It took until 1970 for Sun Ra to play his first European shows, and he did so with a glorious, expansive bang, bringing his Inter-Galactic Research Arkestra to the Fondation Maeght art gallery in St Paul de Vence, France for two performances from which portions were issued on two single LP volumes by the Shandar label in 1971. For Record Store Day 2025 the Strut label has released a deluxe edition of Nuits de la Fondation Maeght as a 6LP set in an edition of 800. The contents spotlight one of the Arkestra’s greatest lineups in peak form and frequently jaw-dropping in its stylistic reach. Copies are still available; it is a lavish prize for dedicated fans and a gripping point of entry for the curious.
The performances documented in this set occurred on August 3 and 5, 1970 as part of a festival of music held at the art gallery of this box set’s title, not the first festival held there but the first to welcome the jazz avant-garde of the USA, with Albert Ayler also part of the festival program that year. Ayler would be found dead in New York City in November of 1970, with his own Fondation Maeght performances, issued in 2022 for Record Store Day as Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght Recordings, serving as the iconoclastic saxophonist’s final works.
Conversely, Sun Ra’s Fondation Maeght recordings kicked off a particularly fertile decade after long stretches of struggle first in Chicago and then in New York City. The pianist and bandleader had cut numerous albums starting in the late 1950s, but his most successful and highest profile were released by ESP Disk in 1965 in two volumes, both titled The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra.
With the exception of his debut Jazz by Sun Ra, released by Tom Wilson’s Transition label in 1957 (reissued by Delmark as Sun Song a decade later) and The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra, released by Savoy in 1962, nearly everything else in Sun Ra’s discography up to the turn of the 1970s was available in small pressings through his own Saturn (aka El Saturn) label (and subsequently reissued by Impulse in the 1970s and Evidence in the ’90s).
In 1970 ESP Disk released the live album Nothing Is, which consisted of recordings from 1966, a fine set particularly in its 2CD expansion issued in 2010, also by ESP Disk. But even in truncated form, the original Nuits de la Fondation Maeght volumes on Shandar were considered a revelation, a perspective that explodes anew upon soaking up the performances in Strut’s greatly expanded edition.
Especially striking is the navigation between avant-garde abstraction and more accessible stretches often with vocalist June Tyson in the lead, although there are also dives into big band classicism and bop-inclined runs that reinforce the Arkestra as being firmly grounded in tradition even as they were generally assessed during this era as a spectacle of eccentricity.
There are still a few hints of the Exotica-like motions that inform some of the earlier Arkestra material, but the Fondation Maeght performances are more impacted by Sun Ra’s excursions on the Moog (along with organ and electric piano) that often bring the set a sci-fi film soundtrack vibe, although side one opens with a feel of a beautifully psychedelic cathedral.
There are numerous blasts of free jazz, both in wildly skronking collectivity or via solo horn scorch from saxophonists John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, Pat Patrick, Danny Davis, and Danny Ray Thompson. Also geometrical patterns that are almost NYC Minimalist. And in this deluxe edition the extended rhythmic bursts are even more pronounced as they combine with Tyson’s vocal flights and the outer space elements to drive home the Arkestra as a cornerstone of musical Afrofuturism. Among a plethora of Sun Ra masterworks, this definitive edition of Nuits de la Fondation Maeght is absolutely essential.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A+
