[ad_1]
When the aliens came looking for Sun Ra, they explained that he was selected for his perfect discipline. Not all humans were fit for space travel, but he, with his expert control over his mind and body, could survive the trip. According to Ra, this encounter happened in the thirties, while he was enrolled in a teacher training course at a college in Huntsville, Alabama. The aliens, who had small antennae growing above their eyes and over their ears, recognized Ra as a soul mate. They teleported him to Saturn and told him that a more meaningful path than teaching awaits. They shared knowledge with him that freed him from the limits of human imagination. They asked him to wait until life on Earth seemed most desperate; then he could finally speak, communicating to the world the equations to transcend human reality.
This instruction guided Ra for the rest of his life as a musician and thinker. In the 1950s, signs of despair were everywhere: racism, the threat of nuclear war, social movements that sought political freedom but not cosmic enlightenment. In response, over the next four decades until his death, Ra released in 1993 over a hundred visionary jazz albums. Some consisted of anarchic and loud space music. Others featured lush, whimsical versions of the Gershwin or Disney classics. They all wanted dance music, although few knew the steps.
Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, into a supportive religious family. It was named after Black Herman, a magician who claimed to be from the dark jungles of Africa and infused his death-defying escape acts with hoodoo mysticism. Very early on, Ra showed a prodigious talent for the piano and musical composition. After his alleged alien visit, he left college and eventually moved to Chicago, where he performed in strip clubs, accompanied local blues singers, and found a place in a big band.
During Ras’ childhood, archaeologists discovered the intact tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The news inspired many African Americans to take pride in the Egyptian roots of human civilization. Chicago exposed Ra to new interpretations of Scripture by black Muslims and black Israelites, as well as suppressed stories of black struggle and works of science fiction. These influences soon permeated his playing. In 1952, he changed his name to The Sonyr RaSun Ra to abbreviate the Egyptian sun god. On Chicagos South Side, he circulated mimeographed newspapers with headlines like THE BIBLE WAS NOT WRITTEN FOR NEGROS !!!!!!!
Ra formed a group, later known as Arkestra, which included saxophonists Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, and Pat Patrick. Rather than employing tight swings and ostentatious solos, they performed in a jagged, exploratory style, with quirky electronic keyboard and brass scribbles. In the early sixties, Ra and his band mates moved to New York City and became known for wearing elaborate, colorful costumes that looked both ancient and futuristic.
In his album notes and interviews, Ra began sketching an Astro-Noir mythology, a way of aligning the history of ancient Egypt with a vision of a future human exodus beyond the stars. The details of Ras’s vision remained unclear, but he seemed to believe that the traumas of history, especially American slavery, had made life on Earth untenable. Humanity needed to break away from it and travel to a technological paradise light years away. It’s after the end of the world / You don’t know that yet? singer June Tyson asks in the 1974 film Space Is the Place. Ra called his teachings myths, they were stories about the future, meant to guide us.
The impossible attracts me, he explained later, because everything has been done and the world has not changed. He gave new names to instruments, such as the spatial-dimensional mellophone, the cosmic-sounding organ and the solar harp. One band member recalled that if you played something wrong everyone had to follow along, incorporating the mistake into the song. For Ra, the Arkestras were not musicians at all; they were tone scientists. A 1967 album is titled Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy.
In 1968, Sun Ra and his band mates moved into a house in Philadelphia. The group’s community ethic is central to Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, a 1980 film by Robert Mugge. For all of his apparent eccentricity, Ra was not a free spirit in his personal life. He had an ascetic outlook, allegedly abstaining from alcohol, drugs, sex, even sleep. He demanded that his group be available for practice at any time of the day. Yet his mischievous side, he was once called Earth Jester, also appears in the film. At one point, he comes up with a riddle about his true identity: some call me Mr. Ra. Others call me Mr. Re. You can call me Mr. Mystery. During a workout, Tyson sings a loud, boisterous song called Astro Black, and the band members, who appear to be dressed for at least three different space movies, smile at the racket.
