To this point, Art Yard's excellent Sun Ra archival series has consisted of expanded albums and straight reissues. With The Paris Tapes, we are given a 1971 concert that has never been officially released. The concert date remains uncertain, though the CD booklet says November 29, 1971. What is certain is the extremely high quality of the recording and of the music.
Energy levels are up throughout this two-hour-and-twenty-minute concert. In fact, the intensity is often strong enough to be frightening. Much of the music is interwoven by a fabric of percussion, played by three drummers and by other Arkestra members when not on their primary instruments. It is to the ensemble's credit that interest is maintained, as dance surely played a large part in the evening's proceedings. The dancers' spirited shouts pervade the polyrhythmic festivities, adding layers of excitement to the roars of an enthusiastic crowd.
The Arkestra rips through a sizzling version of "Space is the Place," a sultrily swinging "Discipline 27," and a slightly more laid-back "Angels and Demons at Play" is still brimming with percussives. There are a few tunes for which liner note writers Knowell Scott and Chris Trent could not provide titles, but one hails from the Discipline series.
The band sound blends jazz and rock in a way that anticipates landmark albums like Miles Davis' On the Corner, even prefiguring later masterpieces like Pangaea and agharta in terms of rhythmic propulsion and funky precision. Ra's synthesizer solos scream with the abandon of his Fondasion Meight concerts of the previous year, but the recording is even better. Indeed, it is the recording that sets this concert apart from any I have heard from the early 1970s. It could be that Sun Ra was planning to release excerpts, as he did with many concerts. The stereo imaging is excellent, conjuring shades of those fantastic middle 1960s Decca recordings as singers, dancers and musicians move about the space. Whatever plans for the tapes were, we are treated to the event in its entirety. All musical and sonic factors merge to provide first-rate documentation of a first-class ensemble, and this may now be the best release in Art Yard's Sun Ra reissue campaign.
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