Two very different Record Store Day releases from the Saturnic Mr Ra, both featuring previously unheard music and both revealing divergent sides of this multi-faceted artist.

At The Showcase er, showcases three storming gigs at Joe Segal’s famous Chicago venue The Showcase. As you’d expect, these are freewheeling performances, perpetually teetering on the edge of chaos, with only the will and gravitational pull of Ra, plus the aggregate skill of his musicians, preventing a collapse into entropy. Highlights of a 10-song (plus numerous announcements and spoken word interludes) set are the 18-minute ‘Calling Planet Earth & The Shadow World’ and a 10-minute ‘View From Another Dimension’. This is Ra and the Arkestra at their most cosmic, with an emphasis on individual expression, improvisation and sonic texture, rather than collective swing. Add in a superb booklet featuring illuminating liner notes plus interviews with the likes of Marshall Allen, Michael Anderson, Jack DeJohnette, David Murray, Reggie Workman and others, and previously unpublished photos from the actual gigs, and you have a winning package.

Pink Elephants – pressed on pink vinyl, natch – is a rather different beast. It consists of live material culled from the archives, recorded at different times with different bands; what unites every tune is that it has a Walt Disney connection (the title track is the music which accompanies a trippy scene from the animated classic Dumbo wherein the intoxicated titular elephant and his buddy Timothy Q Mouse hallucinate wildly). Who knew that our astral traveller had such a soft spot for Disney movies?

The thing is, as bizarre as the idea of a figure as cosmically out there as Sun Ra tackling the likes of ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’ and ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ is, it actually works, and works really, really well, transcending mere novelty. I was surprised at just how seamlessly Ra and his Arkestra put their own unique twist on the seven songs, all of them recontextualised as hard-swinging Afrofuturist jazz.

Thus ‘Whistle While You Work’ becomes a pulsating horns-keys workout full of forward momentun and rich with infectious, polyphonic call-and-response vox. It’s absolutely brilliant. The cacophony of horns and percussion on the title track resemble a marching band, but the tune is given a kind of demented grandeur by the crazed vocal lines. ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ is by contrast taken straight and it swings like a bastard, June Tyson’s heartfelt vocals the icing on the cake. The 10-minute ‘Second Star to the Right’ (Peter Pan) features some of the most assertive Ra piano/keys playing I’ve ever heard and ‘Forest of No Return’ (from the 1961 live-action flick Babes In Toyland) is plain weird and – appropriately enough – rather creepy. Finally, the Sherman brothers’ ‘Let’s Go Fly A Kite’ (Mary Poppins) sees Ra and the crew gleefully jazzifying the galaxy and the jubilant, percussion-laden ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’ round out an always surprising, joyous and fun collection which will win over even ardent Sun Ra sceptics.