British label Strut recently re-released Lanquidity, an album originally released in 1978. It was one of the best albums the band recorded during their years in Philadelphia, when they settled into a swinging style. between enchanted and ethereal visions of deep space and woozy, demented takes on the jazz of the thirties and forties. The band members shielded themselves from the vagaries of the day, but Where Pathways Meet has a surprisingly robust funk groove, a disco crossover sprinkled with an occasional explosion of free-jazz solo. The new edition of Lanquidity features the album’s original mix, copies of which were only available during the band’s live performances. The minor differences between the versions are most evident on the quieter numbers. Ra earned his stripes playing the blues, but in the 1970s and 1980s his recordings took on a more thoughtful quality. The song There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of) drags, carried by songs and a funeral bass line. The Ras synthesizer sounds like it’s trying to elicit a chill. Listen carefully and you hear whispers: there are other worlds they haven’t told you about, repeated by different voices, as if they were passing on a secret. And then: They want to talk to you.
In 1969, Esquire interviewed various celebrities, including Muhammad Ali, Ayn Rand, and Leonard Nimoy, for suggestions on what Neil Armstrong should say as he set foot on the moon. Most people gave serious warnings or made jokes. Sun Ra contributed a poem: Reality has touched against myth / Mankind can move to achieve the impossible / Because when you have achieved an impossible the others / Reunite to be with their brother, the first impossible / Borrowed from the Edge of Myth / Happy Space Age to you … Space exploration inspired Ra; it seemed to be proof that humanity was destined to harness its technological potential.
Ra was far from obscure: in the late 1960s, he was on the cover of Rolling Stone. In the 1970s he taught at Berkeley, performed on Saturday Night Live, and toured around the world. But by the time of Lanquidity’s release, Ra was becoming less optimistic about what listeners had learned from his work. He was often treated like an eccentric, and his theatrical attire often eclipsed his prowess as a songwriter. In a talk he gave in New York, he reiterated his lack of interest in making music about things on Earth. He riffed on Iran, the threat of nuclear war, the fact that young people seem to have no interest in cosmic salvation. For a long time, the world has lingered on faith, beliefs, maybe dreams and truth. And the kind of world you have today is based on these particular things. How do you like it?
We always rediscover Sun Ra although he would probably prefer that we spend our time meditating on the future rather than the past. In 2020, Strut released a compilation called Egypt 1971 which explored the music Ra had recorded while touring there. Last spring, Duke University republished John Szwed’s definitive 1997 biography, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. Last December, the first in a series of Sun Ra Research films was released. It was the culmination of decades of work by two obsessive fans, Peter and John Hinds, who self-published a Ra-centric zine in the 90s. The film is a captivating collage of Arkestra’s performances interspersed with lengthy interviews winding lines and sequences of Ra doing mundane things like answering the phone or checking in at a hotel. The Arkestra, which is now led by protg Ras Marshall Allen, who is ninety-seven, is still on tour. Last year, the band released a set of new recordings of Arkestra classics, titled Swirling. During the pandemic, Allen and the Arkestra aired a benefit concert hosted by Total Luxury Spa, a black-owned streetwear brand in Los Angeles that was influenced by Ras’ ideas and iconography.
Whenever Ra is rediscovered, her reception reflects what her listeners are looking for. When I was first introduced to Ra in the early 90s, he was presented as an eccentric with a good backstory, a precursor to alternative music of the time. Today, in the midst of overlapping global crises, Ra asks us to believe in the impossible. This spring, Chicago gallery and publisher Corbett vs. Dempsey have reproduced a series of Sun Ra poetry booklets: Jazz by Sun Ra, Jazz in Silhouette and The Inmeasurable Equation. As with his large formats of the 1950s, these writings capture a rawness and frankness distinct from his experimental music. In a poem, he implores black youth never to feel unloved: I am your unknown friend. He is always there, in the past and in the future, ready to be found by his listeners. In another booklet, originally published in 1957, he explains that his music is basically about happiness. Maybe people don’t quite recognize these new forms of joy yet. But, he writes, I will eventually succeed.
[ad_2]
picture credit