the asshole neighbor

My asshole neighbor is out on the front step with her friends, at least two of whom were kicked out of the building yesterday by the landlord. The asshole had been trying to supplement her rent by inviting room mates into her apartment, but she never informed the landlord. Apparently there is a whole bunch of stuff broken, so clearly she’s been treating her apartment about the same as she has been treating the entire building: as if she owns the house and is the only residence.

Chill. Don’t get worked up about this.

Back to the writing. Unless I can come up with a good outline, I’m afraid my Sun Ra blog post idea is going to be difficult to write. I did one dry run and unfortunately only wrote a little. Let me brainstorm a bit more about what to include in my musical posts.

  1. instrumentation
  2. musicians
  3. different versions of a composition (Get out the Sun Ra discography)
  4. recording fidelity (some of his albums sound like recordings of rehearsals)
  5. a composition’s relationship with other compositions
    • thematic
    • musical
    • whether or not the tune is sometimes used as part of a space chant
  6. session dates and places
  7. key centers
  8. compositional structure

It’s also interesting to think about which jazz tunes from other composers Sun Ra chooses to record. Also, I should give a listen to Fletcher Henderson so I can begin to get on top of the musical relationship Sun Ra has envisioned between the two of them. Certainly, Sun Ra played in Henderson’s orchestra for a while, but on top of that, Sun Ra always claimed that Henderson was his ideal of a jazz composer.

That being said, I think there’s also a relationship to be discovered between Sun Ra and Alexander Scriabin, particularly where the light organ is concerned. Amiri Baraka about Sun Ra using a light organ in the 1960s. In addition, there is that white guy who performed his own version of the light organ in the 1970s. In fact, this guy’s light organ sounds so much more complex and musical than a simple organ that produces light according to the pitches. The white guy sounds as if he created a unique instrument. It would have been fascinating to see one of those gigs.