Sun Ra in standards mode, in small-group combos, playing mostly straightahead stuff with loving care. Aside from the crazy track 4 and some nuttiness spliced into the start of track 1, you'll find little Arkestra madness here -- although the players are in the house, especially John Gilmore and Marshall Allen on saxes. They add some very nice creative touches in a standards vein, maybe spilling over the line a bit (see #3 and #7, or end of #2). Sound fidelity is middling, but the music is just wonderful. FCC clean.

1- Overlapping chaos intro, into bluesy-standards piano and sax.
2- Piano standard w/a stiff swing in the drums.
3- Coltrane's favorite, spun with a different kind of intensity. Quite nice. Lush piano intro; tough-handed sax work by John Gilmore. From the liner notes: "Given the debt Trane having acknowledged [sic] to Gilmore, it's fascinating to hear Gilmore handle the song most thoroughly associated with Trane."
4- Odd, with off-key murmuring sax, spilling into shrieky avant-garde sax solos. Grumpy, dark, COOL.
5- Slightly melancholy but not slow, with loose horn/flute combo
6- Piano fun, a standard with some unexpected intense bursts. Nice showcase for what Sun Ra can do (check out his solo piano albums for similar work, all of it great, much of it standards-based or even Disney-based)
7- Piano and nifty hand drums alongside drum kit. Free jazz starts to show in the solos.
8- Swingy standard, reprise of #2 but with old-timey organ. Opens with an engineer saying the date, and a possible false start.
9- Cleaner reprise of #2 (#8); warm sax solo early on.

... (8) and (9) are home recordings, and apparently if you listen closely enough, you can hear a separate song bleeding through from the other side of the tape, backwards.