Sleeping Beauty is an album by jazz composer, bandleader and keyboardist Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Myth Science Solar Arkestra recorded in 1979 and originally released on Ra's Saturn label and rereleased on CD on Art Yard in 2008. The Allmusic review by Sean Westergaard awarded the album 4½ stars stating "This is the great late-night Sun Ra chillout album you never knew about. The band had been working in a more groove-oriented setting off and on for over a year, as evidenced by the albums Lanquidity and On Jupiter, with both featuring prominent electric bass and electric guitar".

Recorded live at Pit-Inn, Shinjuku, Tokyo, August, 8, 1988.

Originally Broadcast By National Public Radio In 1988.Sun Ra & Arkestra, live from Petrillo Music Shell, Chicago Jazz Festival, Chicago, IL on September 3rd 1988. When Le Sony'r Ra, better known as Sun Ra, first moved to Chicago he famously took his epiphanic trip to Saturn. This legendary jam with the Arkestra, during the Chicago Free Jazz Festival, at Petrillo Music Shell on September 3rd 1988, broadcast on National Public Radio, shows the afrofuturist in all his glory. Performative, cathartic, and liberating, we are taken on a fantastical jazz journey.

Kris Needs repositions the roots of Sonny Blount aka Sun Ra on three discs (60 tracks) spanning his earliest 1933 recordings of big band jazz and be-bop, thru the birth of Sun Ra and the "future shock" of his later visions. "CD1 (Pre-flight) features Sun Ra’s earliest recordings from the 1940s, playing piano for Wynonie Harris and Lil Green, jamming with Stuff Smith, and coaching or arranging for artists such as Andrew Tibbs, the Hambone Kids and the Dozier Boys with Red Saunders’ Orchestra. Other artists he worked with featured here include pianist Dorothy Donegan, Joe Williams, Jo Jo Adams and LaVern Baker. There’s also an intriguing brace of tracks displaying his experiments with mid-1950s vocal groups such as Nu Sounds and Cosmic Rays, while introducing berserk space-preacher Yochanan. All along, Ra was blueprinting his sonic spaceship until the time was right to launch under his own name in mid-1956 with effervescent debut single, ‘Saturn’, on his newly-established label of the same name. Saturn is also the planet he claimed to be his birth-place. CD1 ends with the first 1956 Arkestra sessions, picked up again on CD2 (Lift-off), which runs through early Saturn singles such as ‘A Call For All Demons’, then tracks from Sun Ra’s early albums Jazz By Sun Ra, Sound of Joy, Visits Planet Earth and Super-Sonic Jazz, his sound tangibly expanding through the stunning Arkestral manoeuvres of tracks such as ‘Sunology’. CD3 ( Future Shock) mixes tracks from Sun Ra’s twin landmark albums Jazz In Silhouette and The Futuristic Sounds Of Sun Ra, with intoxicating one-off singles such as ‘Great Balls Of Fire’, ‘Space Loneliness’ and ‘Big City Blues’, the massively weird ‘Teenager’s Letter Of Promises’ with singer Juanita Rogers, before signing off with Yochanan’s demented ’Message To Earthman’."

Hearkening back to the first releases from his own El Saturn record label in the 1950’s, where early Sun Ra records were typically printed in editions of 75 and featured hand-made or pasted-on sleeves, Kingdom of Discipline arrives in 2024 in a physical, hand-made edition of just 75 copies via Dead Currencies. "You've got a solo, John!" From the opening notes, where we’re dropped in the middle of a rehearsal at Saturn House on Morton Street in West Philadelphia, circa 1978, it’s clear that this is no stuffy jazz label offering. We hear Ra directing some of the legendary cast that would populate his Arkestra. Marshall Allen is on hand, as is John Gilmore. This is, essentially, “lo-fi” from one of the inventors of the genre later exemplified by punk rock and 90’s slacker indie-rock. It's a poetic symmetry for an artist who recorded to Sound Mirror wire tape machines in the 1940’s and self released home recordings before Daniel Johnston was even born. In some ways, Sun Ra has always been the bridge between jazz and punk rock’s DIY ethos. And not just because the MC5 opened for him in their heyday.

