The Birmingham and Chicago Years
Robert L. Campbell
Clemson University
Robert L. Campbell
Clemson University
Sun Ra believed in eternal being. Birth was a bad word in his lexicon. One of his "equations of sound -- similarity" was B-I-R-T-H = B-E-R-T-H. If you were born, that meant you were going to find your place of B-E-R-T- H -- i.e., your final resting place -- i.e., the grave. Sunny preferred to say he had "arrived on the planet," and was more than a little vague about when that happened -- maybe in 1055, he would say, maybe a few thousand years before that.
His passport and his high school records tell a more mundane story. Herman Poole Blount was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 22, 1914. From very early on he was known as Sonny -- spelled with an "o," of course. About his family we know little. He had an older brother, Robert, an older half-sister, Mary, and an older stepbrother, Cary Blount, Jr. Three more stepsiblings resided in Demopolis, Alabama. His mother ran restaurants.
The family home was in a strange location. In a Southern city that was heavily segregated by race, the Blounts did not live in either a black neighborhood or a white neighborhood. Theirs was the only house on an entire city block. They were located across the street from the Post Office and close to the main railroad station. As a child, Sonny could look out the window and see the big sign over the railroad tracks that greeted visitors to The Magic City; many years later that would become the title of one of his greatest (and most avant-garde) compositions. To the north, there were just open fields.
There was a piano in the house (Sunny told interviewers it was a present for his tenth "arrival day") and his family seems to have encouraged his musical aspirations. He seems to have been a genuine prodigy, but his boasts that he could read music without training should be discounted -- even Mozart needed instruction. Though a shy and reserved individual, he struck up a friendship with another young pianist, Avery Parrish (1917-1959). They played duets together and challenged each other to write their first compositions. And while attending Industrial High School -- where he was a straight A student -- he came under the tutelage of John T. "Fess" Whatley, who needs no introduction here.
Before he left graduated from high school in January 1932, he was already playing piano on a substitute basis with bands like the Society Troubadours. He subbed (for Curly Parrish, Avery's older brother) in at least one of Fess Whatley's three bands, the Sax-o-Society Orchestra. In later years took pains to emphasize that such bands played for society dances and other genteel events, not in taverns or nightclubs.
By this time, Sonny was listening avidly to recordings by all the jazz "Masters" when they came out. In fact he collected so many 78s that one day he stacked them too high, and the pile fell over and injured him. In 1933, he transcribed a band arrangement off a record for the first time. It was Yeah Man, freshly released by Fletcher Henderson. Sonny always had the highest admiration for Henderson's band -- he speculated that it must have been populated with angels rather than ordinary Earthlings -- and he called this tune many hundreds of times on the bandstand. The other three titles recorded on that same session (Can You Take It?; King Porter Stomp; and Queer Notions) didn't escape his attention either; all of them stayed in the Arkestra's book from 1966 onward. I thought we might begin with Queer Notions, a number by Coleman Hawkins whose audacious harmonies (by 1933 standards) stuck in Sonny's mind.
[QUEER NOTIONS by the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra played here]
In the fall of 1934, Sonny Blount went on a tour of the Southeast with a band led by Ethel Harper, a biology teacher who had ambitions to make it as a singer. In fact she decamped mid-tour with a vocal group, leaving Sonny in charge. The Sonny Blount Band ranged as far as Chicago, where Sonny joined the Musicians' Union local on December 15, 1934. Eventually he would alter his destiny in Chicago....
He attended Alabama A&M University in Huntsville as a music education major. He was inordinately proud of that ("I think I studied everything in that college except farming"). He was only able to attend for one year (1935-1936); in the depths of the Great Depression, his family couldn't afford the tuition, but Dr. S. F. Harris, who lived in his neighborhood, paid for scholarships for Sonny and several other musicians from his high school. The music department gave him a good deal of classical training (up through Chopin and Rachmaninov anyway); you could always hear it in his improvised preludes, and in the Chicago days he would warm up by playing classical pieces. He ended up eighth in his freshman class, with a Grade Point Average of 3.18 (no grade inflation in those days!)
