The 1966 live LP augmented by more than ninety minutes from the same five dates.

All three volumes, with each disc enhanced, containing archival photos, critical writings and historical videos, including the eighteen-minute documentary Sun Ra Spaceways.

A nonet Arkestra live in 1980.

Live at the Ann Arbor Festival, 1972, 73 and 74. Firing versions of old favourites, with decent sound, tons of drama, space chants, way-out Ra electronics and roaring John Gilmore.

From 1972, with Ra on organ throughout — trading solos with Gilmore and trumpeter Kwame Hadi on the bluesy title cut; duetting with drummer Luqman Ali on In A Blue Mood. June Tyson stars on Blackman.

Recorded one long hot night in July 1978.
Sun Ra at the Rhodes, Disco Kid on guitar… Deadly funk, heady and grooving. A stone classic.
The new box set features the original LP alongside alternative mixes by Bob Blank first released in limited quantities for a 1978 Arkestra gig at Georgia Tech. Both versions of the album are cut loud at 45 rpm over 2LPs each.
Housed in a silver foil box, as per the original issues the first LP comes in a foiled sleeve while the second features two yellow A4 sheets pasted onto a white sleeve. With a twelve-page booklet featuring previously unseen photos and various texts.
The CD version is housed in a foil digipak.
The single LP is a straightforward reissue of the original LP.

The title track was ‘one of Sun Ra’s on-the-spot compositions,’ recalls Danny Ray Thompson. ‘Almost like an Ancient Egyptian Stargazing Ceremony, mapping out the stars and the planets.’ Where Pathways Meet is his ‘funky version of an Egyptian march. Pharaoh is sending his troops off to fight and this is his pep-talk! The music seems to take different pathways but still converges.’ The loping groove of That’s How I Feel features the reflective trumpet lines of Eddie Gale, with solos by John Gilmore, and Marshall Allen on ‘snake charming oboe’. The funky Twin Stars Of Thence weaves around Richard Williams celebrated elastic bassline; the haunting closer There Are Other Worlds is pure ‘space music’.

The second NYC LP, from 1961, Ra on piano leading a three-saxes sextet away from the big-band Chicago sound, into the unknown. Plenty of Gilmore. Exotic Two is a terrific percussion-and-piano original.

From 1982, this was the last of the El Saturn studio albums.
Open, upful and swinging, including the only recordings of Blue Intensity and the title-track Celestial Love, besides a bouquet of other Ra originals, and a couple of Duke Ellingtons featuring the one and only June Tyson in full effect.
Surely the arrangement of Charlie Chaplin’s Smile, with Tyson and Gilmore upfront together, will cheer you up a bit.

Joyous, uniquely Arkestral renditions of songs from Disney films like Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo, and Mary Poppins.
Ra loved this repertoire, faithfully re-visiting it over the decades. He once had his band billed as Sun Ra & His Disney Odyssey Adventure Arkestra.

All previously unissued; drawn from concert performances, 1985-1990.

Another unmissable Ra LP — previously impossible to find — from the same 1972 sessions as Space Is the Place. The opener Pan Afro is a modal tear-up bossed by Gilmore’s saxophone; the title track is a hugely enjoyable, side-long, Ra-led space chant.

‘One thing is certain about a Sun Ra performance: You never know what to expect. Last week at the Chicago Jazz Festival, he presented a huge troupe of musicians, dancers and acrobats in a veritable circus of improvisation’ (John Litweiler, Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1988).
The entire show as originally broadcast by National Public Radio in the same year.