Sun Ra Arkestra - Enlightenment/Love In Outer Space/King Porter Stomp

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?'

Duke Ellington and His Orchestra – Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue

While on a Newport Festival theme, two years before Anita O'Day's vocal calisthenics lulled the audience into a state of somnolent repose on a hot summer's day, the Duke Ellington Orchestra tore up the crowd with the stuff of legend. 'Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue' was or were two sides of a 78rpm release in 1937, at a time when the big bands ruled the airwaves and Duke Ellington's outfit had made the transition from the 'jungle music' of the Cotton Club to the most sophisticated representation of swing. When he announced the number to the festival crowd in his customary fashion, Ellington explained that the two elements would be separated by an 'interval' featuring his favourite tenor sax soloist, Paul Gonsalves. Little did he or the audience realise what was in store. It was not the kind of interval in which you go to the bar or buy a choc-ice from the Ice Cream lady.

In actual fact – and you'll have to imagine these words spoken in a vituperative Southern drawl by that splendid character actor beloved of Sam Peckinpah, Strother Martin, in his role as the mealy-mouthed, sadistic prison captain in the Paul Newman vehicle, Cool Hand Luke – what we've got here is a failure to find the original footage; what you might call a com-pro-mise. It seems that the event, unlike the 1958 edition, wasn't filmed and Ron Murvihill has 'assembled footage from other Ellington events as a videotrack in hopes of giving the historic performance new life.' He's done a great job. While it goes somewhat against the grain, nevertheless the music is as live as live can be and the performance is so darn important in the annals of jazz history that I'm prepared to let it go on this occasion. After all, apparently whenever subsequently asked when he was born, Edward Kennedy Ellington would answer that he was born on the 9^th July, 1956.

By 1956, the Swing Era had given way to one of BeBop, post-Bop and West Coast cool jazz, usually purveyed by the kind of small ensemble that was much more economically viable. The big bands and orchestras were too darn big and costly to keep on the road. Somehow, though, the Duke managed to endure – partly perhaps because he didn't pay the band members what they were really worth. For all the ambitious new extended compositions like 'Such Sweet Thunder' and 'Black, Brown And Beige' that would define the Ellington approach in the 1950s and beyond – not to mention the 'Newport Jazz Festival Suite' that Ellington and his amanuensis and oft-unseen cohort, Billy Strayhorn, composed and arranged for this 1956 festival – it was, however, a struggle. The Duke's star was on the wane. While widely recognised as an exceptional musician and band leader, his reputation as America's greatest living composer had not yet been cemented.

This performance changed that. It's rather neat to think in terms of Gonsalves's interval as lifting his employer's orchestra out of its current diminuendo and into another of its crescendos. The customarily tasteful and elegant Paul Gonsalves really took to heart the Duke's instructions to blow for as long as he liked after the initial section by soloing for 27 choruses. If stretched on the rack, I still couldn't really sensibly explain what a chorus entails, but he sure blew for a long time and whipped up the crowd into the kind of frenzy that you might normally associate with a mid-Sixties Rolling Stones concert.

The 'Diminuendo' part is anything but low-key, illustrating what a very fine and surprisingly modern (in a Monkish sort of way) piano player Ellington was in his own right, and just how tight-yet-loose that band was. And then comes Gonsalves, giving his body and soul to the cause and coming across less like the successor to Ben Webster and more like an R&B honker of the Big Jay McNeely school (tempered, perhaps, by a cool, refreshing dash of Lester Young). The band sits back to enjoy the show while the rhythm section of Ellington and Jimmy Woode on bass and Sam Woodyard on drums spurs him along. But it's the audience that really stokes the fire. And here, alas, we'll have to use our imagination. As they get louder and more raucous by the chorus, the authorities apparently started to fidget. Witnesses describe how people stood on their chairs, danced and even rushed the stage – and remember that this was the Eisenhower era, when folks discovered television and consumed new gadgets and hated Communists. The police came onto the stage in an attempt to quieten things down and prevent the normally sedate representatives of 1950s America from blowing their collective top.

When Gonsalves lays down his horn and the band come back in for the 'Crescendo', there's a slight lull in the tempo at first before they start riffing like the Count Basie Orchestra and trumpeter Cat Anderson steps out front for some of his specialist stratospheric high notes. Cue the audience at around the 15-minute mark for a suitable reception bordering on high-steria.