Other things happened in college. He had a dream in which he was summoned by robed figures. They admonished him to keep inside a narrow beam of light, and all of them traveled upwards until they reached their destination -- the planet Jupiter. Whether Sonny Blount confided any of this, except to his diary, is unknown. After he became Sun Ra, he spoke of this experience many times -- and in a completely matter-of-fact way.
For the next ten years, he led the Sonny Blount Orchestra. Its partisans regarded it as the top Swing band in Alabama. Without refighting any old battles, let's just say it was a serious competitor to Fess Whatley's aggregations. The Whatley bands played mostly for White audiences, the Blount band almost exclusively for Black audiences. (Supposedly their only gig in front of a White audience was in Cullman, Alabama -- they were scared to death the entire night, because Cullman was a center of Ku Klux Klan activity.)
Sonny's audiences wanted blues, pop tunes, and the hottest Swing arrangements (judging from what the Arkestra played in the 1980s, these would have included Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Jimmy Lunceford, but of course there were many others he never felt like reviving). He was in the habit of transcribing arrangements off the radio (sometimes with the help of a wire recorder). When Fletcher Henderson or Duke Ellington came to town, he would put the recorder (then an unfamiliar piece of equipment) right on the bandstand. Clad in tunic and sandals, he would walk for blocks -- ight through the middle of a White neighborhood -- to a local music store, where he would pull out music paper and pencil and quickly copy any sheet music that appealed to him.
Territory bands couldn't count on recording then, and Alabama's top musicians didn't make it onto wax unless they moved to Chicago or New York. So those of us who weren't around then have no direct evidence of what the Sonny Blount band sounded like. There's just one surviving publicity photo of the band, and Sunny had only a Xerox of that in his possession. And though Sunny would rattle off the names of Alabama musicians in later interviews, it's hard to tell from what he said who was actually in his band. We do have some idea, though, who played in the last Sonny Blount Orchestra, a 12 piece aggregration. Walter Miller, trumpet; Nat Atkins, trombone; George "Jarhead" Woodruff, alto sax; Frank Adams, alto sax; Joe Alexander, tenor sax; Warren Parham, also in the sax section; Ivory Williams, bass; and Fletcher Myatt, drums and vocals. Most of these musicians are now in the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.
There was one significant interruption in all of this musical activity. In October 1942 the local Draft Board came calling. Sonny Blount declared himself a Conscientious Objector, but during a war in which there was little tolerance for COs, the answers he gave on his questionnaire displeased the authorities. He spent five weeks in jail in Jasper, Alabama, then was sent to a Civilian Public Service Camp in a place called Marienville, in the boondocks of Northwestern Pennsylvania. But he didn't stay long; by the end of March 1943, he was out on a physical disability discharge, because he had a hernia. In later years, Sun Ra would say that a big band was the opposite of an army; it was a group of men who came together, not to kill, but for a constructive purpose. Sonny's misadventures with the Selective Service System could not have helped his popularity with Alabama musicians. Many already considered him weird; now they could also indict him as unpatriotic.
Whether Sonny actually planned to leave Birmingham, or was merely in the grip of "cosmic forces," we may never know. In 1946, he headed north to Nashville, where for three or four months he backed R&B singer Wynonie Harris at Club Zanzibar. An unlikely setting, maybe, but recordings came at last. Harris and his combo made four sides for the local Bullet label. One of them was Sonny's feature, Dig This Boogie. He'd obviously learned his blues lessons.
[DIG THIS BOOGIE played here]
After the Harris engagement broke up, Sonny Blount took up with a very different outfit that was working in Nashville. Chicago-based drummer Oliver Bibb led a society band that dressed up in Revolutionary War Patriot uniforms, complete with wigs. "It fit the kind of music they were playing," he later snorted, but the idea of costuming stuck with him. How Sunny moved on to Chicago, we don't know -- maybe he accompanied Bibb back to his home base. What we do know is that it didn't take him long to establish himself.
In August of 1946, Fletcher Henderson was working nightly at a large Chicago establishment, the Club DeLisa, with one of his last big bands. Henderson was never much of an improviser, and by this time he had pretty much given up the piano, except for one nightly feature on Stealing Apples. So when Marl Young (best known to posterity as the music director for I Love Lucy) left the piano bench to go to law school, Sonny Blount was there to take his place.
