There is a version of this story that writes itself as a human-interest miracle — centenarian still playing saxophone, isn't that something — and it would be completely wrong. Marshall Allen's new live double album isn't a victory lap or an act of geriatric bravery. It's one of the most genuinely exploratory avant-garde records to drop this year, from anyone, at any age. And it came out on May 23, 2025, two days before Allen turns 101.
Released by Otherly Love Records and Ars Nova Workshop, “Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons: Live in Philadelphia” collects 16 exploratory tracks from the ongoing series’ first two years, captured live on stage at Solar Myth, spotlighting wide-ranging improvisations with saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins, James Brandon Lewis, and Elliott Levin. That guest list alone tells you this isn’t a nostalgia exercise. Bassists include William Parker, Eric Revis, Luke Stewart, and James McNew of Yo La Tengo; drummers are Chad Taylor, Tcheser Holmes of Irreversible Entanglements, Mikel Patrick Avery, and Charlie Hall of The War on Drugs; keyboardist Brian Marsella, trumpeter Michael Ray, the Ade Ilu Lukumi Bata Ensemble, and experimental noise duo Wolf Eyes all joined in various sessions. The album was produced by Stephen Buono and Yuri Seung, and executive produced by Matthew Pierce. Ghost Horizons is not the Arkestra with different furniture. It’s something stranger and more open.
Allen’s Ghost Horizons ensemble came about on the instigation of concert hosting outfit Ars Nova Workshop, which settled on a permanent venue in the old Arkestra home base of Philadelphia called Solar Myth. Ars Nova invited Marshall to lead a series of performances at the new joint, and while he might have been able to just park the Arkestra there, Allen along with Arkestra guitarist DM Hotep instead opted to lead a revolving set of guest musicians who share the Sun Ra tradition of making highly extemporaneous music on the fringes. The result is a record that sounds like a city talking to itself — Philadelphia’s deep creative underground surfacing in real time, one improvised set at a time.
The album’s architecture rewards close listening. Sun Ra’s “Seductive Fantasy,” first recorded in 1979 for “On Jupiter,” opens the album in a quintet setting, with Allen’s raspy growls paired against trombonist Dave Davis — Hotep jags and slices through on guitar, eventually breaking into river-runs over Stewart and Taylor’s lithe rhythm. From there the record shapeshifts without warning. “Back to You,” the second track, ventures into the outer realms, with Allen’s EVI meshing with the bizarre electronics of Wolf Eyes. Then “The Last Transmission” arrives at track four, Allen creating intergalactic tones from his EVI as James Brandon Lewis responds with his grounded tenor sax, with William Parker and Chad Taylor manning the rhythm section. Deep into the second half of the album, “Cosmic Dreamers, Ode to Elegua” melds galactic jazz with African folk music, thanks to the addition of the Ade Ilu Lukumi Bata Ensemble. There is no throughline except Allen’s restless alto and the conviction that the next sound should be one nobody has made yet.
It’s worth pausing on what Allen plays and how. Allen improvises his way through blaring slices of noise on his sax and the bird-call swoops and bleeps of his EVI — an Electronic Valve Instrument — during the ensemble’s quietest moments. The EVI is not an affectation; it’s been central to Allen’s vocabulary for decades, and on this record it functions as a kind of intergalactic counterpoint to the earthbound rhythm sections around him. Having first joined the Sun Ra Arkestra in 1958 and led it since 1995, Allen hasn’t escaped the long shadow of his absent boss — but that shadow is Marshall’s, too. Ghost Horizons doesn’t pretend otherwise. It leans into the inheritance while insisting on something new.
It’s also worth noting what this album arrives alongside: Allen was named a 2025 NEA Jazz Master, and “Live in Philadelphia” is his second album of the year, following his debut solo record “New Dawn,” released on Valentine’s Day. Two albums in one year, at 100 going on 101, and neither one sounds like a man wrapping things up. That last phrase is the key one. Legacy without nostalgia. The avant-garde has always had a problem with its own history — either genuflecting to the past or pretending it doesn’t exist. What Allen has built at Solar Myth, with this rotating cast of younger improvisers responding to his lead, is something rarer: a conversation across generations where nobody is performing reverence and nobody is performing rebellion. They’re just playing. At 101, Marshall Allen is still the most alive person in the room.
