Sleeping Beauty

This album is, of course, perfectly named, for it is the companion piece to the flip-side of a night out. This is played after the keys are tossed on the table, after the tie is loosened, after the heavy sighs and the falling into your favorite easy chair. The first track soothes and revitalizes, so when the second song comes along, you smile, realizing you've still got a bit of groove left in you. The pacing of this short album is impeccable. Close your night with this question: Does beauty exist if it is not beheld?

Sleeping Beauty is like a story building upon itself. Starting with Springtime Again, it builds the foundation of a calm awakening from the winter slumber, with slow chants and slight tingles around. Door of the Cosmos builds upon that, adding a sax and some spacy guitars, which is apt for the song name. And the B side is fully occupied by Sleeping Beauty which takes everything we've learned from the first two tracks and combines them into a 12 minute odessey through flutes, keys, saxophones with a drumming backbone mixed with some ethereal spoken word moments.

Maybe it's a bit ignorant to say this album's sound is embedded to In a Silent Way, but to me there are a lot of parallels to be made. Both are ambient takes on jazz, very sparse, and both feel oddly down to earth, despite trying to sound they're coming from the middle of space. Sleeping Beauty even more so, since Sun Ra's sound is synonymous with spacey jazz. But truthfully, the album sounds like someone dreaming of space in the middle of a concrete street, more than anything. And in that sort of halfway convergence point, this album finds its place as both a great and a unique sonical experience.