Big bands were facing mass extinction and this outfit was not in the forefront of those that remained. Henderson's health was in decline, he had made no musical advances since the mid-1930s, his band no longer had a popular following, and he couldn't attract star soloists. Record companies had lost interest, so we don't know how the band sounded. Apart from trombonist Nat Atkins and two alto saxophonists named Riley Hampton and James Scales who went on to solid local careers, the roster consisted of people that even musicians have never heard of.
Sonny's job was to interpret an established repertoire. The band couldn't handle the "new kind of syncopation" in his orchestrations of Dear Old Southland and I Should Care; after that, Sonny kept his arrangements to himself. Nonetheless, Sun Ra always reminisced about his stay in the band with obvious pride. And though it may not have advanced his musical conception, it solidified his ideas about entertainment.
At the Club DeLisa, the Henderson band's primary responsibility was to back singers and floor shows. The club featured all of the top entertainers in Chicago: singer Lurleen Hunter, blues vocalist Little Miss Cornshucks, impressionist George Kirby, and another singer named Jo Jo Adams, who was renowned for his wardrobe of outrageously colored tuxedos. There were tap dancers like the Four Step Brothers and Cozy Cole's Drum Dancers. The extravagant entertainments that the Arkestra became known for in the 1970s, with their light shows and their corps of singers, dancers, tumblers, even fire-eaters, had roots of a more traditional kind.
The Henderson stint ended on May 18, 1947. Sonny had no trouble keeping himself busy. During this period he backed R&B singer Lil Green. The drummer in her band was a young fellow from Montclair, New Jersey named Thomas Hunter, usually known as "Bugs." By the fall of 1947, Sonny had become the music director of a successful medium-sized band. Bassist Gene Wright, at the tender of age of 20, was simultaneously running a big band and a 10 or 11 piece aggregration called the Dukes of Swing. For a while, both groups were playing in different rooms at the Pershing Hotel. Sonny composed or arranged the Dukes'entire book; many of these pieces were of a strictly functional nature (floor shows again) but their theme number was a suite based on the theme from Spellbound. If only we were lucky enough to have that on record.... The Dukes were picked up by the fledgling Aristocrat label, primarily to back a vocal quartet called the Dozier boys. They managed to slip in two instrumental sides, both written by Sonny Blount. Unfortunately, Leonard Chess, who produced the session, relieved him of the composer credits.
[DAWN MIST played here]
The band broke up when Gene Wright went off with Count Basie in December of 1948. Around this time, Sonny performed for two weeks with Coleman Hawkins and Stuff Smith. And on his very first tape machine, a device called a Sound Mirror, he recorded Stuff and himself playing in his tiny apartment. They played a duet featuring the Solovox, a primitive electronic instrument that Sonny had picked up while still in Birmingham. Sonny had a thing about purple (he thought people would be healthier if they ate more purple food). He released Deep Purple many years later on his Saturn label, and the tune remained in his repertoire for the rest of his career. It was featrued on his very last recording session with Billy Bang.
Some gigs were less uplifting. In mid-1949, Sonny and Tommy Hunter began playing in trios in Calumet City, a Chicago suburb mainly known for its strip joints. Few musicians would have been thrilled with the setting or the nature of the work, which was Sonny's major source of income for some time. Worse yet, the girls were White and the Mob, which controlled the clubs, dictated that Black bands had to play behind a curtain. More rewarding work came from the Club DeLisa, which he retained his connection with for several years. He wrote arrangements for the medium-sized Red Saunders band, and on Saunders' night off he led the relief band.
Some accounts claim that he became seriously depressed. In any case, he was giving a lot of thought to non-musical matters: "I was busy with spirit things," he once said about this period. "I wasn't even really here." His concerns about racism and man's inhumanity to man were coming together with his extensive readings from books about the occult, his analysis of the hidden meanings to be found in the Bible, and old anthropological speculations to the effect that Egypt was the source of all civilization and we are all "children of the sun."
