PLAYING music out of their interplanetary skins, the Sun Ra Arkestra touch down at the Cafe Oto in Dalston with this extraordinary set.

Sun Ra of Birmingham, Alabama, died in 1993. But under the staunch leadership of 91-year-old alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, the 11 Saturnians who constitute the Arkestra have continued touring the Earth with their rampaging galactic sounds.

The whole of jazz history is in their timbre. Cecil Brooks’s searing trumpet cuts loose like Buddy Bolden’s New Orleans horn, George Burton’s piano is the ghost of Earl Hines and Knoel Scott’s storming tenor blows echoes of the rumbling saxophone engine of Coleman Hawkins and the sublimity of John Coltrane.

Their sparkling, sequinned robes reflected the golden sweat trickling from their faces under the Cafe Oto spotlights and when Tara Middleton sings: “Folks been walking, walking, walking on the moon,” you can believe it.

Yet there’s nothing unworldly about the Arkestra’s power as Middleton calls out: “They say that history repeats itself but history is your story.”

These space sonics are definitely of our world and its heterogeneous peoples.

The familiar chant: “May you like it in space, in some far place,” is also a commentary on Ferguson, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Calais, Palestine, Western Sahara or the seething streets outside the venue in Hackney.

The veteran Allen plays some astonishing solos as he conducts and provokes his bandmates and strums his valves as if they’re guitar strings, accompanied by the pounding Afro-Latin drums of Elson Nascimento and Wayne Antony Smith, the relentless subterranean bass of Tyler Mitchell and Danny Ray Thompson’s gurgling baritone.

Gone for now, but not for long. They’re touching terra firma again at Cafe Oto soon. Don’t miss.

Review by Chris Searle