Red Hot & Ra : The Magic City

Album review

Since 1993's Plantation Lullabies, Meshell Ndegeocello's recordings have moved across and/or combined, jazz, blues, soul, funk, reggae, folk, hip-hop, and rock. She's led small bands and large ensembles, and worked as a session musician and a featured soloist across a wide stylistic spectrum. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ndegeocello composed and read critic John Szwed's excellent 1998 biography, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. It germinated an encounter with its subject that changed her permanently. Ra's ideas and music influenced aspects of 2023's The Omnichord Real Book. They are the primary engine of Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City (an album that borrows the latter half of its title from the subject's 1973 album). Ndegeocello is its driver, producer, and orchestrator, and she performs only selectively. The third volume in RHO's Sun Ra tribute series, it offers her own musical conversation with his music and philosophy. Unlike either of the previous volumes, it includes only original work. Ndegeocello assembled a fluid studio cast that included multiple generations of players fluent in Sun Ra's musical language including 99-year-old saxophone-playing Arkestra leader Marshall Allen and 19-year-old drummer Kojo Roney, saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins and Darius Jones, guitarist Chris Bruce (in her orbit since 1999), Stuart Bogie on clarinets, and drummer Deantoni Parks, among others. Ndegeocello, her co-producer, engineer, and sound designer Hector Castillo, and collaborators render Ra's influence directly with an ear toward as yet unrealized possibilities.
The title of opener "Solipsistic Panacea (Black Antiques)" reflects the musical impression of Sun Ra's "Antique Blacks Suite." Introduced by Castillo's soundscapes, Bruce's whammy bar plectrum picking, keyboards, and a choral quartet, Wilkins' blue alto solos above and around the vocals as the taped voice of Allen recounts the history of the Arkestra from Chicago to New York City to Philadelphia and back to New York. The vocalists introduce a cosmic soul jam complete with textured sonics and spoken vocal samples before crisscrossing highlife rhythms, dub, and post-bop enter the fray. The single "Departure Guide of the 7 Sisters" opens with the disembodied voice of Sun Ra before Jade Hicks croons and rap above the band. "#9 Venus the Living Myth" musically references two Sun Ra compositions -- "Rocket Number 9" and "The Living Myth" -- in creating something new. Dan Bunny's spoken recitation is framed by a five-voice chorus, Allen's sampled voice intones, "during that time, we were preparing ourselves," above Kojo Roney's rattling drum kit, an upright bass, acoustic guitar, and dovetailed saxes by Wilkins and Allen (who also plays EWI). It's a psychedelic jazz suite. The otherworldly "Reproductive Manatees - Sunny Side Up!" ripples with interplay between Castillo's sound design, layered guitars, drums, electronics, and layered keyboards framing Jones' saxophone and Justin Hicks' vocal.
Unlike the previous two volumes in the series, 2023's Red Hot & Ra: Nuclear War and Red Hot & Ra; Solar, The Magic City isn't so much a collection of songs inspired by Ra as much as an encounter with his cosmic musicality, informed by dreams, visions, and hard-won experience.

© Thom Jurek /TiVo