Sonny Blount was in his mid-30s now. He was at an age when many jazz musicians have already said whatever they're going to say. He had played piano, been in charge of the band book, even led his own bands. Some musicians considered him a weirdo. Others saw him as a studious type who said little and spent a lot of time at the piano (Gene Wright compared him to John Lewis). His compositions had always kept up with the latest developments in Swing, but pieces like Fission and Thermodynamics weren't as futuristic as their titles. When bebop came along, Sonny listened carefully and took what he wanted from it. Junior Mance recalls, for instance, that Sonny was the first pianist in Chicago to play like Bud Powell, but it's a lot easier to hear Fats Waller than Bud Powell in his later playing. As of yet, though, it was hard to identify a Sonny Blount sound.
Many a working musician would have been satisfied with these results, but Sonny had bigger goals. In 1950 or 1951, he started a band to play his own, frankly far-out music. He called it the Space Trio: one charter member was Pat Patrick (1929-1991), who played alto and baritone sax. The drum chair was occupied on some occasions by Tommy Hunter. On other occasions it was taken by Robert Barry, one of the leading bebop drummers in town.
He fell in with what some have called a secret society on the South Side of Chicago. It preached an unusual variety of Black Nationalism, admonishing Black men to recognize the importance of outer space if they were to better their lot in the future. This was probably a loosely organized group, and from the sparse and self-serving accounts we've been given, we don't know how much Sonny learned from its members and how much they picked up from him. We do know that Alton Abraham, who was to become the Arkestra's manager and head of Sun Ra's record label, was affiliated with this group, as were Lawrence Allen, T. S. Mims, Sr., and others who would later provide financial backing for recordings. Abraham and his friends may have had celestial yearnings but they were a rough bunch. Musicians from that period appreciate Abraham's effectiveness at getting bookings, but many thought he was a gangster. It's not hard to understand why, when we learn that on one occasion a trumpet player showed up drunk and messed up one of Sunny's rehearsals. Lawrence Allen took care of the problem by shoving a loaded pistol under the musician's nose and telling him, "Time to go home and read your Bible."
1952, Sunny proclaimed his vocation: that he was a citizen of Saturn, not of Planet Earth; that he was not human, but rather of an angel race; that he was to serve as the Cosmic Communicator, bringing the Creator's message to benighted Earthlings. On October 20, 1952, he officially changed his name to Le Sony'r Ra -- Ra after the Egyptian sun god, Sony for reasons both heliocentric and mundane, and an extra r' to bring the total up to a lucky nine letters. This is the name that appears on his passport. With characteristic modesty, he explained that he went through the legal rigmarole because "Jesus Christ should have registered himself with the authorities. Then he wouldn't have had any trouble". Sun Ra (sometimes Le Sun Ra) was technically his stage name.
He deliberately concealed his former life. He would say that he was never really named Herman Blount, that he had always used other names, that the name "didn't have no rhythm" anyhow. He renamed his band the Arkestra (a respelling that happens to include "Ra" both forwards and backwards).
Sunny always wanted a big band, but it took some time to build one. Before Tommy Hunter fled to New York in 1953 (the Mob was after him for getting too friendly with the strippers), Sunny had already experimented with larger groups, but none stayed together for long. In 1954, the Arkestra made a significant addition. John Gilmore (born 1931 in Summit, Mississippi, but raised in Chicago) had attended DuSable High School with its fabled band program. After getting out of the Air Force in 1953, he worked with Earl Hines and quickly became regarded as one of the up and coming young musicians in Chicago. When Gilmore joined, the Arkestra was no more than a trio, but it quickly grew: Pat Patrick returned from a sojourn in Florida, Dave Young came in on trumpet, Julian Priester on trombone, Richard Evans on bass, Jim Herndon on tympani and timbales. And they got regular work at Cadillac Bob's Budland, in the basement of the Pershing Hotel. The only Chicago-period photo of the Arkestra that's been published shows the band as it stood in the Fall of 1955. Sunny probably taped this band (he had been taping performances and rehearsals for several years) but nothing was ever released.
Sunny had other musical enterprises going, too. From 1954 through 1957 or 1958, he wrote songs in four-part harmony -- Black Sky and Blue Moon, Take the Outer Drive to the South Side. Many of these are lost, but not all.
