Sun Ra - Prophet [Red]

Prophet is a lost Sun Ra session finally reaching earth, red vinyl, and quite possibly the only day he ever spent recording on the keyboard that gives it its name.

Sun Ra released hundreds of records across half a century, most of them cut live or in makeshift rooms like the Choreographer's Workshop in early 1960s New York. This one is different. In 1986 he took the Arkestra into Mission Control, a 24-track studio north of Boston stocked with every electronic sound generator going, and among them sat a brand new Prophet VS, the Vector Synthesizer. There's no evidence Ra had touched a Prophet-5 or Prophet-10 before, so this is a man in his seventies meeting a machine for the first time and simply following it wherever it goes. The name surely appealed to him too. It always did.

The Prophet opens the session with Ra circling the instrument's timbres like someone testing ice, and Infinity Excursion stretches out into exactly the interstellar drift the title advertises. The Prophet at Play is the loosest, funniest stretch here, while They Plan to Leave and They'll Come Back close the day out as a pair, departure and return, the theme of his entire career in miniature.

Everything cut in a single day, and it took decades to land.