Thirteen Cosmic Standards By Sun Ra & Funkadelic

Album Review

These are covers of works by Sun Ra and Funkadelic — innovators that most acts would not think to mix, certainly to the exclusion of all others, in one album. Vandermark, McBride, and Drake offer rather minimal, though still rather busy and full-sounding, interpretations of the works. On the compositions by Sun Ra (all of them taken from that jazzman's late 1950s and early '60s material), there's a spacious clarity; the Funkadelic numbers (all from the first half of the 1970s), by contrast, have more of a percolating jazz-funk groove. It's the Funkadelic cuts that are more interesting, simply because so few jazz acts have tackled Funkadelic songs — or music that sounds anything like Funkadelic. The musicians translate cuts like "Cosmic Slop" from wacky funk-soul-psychedelic tunes to fusiony (in the good sense) instrumentals, making them work fairly convincingly as jazz pieces. Every player does well, with Vandermark presenting his usual impressive assortment of forceful tones. McBride is particularly skilled at creating a variety of timbres and textures from both electric and acoustic basses, traversing both deep funk and buzzing cello-like lines. It's not easy to cover the works of well-known legends in a fresh fashion, or to combine material from two fairly different bodies of work, and Spaceways Incorporated acquit themselves pretty well in this attempt.