[DREAMING played here]
The Cosmic Rays were four teenagers from rough neighborhoods. Sun Ra was a serious believer in community outreach, and he hoped to change their destinies, but despite his efforts all four made bad exits from the planet many years ago. "They were connected with a barbershop. I taught them other things." The Rays were his pride and joy -- he recorded them for his own label only after Vee-Jay rejected their demo, supposedly telling him that they were "too good." There were others: the Nu Sounds, the Clockstoppers, and the Qualities, all of whom he recorded. Rumor connects him with still another doo-wop quartet called the Equallos.
Now the Arkestra was finally ready to record. Sunny's working methods were already set. Constant rehearsals had already been part of his musical life in Birmingham. In Chicago, they were just like going to work -- five days a week, eight hours a day. Everyone remembers the rehearsals, especially Art Hoyle, who had to drive all the way from Gary, Indiana. Like Ellington, Ra would write pieces as he sat at the piano, handing out individual parts to each band member. On the gig, there was no fixed program; Sunny would signal the next piece in his piano introduction -- and to the musicians' frustration he would often change it around from the way they'd done it in rehearsal.
By early 1956, Wilburn Green was playing what Sunny quaintly called the "electronic bass" and Gilmore's old Air Force buddy Art Hoyle had become the Arkestra's main trumpeter. Some money must have been available, because time was booked at RCA Studios.
The first Arkestra we can hear for ourselves was a hard-bop band. Bop wasn't Sunny's music exactly, but it was what the young musicians in the Arkestra understood. And there wasn't anything conservative about such music in 1956. It was modal hard-bop, polytonal hard-bop, polyrhythmic hard-bop. Sunny wrote a new tune in honor of his "home planet"; it became the band's theme song. It convinced John Gilmore that Sunny's music offered endless possibilities, that it was "more stretched out than Monk."
[SATURN played here]
By the way, you haven't been listening to the late 1956 Saturn or the 1958 Saturn. What you've heard is the very first recording of the piece, and if it was ever released at all (the Saturn label guards its mysteries) it's been out of print for 39 years.
The Arkestra laid down more of their repertoire at the RCA Studios, and in July the short-lived Transition label sprang for a session at Universal, the best studio in town. But Transition soon folded. In fact, the second Transition album stayed in the can for a decade. It was recorded in the fall of 1956. Julian Priester, concerned about "the rise and fall of the fork," had gone on the road with Lionel Hampton; Charles Davis had come in on baritone sax. William "Bugs" Cochran had taken over on drums. The Arkestra had grown less militant and more relaxed; compositions like The Kingdom of Not showed the influence of Gospel music as well as an obvious strain of exotica. So did El Is a Sound of JOY.
[EL IS A SOUND OF JOY here]
Good quality recording lets you hear all the counterrhythms. Some critics claim that the piece was inspired by the elevated railroad, but the piece lacks any obvious train imagery. I think the title came straight out of one of the poems Sunny was writing at the time: "El is Ra/ Ra is El/ Is Ra El?" The album as a whole, which wasn't released till Delmark picked it up in 1968, is one of Sunny's best.
Not wanting to depend on others to put out his music, Sun Ra wisely started his own record company. "I didn't want to go through all that starving in the attic and all that foolishness," Sun Ra said in 1987. "I wanted to bypass that particular trauma they put on artists."
Saturn records were basically home-made. They were pressed in batches of seventy-five. The mastering and pressing were crude (even vinylmaniacs admit that Saturns sound much better in CD reissues). At first the covers were hand-decorated, and when printed covers appeared they had a distinctly amateurish appearance. Sunny brought the records to gigs in a cardboard box, where band members sold them for cash only. Record store sales (and reviews in the jazz press) were few and far between.
During the period that concerns us, Saturn was a singles label. The first Arkestral releases were all on 45s (though some reappeared on LP much later). There were only two LPs: Supersonic Jazz, which came out in 1957, and Jazz in Silhouette, from 1958. The bulk of the Arkestra's Chicago recordings went unreleased until 1965; some waited longer than that.
