Sun
Ra was one of the most prolific and innovative American Composers of the 20th
century alongside other innovators such as Duke Ellington and Charles
Mingus. You can trace Sun Ra back to the
origins of big band jazz. He studied
with Fletcher Henderson who was one of the first people to write arrangements
and put together a big band jazz group.
He took that knowledge and stretched the traditional arrangements out by
using unusual voicings. He was always
pushing the envelope with a single-minded focus on music that never
ceased. He was like a monk in his
devotion to music.
This
single-minded focus on the music is why the Arkestra was so good. The Arkestra produced two of the best
saxophone players in jazz history in John Gilmore and Marshall Allen. John Gilmore was a member of the Arkestra
from the mid 50s until his death in 1995.
Marshall Allen joined the Arkestra in 1958 and continues the legacy of
the Arkestra by being the musical director.
John Gilmore was a big influence on
John Coltrane, in the JC Thomas book Chasin
the Trane, Thomas reveals:
Gilmore
showed Coltrane how to reach certain notes in the overtone series that some
critics claimed weren’t even on the horn.
But they were; Gilmore was certainly playing them and Coltrane was
definitely hearing them. In return,
Coltrane taught Gilmore some of his harmonic discoveries, which the latter
often used with startling effects (Thomas 182).
John Gilmore continues
on in the Chasin the Trane book,
explaining the influence of the Arkestra on Coltrane:
Trane
really wanted to play more avant-garde music, but he didn’t get the foundation
until he listened to Sun Ra a lot. I
think we helped him get his Oriental and African music together too. I’ll tell you this, whenever I saw him after
he’d studied with Sun Ra he was smoking (Thomas 182).
If you look at the records Sun Ra
was putting out in the 1950s he was easily ten or fifteen years ahead of his
time. Songs such as India, Watusi, Aethiopia, and Africa break the mold of merely extending existing jazz ideas. They are employing exotic scales and rhythms
not common to the jazz form. This would
of course become commonplace in jazz from the 1960s on. The Arkestra was way ahead of the curve. This put him in the company of pioneers like
Ahmed Abdul Malik with Jazz Sahara released in 1958 and Charles Mingus’ Tijuana
Moods. Tijuana Moods wasn’t released
until 1962, but it was recorded in 1957.
All of these releases were using traditional jazz and adding new worldly
expressions and rhythms to the canon.
Sun Ra was a
leading innovator in the Free Jazz movement that went on to influence rock and
roll and early proto-punk bands like the MC5.
In
the 1960s the Arkestra moved to New York and contributed to the Black Arts
movement. The Arkestra performed the
music for Amiri Baraka’s play Black Mass, and often performed at Baraka’s Black
Arts Repertory Theatre. We see how Sun Ra’s use of art to transcend was
being employed by many artists of the black arts movement as Nathaniel Earl
Bowles describes in his paper: My Music
is Words-The Poetics of Sun Ra:
their shared reliance on energies and
forces beyond the realm of initial human understanding. Indeed, this was one of
the main forces behind the music of the African-American avant-garde in the
1960's – sound as a vessel for both cosmic energies and primal feeling,
manifesting itself as the sound of the ecstatic truth (Bowles 28).
Sun Ra was able to operate
independently from everyone else, and yet he had a comprehensive understanding
and awareness of the history of all African Americans. He used his art to transcend all politics and
social stigmas. He was able to achieve
all of this while still operating within the same limitations that all African
Americans faced. Baraka said that:
Ra was
so far out because he had the true self-consciousness of the Afro American
intellectual artist revolutionary. He
knew our historic ideology and socio-political consciousness was freedom. It is an aesthetic and social dynamic. We think it is good and beautiful! Sun Ra’s consistent statement, musically and
spoken, is that this is a primitive world.
It’s practices, beliefs, religions are uneducated, unenlightened,
savage, destructive, already in the past (Sinclair 3).
Sun Ra used his art to make
a stand, but it was his own stand. He
used the past to create a unique and bold vision that was part of the Black
Arts Movement but also free from any one movement. Sun Ra was transcending all of humanity. He wanted to free everyone’s mind from all
man made constraints. This is why he is
not easily categorized. This is why
people say he’s crazy. If you look at
the facts he is anything but crazy. He
held his band together in a way that few bandleaders have done and exuded the
kind of discipline that keeps the band going to this day.
Sun Ra was there at the
beginning of BARTS. On the day the
school opened The Arkestra marched down 125th street while local
artists waved the Black Arts flag.
Baraka referred to Sun Ra as the “resident philosopher” (Baraka
298). Baraka and Sun Ra were both
operating in a time when anything seemed possible. The artists of the Black Arts Movement were
breaking new ground and laying the foundations for the next generation of
artists to grow and develop. Sun Ra’s
poem Like Seeds illustrates this
idea:
They are alike…Seeds and words.
When seeds are sown, they become potential
They become potentially active…..
When words
are so-oned
They become
potentially active.
Yes…indeed…in deed…
Alike they
are ………..(Ra 68)
Baraka and Sun Ra were both
conspirators in using art for revolution and liberation, “indeed” and “in
deed.” They both knew that the only way
to be free was to operate independently from the existing white power
structure. They were not playing
according to the existing rules. They
were making their own rules up as they went along. By doing this they provided the groundwork
for “potentially active” artists to come alive to follow and innovate in their
wake.
Further Reading
Below
are some interesting links of academics writing about Sun Ra such as the Bowles
paper quoted from above as well as Sun Ra’s links to Afrofuturism, which
Wikepedia defines as:
An
emergent literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science
fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, afrocentricity, and magic realism with
non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas
of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the
historical events of the past.
).
My Music Is Words-The Poetics of Sun Ra by Nathaniel Earl Bowles
Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi
Jones. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill, 1997. Print.
Bowles,
Nathaniel Earl. "My Music Is Words" – The Poetics of Sun Ra.
Diss. Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2008. N.p.: n.p., n.d. "My Music
Is Words" – The Poetics of Sun Ra. Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
Web. 27 Dec. 2013.
<http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-04292008-173116/unrestricted/mymusiciswords.pdf>.
Sinclair, John. Sun Ra:
Interviews and Essays. London:
Headpress, 2010. Print.
Sun, Ra,
Adam Abraham, James L. Wolfe, and Harmut Geerken. Sun Ra Collected Works.
Chandler, AZ: Phaelos, 2005. Print.
Thomas, J. C. Chasin' the Trane: The Music and Mystique
of John Coltrane. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975. Print.
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