1. Sun RaSpace Is The Place
Out of all the ones to choose, because there’s so many and Sun Ra is such a big influence, it’s the record I come back to. It covers a lot of different ground. Sun Ra covers the whole universe. ‘Space Is The Place’ has these lines, I’m not sure if it’s Pat Patrick or Danny Davis, but there’s a baritone sax playing a figure that’s a five count and everyone else is playing the main theme which is more of a four, eight or sixteen count. The shifting ways that things sync up and then stretch, that was something that blew my mind when I heard it. I got nerdy about it and sat down and tried to figure out what was going on, and how you have the sum of all the parts becoming a whole that’s really chaotic, but also beautiful. I was really loving it. I felt like there were grooves in it too, but there were also so many different seemingly opposing things going on. That was a thing I was trying to do on The Key with some of the basslines. They’re not in the same time, or whatever you want to call it, but they’re looping, and they’re getting ahead or behind what the guitars are doing and what the drums are doing.
