Late 1966 recordings for Blue Note and BYG.
With Jimmy Lyons, Alan Silva, and Andrew Cyrille throughout; plus Bill Dixon and Henry Grimes on the opener (from the Conquistador sessions).

The definitive edition, with much better sound than any of the rather garbled ESP iterations.
‘Recorded on May 18, 1966 at St Lawrence University, Potsdam, NY, Nothing Is…Completed & Revisited has Ra, who was at the time only just beginning to perform on the US college circuit, testing the water with a programme drawn from several stages of his work with the Arkestra. There are space chants (Outer Spaceways Incorporated, Next Stop Mars, Second Stop Is Jupiter, We Travel The Spaceways), a salute to the swing era (Velvet, from the 1959 Saturn masterpiece Jazz In Silhouette), far-out material such as the sixteen minute version of Outer Nothingness from the 1965 ESP album The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra Vol. l, and trippy exotica such as reed player Marshall Allen’s oboe feature Exotic Forest, here given its first airing on disc.
‘The twelve-piece band is killer, with Allen, tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, baritone saxophonist Pat Patrick and trombonists Ali Hassan and Teddy Nance propelled by the A-team anchors Ronnie Boykins on bass and tuba and Clifford Jarvis on drums. Everyone, including Ra on clavioline and piano, is on top form’ (Chris May, All About Jazz).

Two dates from an extended stay at the Half Note club, March 26 — May 7, 1965; originally captured for radio broadcast, but issued by Impulse! in 2005 as One Down, One Up: Live At The Half Note.
Here it is again, with vastly improved sound, re-sequenced to culminate in the stunning saxophone-drums duet One Down, One Up.

Writing in All About Jazz, Chris May quotes Alice Coltrane, reminiscing about this period: ‘Someone in the audience would stand up, their arms upreaching, and they would be like that for an hour or more. Their clothing would be soaked with perspiration, and when they finally sat down, they practically fell down. The music just took people out of the whole material world; it lifted them up.’ And Archie Shepp, specifically about these Half Note gigs: ‘It was like being in a church. I mean, Coltrane brought something which raised this music from secular music to a religious world music.’

Transformatively remastered, first performances of Coltrane’s classic quartet, including the sensational debut of Chasin’ The Trane.
The two Impulse LPs Live at the Village Vanguard and Impressions, plus a second performance of Spiritual retrieved from a box-set.
‘The big deal is that the label’s Revisited series employs a combination of state-of-the-art mastering technology and outstanding engineers to deliver substantially improved audio. If you are using an even halfway decent hi-fi set up, you will notice the difference in clarity and presence, with Coltrane’s saxophone and Elvin Jones’ drums particular benificiaries. This makes Chasin’ The Trane Revisited practically a down by law must-have for Coltrane aficionados’ (Chris May).

Definitive performances by pianist Judith Wegmann and Andreas Kunz.
Feldman: “The degrees of stasis, found in a Rothko or Guston, were perhaps the most significant elements I brought to my music from painting. For me, stasis, scale, and pattern have put the whole question of symmetry and asymmetry in abeyance.”
Cage about Feldman: “Listening to this music one takes as a spring-board the first sound that comes along; the first something springs us into nothing and out of that nothing arises the next something… like an alternating current. Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.”

Dazzling abscondments from bebop, as fresh and challenging now as then.
Microtonal and pointillistic; formally forensic and equal handed; freely and limpidly expressive. Strictly no going through the motions; no cliches; no posturing, or emotional bluster.
‘What comes out is an investigation of sound from the inside out, textually, tonally, spatially’ (as Pitchfork describes a much later session).
Clarinet solos, and duos and trios with Steve Swallow and Paul Bley. 
Amazing stuff.