Sundown D4. June Night D5. Rumination