Exciting as 'Diminuendo And Crescendo In Blue' may be, it was a bit of a one-off and not particularly representative of the Ellington orchestra's sound. So I checked out the 1962 model's interpretation of one of the best loved of all Ellington compositions, 'Satin Doll'. It's worth it just for the Duke's curiously trim (for someone whose lacquered hair often sprawled over the collar and curled up at the ends) hairstyle with cute little quiff – no doubt specially coiffed for the occasion, rather than merely 'maintained' by his designated barber, trumpeter Rex Stewart. The band, however, seems a little stiff and wooden, perhaps because the performance was commissioned by the Goodyear tyre company as one of five short jazz films.

If you let it run on, to the next piece, you come up with another Paul Gonsalves vehicle, 'Blow By Blow' (not to be confused with Jeff Beck's classic album). It's not a number I know, but at four-and-a-half minutes, it's a nice compromise for anyone not willing to give themselves up to the quarter-hour shenanigans of the Newport performance. Although the footage is entirely genuine, it's not quite the real deal.

No, for all the compromise, it has to be this one. If it's true that Gonsalves didn't want to play the concert due to an alcoholic 'incident', he must have been very glad ultimately that his boss got him on stage. Immortality was his reward. The festival promoter, George Wein, described the concert as 'the greatest performance of Ellington's career... It stood for everything jazz had been and could be.' In the words of some YouTube commentators, 'This is one of the most exhilarating moments in the history of jazz.' 'This performance swings harder and more gloriously than anybody has ever swung before or since.' 'If you can't feel this... your [sic] not among the living!' 'If you can sit completely still through this song..., your heart has stopped & you must be dead.' Oh, and by the way, the legendary (or mythical?) platinum blonde woman who got up on stage to dance did not remove her blouse in the euphoria of it all. You'd have to wait till the next decade for that sort of thing.

Anita O'Day - 'Sweet Georgia Brown' & 'Tea for Two'

I'll begin at the beginning, as the King advised Alice gravely, with the very epitome of style and cool. Anita O'Day stepped out of the pages of Vogue and onto the Newport stage in her white gloves, hip-hugging sleeveless frock and majestic picture-hat, to be immortalised in the 1959 film Jazz On A Summer's Day. As one of the co-directors, fashion photographer Bert Stern must have drooled over Ms. O'Day's iconic attire and her supremely elegant performance. He certainly seemed to get a kick out of letting the camera linger over the more fashion-conscious of the audience on that warm, sleepy July day. The irony is, however, that she refused to turn out like this for her first big-band employer, drummer Gene Krupa, at a time when it was de rigueur. She insisted instead on regular band jacket and short skirt so she could appear more like one of the boys.

 

There's a lot more to this performance than merely meets the eye, though. The way Anita interprets the two old chestnuts – cutting up, caressing, stretching and eliding the lyrics, playing with the time signatures, using pauses to playful and dramatic effect (I love the way in 'Sweet Georgia Brown', for example, that she qualifies the claim that she 'don't lie...' with that throwaway 'much' after a heavily pregnant pause) – she transforms both pieces from something so familiar as to be almost hackneyed into fresh and wonderful new creations. In actual fact, she sings the first two verses of 'Georgia Brown' reasonably straight while accompanied by her drummer beating out the beat by hand on his tom-tom, and it's only when the bass and piano enter the fray that she really lets rip with the twists and turns, swoops and dives, and her whole trick-bag of vocal idiosyncrasies. 'Tea for Two' on the other hand is an Ella-like tour de force including scat dialogue with her drummer, a staccato sprint for the finishing line in a headlong attempt to keep pace with her rhythm section.

Much as I enjoy the cinematic asides as the camera turns to focus on the (very snow-white) audience, it's a shame that we don't get to see a little more of the band. Drummer John Poole is not someone I know, but bassist Red Mitchell was an ever-present on West Coast 'cool jazz' dates, while pianist Jimmy Jones was a trusted accompanist of Sarah Vaughan. 'Sassy', with her perfect pitch and classic phrasing, was in some respects the very antithesis of Anita O'Day as a jazz singer. Much as I like Sarah Vaughan as in 'admire', give me the quirky, imperfect stylist any day of the week.

