When jazz’s most productive centenarian, Marshall Allen, released the studio album New Dawn earlier this month, it was rightly heralded as a long-overdue solo debut. That framing might lead a person to believe that Allen has only rarely left the celebrated orbit of the Sun Ra Arkestra, which he joined in 1958 and has led faithfully for 30 years.
Here in Philly, we know that Allen hasn’t been shy about stepping out on his own, even as he grows ever more synonymous with the Arkestra and its legacy. Over the last few years in particular, he’s led a changeable unit called Ghost Horizons in a long-term residency at Solar Myth. Highlights from that residency will soon find release on a double album, Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons, due out on May 23 in a joint release by Otherly Love and Ars Nova Workshop.
A compilation of recordings from nine different shows, the album features Allen on alto saxophone, electronic valve instrument (EVI), Casio synthesizer and occasional vocals — alongside an essential co-conspirator, the Arkestra guitarist DMHotep, and noted guests like bassists William Parker and Eric Revis; saxophonists James Brandon Lewis and Immanuel Wilkins; and the experimental noise duo Wolf Eyes.
WRTI is proud to share a world premiere of the album’s lead single, “Square the Circle,” which features DMHotep and two musicians best known for their work in indie-rock: James McNew, who plays bass in Yo La Tengo, and Charlie Hall, the drummer in The War on Drugs. Recorded on Jan. 28, 2024, the track opens with Allen’s swooping space sounds on EVI, before McNew and Hall lock into a motorik beat. Switching to alto over their krautrock groove, Allen extemporizes as only he can — in bursts and blurts, like a neon graffiti scrawl along the aluminum shell of a fresh subway car.
Allen was still a limber 99 at the time of this recording, the most recent on Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons. Elsewhere on the album, there’s documentation from as far back as the band’s Solar Myth debut, on Nov. 12, 2022, when the ensemble included Dave Davis on trombone, Luke Stewart on bass and Chad Taylor on drums and percussion.
“I didn’t want it to turn into a cookie cutter series where every iteration is the same style with different faces,” explains DMHotep in a press statement. “I tried to incorporate musicians with different improvisational mindsets. I’m very familiar with the things that really inspire Marshall, so I kept an eye and an ear towards that while occasionally throwing him a curveball.”
Allen is scheduled to play an album-release show for New Dawn at the Music Hall at World Cafe Live on April 9. Ghost Horizons is a wider, wilder sonic experience, and in that sense a good deal truer to his core sensibilities. But the two albums stand together in rich complement, a testament to the vitality that Allen has continued to summon into his tenth decade. His 101st birthday falls on May 25, a couple of days after the new album’s release. We’ll be listening to the available music in the meantime, eyes turned to the skies.
Marshall Allen's Ghost Horizons will be released on May 23; preorder it here.
