Omniverse Sun Ra

Omniverse Sun Ra revised edition, Mint copy as issued in new dust jacket, 2nd Revised edition, text is in English, full color, 304 pages, ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0993351402, 4.5 pounds, ‎ 9.65 x 1.06 x 11.42 inches, Art Yard, 2016

Revised and expanded second edition of Hartmut Geerken and Chris Trent’s comprehensive reference Omniverse Sun Ra, originally published in 1994. Full-color 304-page hardcover book. French fold cover with metallic silver foil blocking on cyan faimei cloth. 290mm x 245mm portrait. Omniverse Sun Ra features many previously unpublished photographs of Sun Ra and His Arkestra in New York in 1966 and Germany in 1979 by Val Wilmer, and Hartmut Geerken’s previously unpublished photographs from Heliopolis in Cairo, Egypt, in 1971, in addition to an updated comprehensive pictorial and annotated discography by Chris Trent, including chronological discography and alphabetical record title, composition, personnel, and record label indexes, as well as indexes of shellac 78RPM records, 45 RPM singles, jackets, and labels. Also includes essays and photo documents by Hartmut Geerken, Chris Trent, Amiri Baraka, Robert L. Campbell, Chris Cutler, Gabi Geist, Sigrid Hauff, Karl Heinz Kessler, Robert Lax, and Salah Ragab.

“Omniverse Sun Ra is Art Yard’s first venture into book publishing, and Peter Dennett has pulled out all the stops. It features a fine selection of images by the great jazz photographer Val Wilmer, all beautifully reproduced — although the photo on the dust wrapper is actually by Hartmut Geerken. Lurking under that heavy duty dust wrapper is a blue cloth cover embossed in silver with the title, authors’ names and an image of Ra, from another photograph by Geerken. The entire book is extravagantly illustrated, not just with photos but also album cover art, handbills and original Sun Ra record catalogues, much of this in colour. It also comes with a snazzy sewn-in cloth bookmark. It is a large and heavy tome, over 300 pages, with a comprehensive discography and enough facts and images to keep any Sun Ra nut busy for years. There is a particularly excellent, and comprehensive, 36 page essay by Robert L. Campbell charting the history of Sun Ra’s music and groups, which makes the interesting point that “Like the later Duke Ellington bands, Arkestras of the 70s and 80s are yet to be fully documented.”
—London Jazz News

$ 250.00