Dreaming of the Masters

OMG, the Alphabet City neighborhood of Manhattan in the late 60s and early 70s!  It's reportedly gentrified and quite safe now, but back then the unlit streets were corridors of danger at night. According to an article written by James Gavin in the magazine Jazz Times,

"Dealers skulked in doorways; muggings were common. But that didn’t stop musicians and their fans from trekking into scary Alphabet City, east of First Avenue, to visit a club that lured the bravest renegades in jazz. Taxi drivers avoided the area, and the nearest subway stop was blocks away; those who lacked a car walked briskly. Along the way they passed squalid tenements, a men’s homeless shelter and the clubhouse of the Hell's Angels, with a row of Harley-Davidsons outside."

That club, Slugs’ Saloon, was the ultimate jazz dive.  The place had bare brick walls, hanging lights that barely lit up the room, and drug dealers hovering near the men’s room.  The floor was covered by sawdust mixed with peanut shells. "If someone threw up you’d just cover it up,” according to saxophonist Gary Bartz, who played there often.  The windows were usually dirty and the front door hard to open.  It had two eye-level grates, out of which spilled tough-sounding jazz. According to author Paul Pines, when you arrived “you knew you were at the gates of the underworld.”

Albert Ayler Quintet at Slugs' Saloon, 1966

And what did that jazz spilling out from the underworld sound like?  On Monday nights, it might have sounded like what was captured on the Sun Ra LP, Universe in Blue, a collection of undated live club performances. While some have contended that the album was recorded somewhere on the west coast around August 1971, surviving members the Arkestra have suggested that it could have been recorded “somewhere on the road” in mid-1972 as they straggled across the country on their way back to Philadelphia. As the audio fidelity, room tone, channel separation, and mic artifacts on Universe in Blue are very similar to those on I Roam the Cosmos (which was recorded at Slugs'), Sun Ra's Bandcamp page credits the recording as "likely Slugs' Saloon, New York, early 1970s".

Calling Planet Earth - We'll Wait for You is a previously unreleased, labyrinthine 23-minute "space suite" full of bluster and unexpected dynamic twists, with a vocal centerpiece by June Tyson and the band. After a group vocal intro ("Calling Planet Earth") segues into a group sax improv, a blistering baritone sax solo (Pat Patrick?) carries the suite well into outer space territory.  Some brief applause follows, and then another solo, this time a John Gilmore tenor number. Sun Ra is up next on his "Intergalactic Space Organ" until he's suddenly interrupted by June Tyson and the band for the We'll Wait for You vocal centerpiece. After the ensuing group sax improv, Sun Ra resumes his solo, featuring lots of his signature white-noise effects.  A slow, almost funereal, composed segment then closes out the piece.

All in all, a pretty good representation of the late-night sounds that were emanating from the rough-and-tumble Slugs' Saloon in the "bad" part of Manhattan in the early 70s.

Personal note:  back at this time, my friends and I would take the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan on weekends and then venture down to the East Village (during daylight hours!) to explore the hippie head shops and boutiques there.  We hadn't discovered jazz yet and never ventured into Slugs or any other jazz clubs (plus we were well under 21), but we'd buy posters, underground comic books, and paraphernalia, and then haul it all back like trophies to our suburban homes.  Good times . . . .