They came from outer space – and this video offers incontrovertible proof. It also carries a government health warning: Jazz can seriously flip your wig, daddyo.
It would have been nice and neat to have followed Duke Ellington's 'Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue' with the Arkestra's take on 'Take the A-Train', that perennial classic written by Ellington's right-hand man, 'Swee' Pea' himself, Billy Strayhorn. You can tell from the leader's extraordinary helmet-headgear that it comes from the same appearance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. But I wouldn't wish to give a particular friend of mine yet more reason to tell people why he hates jazz. Our Mr. Ra, born to all intents and purposes Herman 'Sonny' Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, but actually deriving from Saturn, leads off with a hugely impressive solo-piano intro that sounds like a Cecil Taylor take on a meeting of Duke Ellington and Arnold Schoenberg. When the band kicks in, there's a long tenor solo by one of the Arkestra's mainstays, the legendary John Gilmore, that's liable to give the unwary a dose of the screaming ab-dabs. It's then followed, moreover, by that most tedious of jazz conventions: a drum solo. An overlong drum solo at that, by Clifford Jarvis. So I felt it best not to alienate unwary readers.
Sun Ra was given to branding his Arkestra with a bewildering array of weird permutations. On the album that celebrated their appearance at Montreux, they are labelled as the Intergalactic Cosmo Arkestra. They may have come from outer space, but it was definitely via Africa, as this selection illustrates so clearly in the joyfully rhythmic 'Love In Outer Space' section. For all its editing faults – and 'Love In Outer Space' isn't just cut off in its prime, it's positively amputated – this video is priceless in so many ways: singer June Tyson's introductory invitation to be of their space world, dressed in an extraordinary metallic costume that makes her look like some kind of medieval knight; the oompa-loompa dancers like urchins out of one of those weird Eastern European fairy tales they used to show on BBC television when I was a lad; the thrilling massed percussion and general musical mayhem that accompanies the dancers as Sun Ra picks out the outer space theme of one of the Arkestra's best-known numbers on a very lo-fi keyboard synthesiser; Sun Ra's somewhat reticent introduction to 'King Porter Stomp' in an Alabaman drawl that makes it sound like 'Cayn't Put a Stop'; the loose-limbed performance in the spirit of the Roaring Twenties of the Jelly Roll Morton chestnut when the band lays down its drums and takes up the brass once more.
Yes sirree Bob, this may not be perfect, but it seems best to capture what Sun Ra's extraordinary band – these days, you could probably use the trendy term 'collective' with some justification – was all about. On one hand, they're seemingly barking mad, the whole lot of them; on the other hand, they're an incredibly tight and well-drilled outfit, born of communal living and rigorous practice. Sun Ra, while still Sonny Blount, learnt his big-band trade as pianist for a year or so with one of the first great orchestras of the era, that of Fletcher Henderson, and he liked to include numbers from Henderson's repertoire, such as 'King Porter Stomp' and the glorious 'Queer Notions'. During the late 1950s, before they took off for the Planet Venus to spend the rest of their days travelling the space ways, his embryonic Arkestra produced brilliant but more jazz-classical albums like Jazz In Silhouette in which they sound not too many planets apart from Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus.
A conscientious objector in World War 2, which for a black American man at the time must have been an incredibly brave and single-minded stance to take, Sun Ra wasn't just a band leader and showman, but more of an extraterrestrial philosopher and cosmic mystic. Following a kind of out-of-body mystical experience as a young man in the 1930s, when he found himself on the Planet Saturn, his apparently dotty pronouncements inspired both ridicule and devotion. Like James Brown, he was also quite a disciplinarian in his endeavour to manifest the music of the spheres that he heard in his helmeted head. 'I tell my Arkestra that all humanity is in some kind of restricted limitation, but they're in the Ra jail, and it's the best in the world.' Musicians of the calibre of John Gilmore, Pat Patrick and Marshall Allen, to name but three, were happy enough to stay 'in the Ra jail' for as long as the likes of Johnny Hodges, Rex Stewart and Paul Gonsalves were happy to stay in the Ellington jail. They may have gone off from time to time to do their own things, but the stalwarts always returned to stick by their 'master' through thick and thin.
At the time of writing, alto-saxophonist Marshall Allen is still marshalling new versions of the Arkestra at the age of 98. Here's a fantastic take on 'Love In Outer Space' recorded in 2014 for the BBC's Jazz On 3 series. Marshall Allen and Danny Ray Thompson (on baritone sax and percussion) are two hardy perennials from the Arkestra's heyday, and there are young tyros like Tara Middleton on vocals and violin and Shabaka Hutchings on that beautiful, melancholic instrument, the bass clarinet. It should disavow any lingering doubts that the Arkestra was just a collection of demented weirdos. Those cats – and these cats – sure can play.
A dear friend of mine who left the planet prematurely a few years ago described to me the out-of-mind, out-of-world experience of seeing Sun Ra and his acolytes live in concert. He drew parallels with two of his heroes, Captain Beefheart and the beatnik raconteur and comic monologist, Lord Buckley. All three could be described as off-the-wall, as well as geniuses in their own right. It's a shame he never explored the parallels in a book. Sun Ra's life and works no doubt filled the pages of several books. I don't know, though, whether any such tome could answer Gavin Vlietstra's YouTube question: 'Is Sun Ra's hat made out of soda can lids?'
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