Kelan Phil Cohran, the former Sun Ra sideman and co-founder of the influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), has recently seen several of his dates as a leader from the 1960s reissued, including a couple on Portland’s popular Mississippi Records. African Skies, the most recent album to come out under his name, has all the trappings of outré Chicago jazz from that era—flute, kalimba, mystical chanting—but the date of the session stands out. The record, released last year by Chicago’s Captcha, is an unheard studio recording from 1993. It is Cohran’s first album of new music since The Malcolm X Memorial (A Tribute in Music), which first came out in 1968.
