Sun Ra Fate in a Pleasant Mood / When Sun Comes Out

Before Sun Ra careened into the jazz avant-garde with his banks of electrickeyboards and highwire group improvisations, he made recordings like *Fatein a Pleasant Mood.* Rich with Ra's persistent astro-mythology, *Fate* is equally rich with an immersion in the history of big band music. The charts played on Fate are as orchestrally complex as anything Duke Ellington wrote, yet they still maintain a clear position on the cusp of the avant-garde. More than anything, changes are the order on Fate, fast runs across difficult melody statements, on-the-fly changes in harmonic aims and rhythmic jumps that illuminate just how completely Sun Ra understood the overlap of jazz traditions as the 1960s approached. --Andrew Bartlett