SUN RA ON BANDCAMP - - - BATMAN AND ROBIN

Various titles of the Sun Ra catalogue are being added to Bandcamp.
The latest is the 1966 "Batman And Robin" album.
Produced by Tom Wilson (who also produced The Mothers' "Freak Out" album around the same time!)



Irwin Chusid adds:

This is not a Sun Ra album, nor does it sound like a Sun Ra album—but Sun Ra and various members of his Arkestra are on it. This 1966 budget-label project was an attempt by producer Tom Wilson (1931–1978) to cash in on the Batman craze launched by the popular superhero comic book-turned-TV series.

"The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale" were not a real group—it was a marquee name for a rotating cast of session pros earning rent money by playing on hastily recorded albums intended to turn quick bucks on various musical and cultural fashions. There are at least 20 "Dan & Dale" albums listed at Discogs, most issued on the Diplomat label. To the best of anyone's knowledge, there were no musicians named Dan or Dale involved. In fact, few, if any, musicians have been identified from any D&D projects—"Batman" being a notable exception, and for good reason.

Wilson had produced Sun Ra's first LP, Jazz by Sun Ra, in 1957 for Wilson's short-lived (but legendary) Cambridge-based Transition label. After Ra relocated from Chicago to New York in 1961, Wilson contacted Sunny, booked him in a Newark NJ studio, and produced The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra, issued in 1962 on Savoy.

The Batman project occurred after Wilson's resignation from a staff producer position at Columbia Records, where he helmed albums by Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Eddie Harris, Herbie Mann, and others. By 1966, Wilson had begun selling his services to the highest bidder as a freelancer, and produced many historic projects for MGM-Verve, including the first two albums by the Mothers of Invention, the first two Velvet Underground releases, and albums by Nico, Hugh Masekela, Eric Burdon and the Animals, and others.
...