The planets align as the mighty Sun Ra Arkestra, under the direction of the maestro Marshall Allen, are releasing their first studio album in over twenty years, ‘Swirling’.

While the most renown track in this omniversal opus is the atomic expletive-filled repartee “Nuclear War,” there is so much more to this dark mysterious journey through the mind of Sun Ra. The sprawling, suite-like 20-minute title track sustains a lyrical edge in spite of an open framework and textures, which encourage sonorities to surface and emerge from the band as if there was no human intention behind them. In opposition to “Nuclear War,” Ra's organ playing here was built less on bombast and sonic terror than it is on whispers, stutters, shivers, and swells. Fireside Chat offers a wide stylistic array, as was the artist’s intent, reflecting his eclectic, seemingly irreconcilable approach to compositional extremes. With Sun Ra you get everything… except predictability.

Sun Ra was a true innovator, releasing music that was a bit different to his peers from his earliest output. But what would Sun Ra have made of today’s music scene? If he is looking down from his cosmic realm, he’ll be pleased to know that his music from the past still sounds eerily futuristic. Recorded in just one day, on October 10, 1961, The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra features 11 tracks. Among the selections is the Latin-influenced opener, “Bassism,” the bluesy “Of Sounds and Something Else,” and the aptly named, “What’s That?,” which breaks into a four-saxophone improvisation, stands out as an example of Ra’s early experimental work.

A celestial journey is what Sun Ra and His Arkestra created with Space is the Place. Sun Ra’s opus, at its simplest, is a trip through outer-bound melodies, planetary bodies, eras in time, crystals, and space caravans. You will be transported a world away!

Universe in Blue, a collection of undated live club performances by Sun Ra & His Blue Universe Arkestra, was issued in small-run pressings with two different LP covers on Sun Ra's Saturn label in 1972. Until now it has never been officially reissued on LP or CD.

Featuring what may be his only recordings on the Prophet keyboard, these once lost performances expand the omniverse of Ra across a stellar set of lengthy cuts! All recorded in a single day and finally making their terrestrial debut!

Sun Ra, as well as anyone, proved that an artist could change with the times without being a dedicated follower of fashion. In fact, Ra and his music never stopped evolving. A series of albums recorded from 1978 to 1980—Lanquidity, On Jupiter, Sleeping Beauty, and Strange Celestial Road—demonstrate the influence on Ra of musical and production trends of the mid- and late-1970s, especially heavy, studio-enhanced dance floor grooves (traceable from soul and funk to disco), and atmospheric New Age "dream" pieces. But Ra never fully surrendered to these trends; it's arguable that he even embraced them. He adapted techniques, but what he created amounted more to reinventions than "File Under" genre works.

Every Sun Ra album is unique. Yet even by Ra's standards, DISCO 3000 is an outlier. However, it sits comfortably in the Sun Ra discography — because it's weird.

Celestial Love contains recordings made in September 1982 at New York's Variety Studios, which had hosted countless Sun Ra sessions since the late 1960s. This was one of the last extended sessions at Variety, and these recordings were the last studio works released on Sun Ra's own Saturn label (though the label did continue to press concert recordings, and new studio recordings did appear on other labels). Aside from their inclusion on Celestial Love, tracks from these sessions landed on the albums A Fireside Chat With Lucifer and Nuclear War. Since Nuclear War's contents overlapped with both Fireside Chat and Celestial Love, we have reconstituted the latter two as complete albums, thus covering all titles from these Variety dates.

Recorded live at Storyville jazz club, New York, October 24 & 29, 1977. Quite simply one of Sun Ra's best live albums. This rare recording (originally on Horo records) finds Ra, along with a 19-piece Arkestra, playing a mix of his own compositions ('Images' and 'Lights') along with several jazz standards (including Jelly Roll Morton's 'King Porter Stomp' and Duke Ellington's 'Lightnin''). While Ra's own compositions were usually more avant-garde affairs, he always revelled in playing the classics as well in an effort to give his audience a lesson in jazz history."