Despite her appearance on this particular summer's day, Anita was certainly in many ways flawed. Her autobiography, High Times, Hard Times, and the splendid 2007 documentary, Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, reveal just what a tough, tenacious cookie she was. Probably only Billie Holiday of her female contemporaries had a harder time of it. As the documentary's publicity proclaims: She survived it all to become one of the world's great jazz singers. That suave and soigné appearance belies a lifetime of hard-knocks: an unhappy childhood during the Great Depression; three of her teenage years spent as a dancer in the kind of marathon dance contests portrayed in the film They Shoot Horses, Don't They; arrests and imprisonments on narcotics charges; a long-term addiction to heroin; and a life-threatening fall downs some stairs. Although she changed her given name of Colton to O'Day, an obscure permutation of 'dough' as in money, a long career of gigging and hustling didn't make her much of that. But she certainly survived – and she left quite a musical legacy: not just this memorable performance, but also a wealth of records, particularly those deriving from her heyday, either with the Stan Kenton Orchestra or as a freelance singer, in the 1950s.

What makes the singer's turn at Newport such infectious viewing is her evident enjoyment in what she's doing. According to Ms. O'Day, she was probably high on heroin. Given her habit, it may well be true. On the other hand, she always liked to tease and shock a little, so it may not be true. In any case, this is a performance that warrants that tired old adjective 'iconic'. Anita O'Day didn't need no dope to be this dope.

 

Wayne Shorter: Native Dancer

Here's one that they don't particularly like in my monumental Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, LP & Cassette. Two measly stars they give it. But then they're not that keen on Weather Report either, partly because Wayne Shorter didn't play enough sax with them. I was slightly disappointed myself when I saw Shorter playing with an electric quartet at the North Sea Jazz Festival back in the late '80s, but it wasn't long before he was appearing again in the acoustic settings of what one might uncharitably call his 'dotage'.

The thing about Mr. Weird, as he was dubbed, was that he was never afraid to experiment. Like Herbie Hancock in that respect, who also broke purists' hearts when he went all Future Shock. But I suppose the greatest and most influential jazz musicians, like Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, were not only not afraid to experiment, but also felt that it was their appointed duty to do so.

And what lovelier music with which to experiment than Brazilian? Richard Cook and Brian Morton, the compilers of the mighty reference tome, found 1974's Native Dancer 'a bland samba setting which does more to highlight Nascimento's vague and uncommitted vocal delivery than the leader's saxophone playing'. I have to stamp my feet and take issue with that on several counts: Milton Nascimento is one of Brazil's most original talents, with an extraordinary ethereal falsetto, and if he sings wordlessly at times, it is far from vague or uncommitted; the music that he and Shorter concocted (roughly sharing the writing credits, with one track by Herbie Hancock, who features on piano) has little to do with samba, nor bossa nova for that matter; and the leader's saxophone – both tenor and soprano – is integral to the successful fusion of genres. So there, Messrs. Cook and Morton!

The gorgeous Nascimento staple, 'Ponta de Areia', is I guess a case in point, with Nascimento's wordless vocal giving way to Shorter's soprano that slows things right down in a delicate mid-section before the group comes back to lead us out. 'Beauty And The Beast' is a stop-go Shorter composition in which the Brazilian sits out. Shorter's soprano sax soars high above an earthy theme prodded by Hancock's funky piano refrain. Nascimento returns to sing 'Tarde' in the more traditional vocal vein of someone like Caetano Veloso, before ceding to a beautiful Shorter tenor solo that's just long enough to satisfy any purist. Neither Nascimento's singing nor Shorter's tenor and soprano playing are in any way uncommitted in the dramatic 'Miracle of The Fishes', which ends the first side in rousing fashion.

Shorter's 'Diana' opens Side 2, a brief vehicle for his soprano sax and Herbie Hancock's elegant piano. It ushers in 'From The Lonely Afternoons', possibly the most seamless combination of wordless falsetto and (tenor) sax on the album. Shorter switches back to soprano sax for 'Ana Maria' to slow down the pace, before Nascimento comes back into the mix for a simmering 'Lilia' propelled by Roberto Silva's superb drumming, Airto Moreira's percussive armoury and the insistent organ of the splendidly-named Wagner Tiso. Hancock's 'Joanna's Theme' wraps up the proceedings with a typically Herbacious piece that offers Shorter space to illustrate that 'less is more'.

I brought this one back from New York many moons ago, along with Miles Davis' In A Silent Way. I must have been fusion-mad at the time. Native Dancer is arguably Shorter's most successful attempt to fuse jazz with any other kind of genre, be it funk or, as in this case, Brazilian music – or a bit of both, as on Weather Report's Tale Spinnin' the following year. He had been an established star since his tenure with Art Blakey, but the album opened the ears of the world outside of Brazil to the extraordinary voice of Milton Nascimento. Search as hard as I might, I have still not found a more satisfying showcase for his talents than this lovely lyrical precursor of what we now call 'world jazz'.