A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH JERRY GORDON, CO-FOUNDER OF EVIDENCE


In my humble opinion, Evidence is a label to be reckoned with because it holds the keys to the vault of the major works of the immortal Sun Ra. Jerry Gordon, the co-founder and head of the label, has been a long time supporter of Ra's vast work and has strived tirelessly to assure that generations to come have an opportunity to enjoy Sun Ra's music and continues the legacy of one of this music's most interesting figures. I am honored to present Gordon, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

JERRY GORDON: Evidence was started in 1991. My partner and I were both record retailers. He had a seventeen store chain and I had a single store. His was more the mall type store. They were a very efficient store and my store was catered to non-hit product like jazz and blues and other avant-garde music. We both got out of the retail record business around the same time and were together at a party and compared notes and decided to start a label.


FJ: And your initial mission statement?

JERRY GORDON: We knew that there were tons and tons of out of print records and we started licensing to fill the void. Initially, we were interested in just re-issues.


FJ: When did you ink the deal with Sun Ra's Saturn label?

JERRY GORDON: We spent a year putting together deals. The first deal we made was with Sun Ra to issue his Saturn catalog. That happened because Sun Ra was living in Philly and I knew him through my record store. We used to sell his records. I was kind of the Sun Ra LP outlet in Philadelphia. I knew what a treasure the Saturn label was.


FJ: Your impressions of Sun Ra.

JERRY GORDON: Well, Sun Ra was an incredible hard worker. When he wasn't touring or performing, he was rehearsing that band. He was absolutely a genius. The core of his band, Marshall Allen and John Gilmore were devoted to his music. It wasn't about the money at all. Sun Ra was always pushing forward his different philosophies. He wasn't on or off. He was just always Sun Ra. Sun Ra's whole thing was to turn on the light upstairs with as many people as he could come in contact with.


FJ: Why is he not acknowledged for his contributions?

JERRY GORDON: The reason why he is not recognized like a Monk or Charlie Parker is partly his wardrobe and his futuristic elements that are associated with his music. Not as many people dug Sun Ra as there should have been.


FJ: Then why is it that young audiences get Sun Ra's music?

JERRY GORDON: When you are young, just like we get more conservative as we get older, age makes you conservative. When you are young, you are open to that. You have the time to indulge Sun Ra's music and listen to his music and get into it. When people are young, they have the time to do it and the willingness to explore. Sun Ra's music is about exploration. People don't get his music because they are intellectualizing it. It is not an idea. It is just music.


FJ: How extensive is the Evidence catalog?

JERRY GORDON: The Evidence catalog is 350 titles.


FJ: How much of that pie is blues?

JERRY GORDON: It is a substantial part. Blues has been growing. Blues sales are better than jazz sales.


FJ: Let's touch on the five soon to be released Sun Ra reissues.

JERRY GORDON: They come out September 21. There are five titles and they represent the seventeenth through twenty-first Sun Ra releases on Evidence. Previously, Sun Ra reissued sixteen releases. The first fifteen were single CDs. On those fifteen CDs appeared twenty Sun Ra albums. Then sixteenth was the 2-CD Sun Ra Singles set. There are now five more releases, one of which is a 2-CD set. Each one has a unique story. The Sun Ras are really exceptional. I am proud of all of these releases. These are every bit as exciting as the previous ones. The first one is When Angels Speak of Love. It was recorded in '63 and released in '66. It is the rarest of all Saturn albums. It is a really, really rare album. In fact, Fred, I don't own it. In all my years, I had never seen it. The master of this album could not be found. It was mastered off of two record collector's albums. Believe it or not, the sound is terrific. Sun Ra's LPs were low-fi. There was a money situation. They were doing it themselves. They did not have a large record company recording them. They recorded at the slowest speed you could record something. They did that to save tape. Not only that, they used both sides of tape! To get the sound we get on our recordings takes a great deal of money and time to eliminate all the hisses and clicks and pops. We struggle to find the masters. It came from when Sun Ra was living in New York in Greenwich Village. It is a great album. The next one is called The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums: Cymbals & Crystal Spears. That is an interesting story. In the early Seventies, the head of Impulse! tried to sign Sun Ra as an artist. They couldn't do the deal. In order to get some kind of relationship with Sun Ra and his music, he decided to license preexisting masters from the Saturn catalog. Impulse! abandoned the project a third of the way through. The seventeen masters were all boxed up and returned. In those boxes were two albums recorded in 1973 that had never been issued. They sat in boxes for thirty years.


FJ: Who dusted off the boxes?

JERRY GORDON: Me!


FJ: You should get the key to the city.

JERRY GORDON: They are the great, lost Sun Ra albums. Pathways To Unknown Worlds came out on Impulse!. It was the last album that came out when they pulled the plug. So it was only out for a short time. It sounds very different from the Impulse! release through modern technology. You can hear voices you couldn't hear on the original recording. We even found a track that was never released on the Impulse! album because the sound quality was so poor. It was a very short album and we didn't want anyone complaining that the LP was only twenty-three minutes long. So we combined it with Friendly Love, an album that no one had ever heard before. The next release was a greatest hits album called Greatest Hits: Easy Listening For Intergalactic Travel. It is a compilation that includes one track from all the CDs that Evidence has ever reissued of Sun Ra. I tried to put great, yet more accessible Sun Ra, so people could try out Sun Ra. The music is fantastic. The last of the five releases is called Lanquidity. It is the only one that did not come from Sun Ra's Saturn label. This one was recorded by a WXPN radio station engineer. Sun Ra was a frequent guest on WXPN, a college radio station here in Philadelphia. One of the engineers had a small record label and Sun Ra and this engineer got together and recorded an album. It is also very rare. Not many people had heard it. It became an incredible collector's item because DJs in the UK used it to sample from. The album goes for about four hundred dollars a copy. It sounds fantastic.


FJ: You must sleep like a baby.

JERRY GORDON: I am very proud of these records. I recommend the following Evidence titles. They are about as good as it gets and you should break the piggy bank for some of these recordings


1. Rashied Ali/Borah Bergman/Joe McPhee/Wilber Morris/Myra Melford Trio - The October Revolution
2. Sun Ra - Jazz in Silhouette
3. Sun Ra - Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy and Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow
4. Sun Ra - The Singles
5. Sun Ra - Atlantis
6. Sun Ra - The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums
7. Sun Ra - Holiday for Soul Dance
8. Sun Ra - We Travel the Space Ways and Bad and Beautifu
l 9. Sun Ra - The Magic City
10. Sun Ra - Visits Planet Earth and Interstellar Low Ways
11. Sun Ra - Angels and Demons at Play and The Nubians of Plutonia
12. Sun Ra - Fate in a Pleasant Mood and When Sun Comes Down
13. Sun Ra - Monorails and Satellites
14. Sun Ra - When Angels Speak of Love
15. Sun Ra - Lanquidity
16. Sun Ra - Pathways to Unknown Worlds and Friendly Love
17. Sun Ra - Super-Sonic Jazz
18. Sun Ra - Sound Sun Pleasure

(The Roadshow also recommends any of the Pharoah Sanders material and highly recommends Evidence's blues catalog)


Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief. Comments?  Email Fred.