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Sun Ra Music Archive Launches Centennial iTunes Reissue

Lenny Kravitz, Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Lion Babe, Thundercat, SZA & More Rock The Afropunk Festival 2015 in Brooklyn, NY.

The Sun Ra Music Archive has launched an iTunes reissue program to celebrate the centennial of Sun Ra's birth with 24-bit versions of his analog masters. News of the release comes just days before the jazz icon's 100th birth date. The archive's reissue includes digital versions of 21 classic albums exclusive to iTunes and released on the Enterplanetary Koncepts label. The series built around recordings from the first half of Sun Ra's career is said to be the first of many. A press release announcing the news also explains the technical changes to the recordings in greater detail:

“The Mastered for iTunes format exceeds the standard 16-bit sound quality of CDs, starting with 24-bit transfers from the analog master tapes. This ensures that the music is delivered to listeners with increased audio fidelity that more closely replicates what the artists, recording engineers and producers intended.”

Continuing, the release states that the reissue also includes:

“material culled from session and rehearsal tapes, and production and album masters. The series includes a significant amount of previously unreleased material, some stereo mixes of tracks previously available only in mono, and complete versions of tracks that had been edited for the original LPs. Many of these tapes, and the records that were made from them, are high-quality lo-fi, having been recorded in studios, nightclubs and ad hoc rehearsal spaces. The setup often consisted of just one or two mics, an open-reel tape deck, and a primitive mixing console. The tapes reveal weird transient sounds—musicians bumping mics, a cough, dropped equipment, fingernails clicking on keyboards, accidental percussion, the studio phone ringing during a solo.”

The massive reissue project features contributions from pillars of the Arkestra including Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Pat Patrick, June Tyson, Clifford Jarvis and many more. Check out the listing below to view the titles available in the digital reissue. Purchase the digital reissue via iTunes. Stay tuned for more on Sun Ra and the celebration of his centennial year.

Sun Ra Archive iTunes Reissue Titles:

Supersonic Jazz (1957)

Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth (1958)

Angels and Demons At Play (1965)

Interstellar Low Ways (1966)

Jazz in Silhouette (1959)

Nubians of Plutonia (1966)

Sound Sun Pleasure (1970)

We Travel the Spaceways (1967)

Fate in a Pleasant Mood (1965)

Holiday for Soul Dance (1970)

Bad and Beautiful (1972)

The Invisible Shield (1974)

When Sun Comes Out (1963)

Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (1967)

Monorails and Satellites, Vol. 1 (1968)

Other Planes of There (1966)

The Magic City (1966)

Strange Strings (1967)

Atlantis (1969)

Astro Black (1972)

Universe in Blue (1972)

Spotted at WP & JT.