Sun Ra returns to the spotlight with a batch of new archival and tribute releases featuring the Arkestra and its current leader Marshall Allen, plus Laurie Anderson, John Blum and even Walt Disney. We contemplate the career arc of this most eccentric of American mavericks, and contrast his Strange Strings album (peculiar even by Sun Ra standards, and the subject of a new expanded reissue) with Mauricio Kagel’s Exotica (released five years later) as joint manifestations of a primitivist stream in avant-garde music. Also in the spotlight is a new work by Japan’s preeminent living composer, Toshio Hosokawa, which follows a solo violin's symbolic passage from birth to death, with an orchestra as the backdrop. A pair of compositions by Penderecki and Julius Eastman express the intensity of religious fervor in very different ways, while a new improvisational release from Northwesterners James Falzone, Bonnie Whiting and Lisa Cay Miller rounds out the playlist.
