When Angels Speak of Love

When Angels Speak of Love, released in 1966 on Sun Ra's Saturn label, is a rarity, with limited pressings (150 copies, by one estimate), which were sold thru the mail and at concerts and club dates. The tracks were taped in New York during two 1963 sessions at the Choreographer's Workshop, a rehearsal space/recording den with warehouse acoustics. Ra spent countless hours at the CW from 1961 to 1964 sharpening the Arkestra during exhaustive musical huddles. John Corbett calls this "one of the most continuous, best-documented periods of Ra's work"; much tape from these seminal sessions has survived and been issued on LP, CD and digitally.

Following the musical trajectory Ra launched shortly after his 1961 exodus from Chicago to New York, the works on When Angels Speak are less composed than directed. Despite the seemingly unbound playing, it is an orderly chaos. Ra rejected the term "free jazz." (His views on freedom generally are, to put it kindly, complex; he referred to his band as "the Ra Jail," explaining, "my jail is the best jail in the world, they learn things in my jail.") Yet there is undeniable liberation in this music. There's also, thanks to Tommy Hunter's freestyle tape reverb, a pre-psychedelic quality.