Brother From Another Planet
In 1958, the jazz pianist
known as Sun Ra recorded a remarkable album, Jazz in Silhouette . Borne
aloft by splendid dancing melodies and often-startling syncopation, Jazz in
Silhouette soared in the manner of Duke Ellington. The compositions were
ingeniously conceived suites, where a boppish swing might break into a Cuban
cha-cha-cha; or a trumpet's eerie whisper, into a thunderous row of piano
clusters. The best Sun on vinyl, Jazz in Silhouette is also the most
obscure. (Click for a clip from the album.)
That's
because Sun Ra's reputation was established not by Jazz in Silhouette
but by albums like the 1965 Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra , whose
garrulous improvisations and expressionist timbres--devoid of a tonal center,
with much less of a tune to hang on to--made it an exemplary statement of free
jazz. From a strictly aesthetic perspective, neither of the two volumes of
Heliocentric Worlds holds up well against free-jazz albums from the same
year by Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and Don Cherry. The saxophones cry
balefully, the drums rumble ominously, the marimba echoes warmly--yet the
combined effect is more curious than moving. (Click for a clip from
Heliocentric Worlds .)
But then, as John F. Szwed makes clear in his new
biography, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra , Sun Ra
never aspired to conventional lyricism; he wished to re-create the roars and
the silences of the cosmos. And, in Heliocentric Worlds , he forged an
original style intended to do just that. Rejecting chords--the traditional
foundation of improvisation--as an impediment to creativity, Sun Ra favored the
more supple backdrop provided by a hypnotically sustained drone, or "space
key." This freed his sidemen to pursue the music in their heads--a fairly
turbulent journey, as it turned out. Even today, the music sounds pretty far
out, clanging with esoteric percussion, electronic distortion, and novel
instrumental voicings. Heliocentric Worlds was also an expression of Sun
Ra's persona, a persona so extraordinary it ended up casting a permanent shadow
over his art. The cover illustration of the second volume linked Sun Ra to a
visionary heritage of space explorers including da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo,
Pythagoras, and Tycho Brahe. The songs were interstellar tone poems, bearing
titles like "Cosmic Chaos" and "Outer Nothingness."
Sun Ra's
fascination with outer space was no publicity stunt. Born Herman Blount in
Birmingham, Ala. (he took the name of the Egyptian sun god in 1952), Sun Ra
genuinely and fervently believed that he was a visitor from Saturn. He denied
that he had been born and, therefore, that he would die--a claim he maintained
right until he died, at age 79, in 1993. A short, rotund black man, dour of
expression, he appeared in garish flowing robes, a shining turban, and space
goggles. For nearly four decades, this cosmic jazz messenger performed, lived,
and traveled across the world with an entourage of Afro-futurist troubadours
called "Arkestra" (a cross between "ark" and "orchestra"). Sun Ra's men
believed in the myth of their leader's origins and, like him, waited to be
rescued from Earth by alien spaceships. According to Art Blakey, Arkestra
saxophonist John Gilmore often boasted about his "fans on Mars or Jupiter." The
band's concerts were filled with dance, light shows, midgets, fire breathing,
and space chants.
Unlike most jazz musicians, Sun Ra was not a
child of the black bourgeoisie. Poor and fatherless, he grew up in 1920s
Birmingham, one of the most segregated cities in the country. As an adolescent,
he was afflicted by cryptorchidism, an especially ferocious hernia. Terrified
that "others might find out and that he might be treated as a freak," he became
a recluse, burying himself in music. When not practicing piano, he was delving
into mystical treatises at the black-run Masonic Lodge. Declaring himself a
conscientious objector to World War II, he directed a poignant appeal to the
National Service Board: "I don't see how the government or anyone else could
expect me to agree to being judged by the standards of a normal person."
Sun Ra's
struggle with disability is the real revelation of Szwed's book. (Oddly enough,
he neglects to mention Sun Ra's apparent homosexuality, to which jazz
aficionados refer as if it were common knowledge.) Unfortunately, Szwed does
not explore it enough. Might it help explain Sun Ra's attraction to theosophy,
his repudiation of physical reality as a "prison," his conviction that our
bodies are mere vehicles, his obsession with secret layers of meaning? Sun Ra
hinted at such connections to the tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin: "I must be
from someplace else because I'm a total misfit." Many of us have entertained
such a thought about ourselves. The difference is that Sun Ra actually came to
believe it. There's a tale here as rich as, and in some ways akin to, Marshall
Applewhite's.
Like many '50s outcasts, Sun Ra came into his own in the
'60s. He was honored as an elder statesman of the avant-garde, housed in
Oakland by Bobby Seale, hired as a guest lecturer at Berkeley, embraced by
white hippies. His appeal to different constituencies isn't hard to fathom. To
flower children, the Arkestra was a commune; to black admirers, a black
commune. The band's ensemble structure seemed to prefigure the black music
cooperatives then being set up in Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, as well
as such emerging family funk bands as Sly and the Family Stone. In 1979, the
eccentric funk pioneer George Clinton said of Sun Ra: "This boy was definitely
out to lunch--the same place I eat at." It was a compliment.
Sun Ra saw
himself as a charismatic leader who would deliver his followers through
patriarchal discipline. The anarchism of his music was deceptive. Sun Ra's
dream was to rule something like an intergalactic Singapore. Music, he
believed, provided a "model for government." That model combined futurism,
Egyptology, and black uplift. In the post-Sputnik age, Sun Ra argued, it was
incumbent upon black musicians to master electronic instruments, notably the
Moog synthesizer. As he put it, "Black people are behind on these things, and
they've got to catch up." (If Sun Ra were around today, he would almost surely
be an Internet zealot--as is, for example, Ornette Coleman, whose performance
piece, Tone Dialing , owes much to Sun Ra.)
His followers were to achieve transcendence
through self-abnegation. In living with Sun Ra, Arkestra members renounced
drink, drugs, and sex. Until the moment of "emigration to space," Sun Ra's word
was the law. He could wake up the men in the middle of the night if he desired,
for rehearsal, or for a windy lecture on ancient Egypt. Those who crossed him
risked corporal punishment. "We're less than his pupils," explained one
Arkestra musician. "We're nobodies with the master." Gilmore, a brilliant tenor
saxophonist who influenced Coltrane and played with both Blakey and Miles
Davis, gave up what was bound to be a distinguished solo career to play with
Sun Ra for four decades. He never led his own group.
How was Sun Ra able to
command this kind of sacrifice? Szwed stresses the musician's affiliations with
a powerful current of black American prophecy. From slaves' dreams of being
transported magically back to Africa to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon ,
the idea of a miraculous exodus has loomed large in black American narratives.
It's understandable why this fantasy of flight would take root in black
America, which, at numerous moments in its history, has been given reason to
fear that conditions in the diaspora can never be improved. Sun Ra's spaceships
did not come, as it were, out of nowhere. But Szwed overlooks a crucial
distinction between Sun Ra and his forebears. He and his associates weren't
operating at the level of metaphor. Like the Nation of Islam, which claims
Elijah Muhammad is currently circling Earth on a space shuttle, Sun Ra made his
vision of liberation in Saturn the ideological bedrock of a rigorous theology,
organization, and enterprise. There is a word for organizations that obey a
charismatic leader, uphold fantastic founding myths, and assemble a body of
secretive lore, but Szwed can't bring himself to call the Arkestra a cult. It's
too bad he's squeamish. As a jazz composer, Sun Ra never fulfilled the bright
promise of his early recordings like Jazz in Silhouette . But by founding
a cult, he earned a lasting place in the larger culture, which otherwise might
have eluded him.