Studio time cost money, too. For the next few years, Ra and Abraham usually made do with tapes cut at rehearsals or in the clubs. The 1957 Arkestra isn't well documented on records, and by the beginning of 1958 there had been further changes. An adventuresome alto saxophonist named James Spaulding (1938-) came into the fold in July of 1957. Spaulding sounded the same then as he does today -- somewhere between Cannonball Adderley and Ornette Coleman. Alto saxophonist Marshall Allen (born 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky) had wandered into Chicago sometime earlier and sought out Sun Ra after hearing the Transition album. He and Spaulding added their flutes to the Arkestral armamentarium. And then there was bassist extraordinaire Ronnie Boykins (1932-1980, another graduate of DuSable High School).
Ra had put together one of the premier sax sections in the business. He had reliable trumpet players in Lucious Randolph, Bill Fielder, and Everett Turner. And Nate Pryor came by to play trombone when he finished his day at the post office. But in mid-1958, Ra decided he had a band that was special enough to justify the expense of another studio recording.
The Jazz in Silhouette band was dominated by Hobart Dotson. Dotson has to be one of the most obscure jazz musicians of all time. He was a gifted composer and arranger who contributed Enlightenment to the Arkestra's repertoire. As a lead trumpeter, he was sought out by leaders like Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, and Slide Hampton. The problem he had was that he could never eat up the chord changes like Freddie Hubbard or Lee Morgan. But Sunny was on his way past hard bop rhythmically; he was already well versed in modality and "space key"; he was able to give Dotson the ideal musical environment.
Jazz in Silhouette carefully balances the old and the new. Let's start with the number that originally opened the album. Hours After was actually written by Everett Turner, and there's an earlier recording of it with Turner taking the trumpet solo; all Ra contributed was the more decorous title (Turner called it Stinkin'). It's often considered to be a soul-funk number a la Horace Silver.
[HOURS AFTER plyed here]
Horace Silver, huh? Try Erskine Hawkins. The album went on to include a Blues at Midnight, the Dameronian Images, another Saturn, and Sun Ra's take on hard bop shows up again in numbers like Velvet. But Sunny was incorporating more and more of Africa into the band's playing. Ancient Ethiopia was an Afrocentric point of reference for Sunny; he wrote a processional to commemorate it, normally a 4 or 5- minute piece performed with lots of percussion and maybe a flute solo. On this occasion Jim Herndon wasn't available, and the percussion couldn't be quite as heavy as usual. No matter. He had special plans that night.
[ANCIENT AEITHOPIA played here]
Ra dreamed of rebuilding his brass section around Dotson and trombonist Bo Bailey, but it wasn't to be. For one thing, Dotson was an addict; he had given up the needle but swallowed down cough syrup every day. Band members helped hide his consumption from the leader, but this couldn't have gone on forever. (Ra was a rather abstemious sort. Some believe he took a vow of celibacy when he became Sun Ra. In any case he strongly disapproved of drink and drugs.)
Besides, Sunny's priority was for the band to get work, whether it paid well or not. Throughout its history, the Arkestra had plenty of gigs but the musicians were always broke (there was one exception -- in the early New York years, there were no gigs either). Except for Marshall Allen, all of the musicians took outside work, and for Dotson, the lure of a road trip with B. B. King was too great. He drifted off to New York, where he died in his early 40s. As for Jazz in Silhouette, it didn't get a single review in the jazz press, and its importance wasn't understood at all until it was reissued by Impulse sixteen years later.
Everyone has a standard image of an Arkestra performance. The glittering (though inexpensive) costumes worn by the musicians. Sunny's grand entrance. His otherworldly electronic keyboards. His sermons to benighted Earthlings. The Fletcher Henderson numbers, complete with repertory solos. A blues feature for Sunny's piano. At least one outside number with falsetto tenor sax, frenetic alto, berserk bass clarinet. Dancers. Maybe a light show. And those ditties about outer space.
If we could go back and see a concert in Chicago (of course, we can't -- the only period film of the Arkestra is frustrating snippets in a short called The Cry of Jazz), we would find some parts familiar, other parts less so. The lineup then was mostly Ra compositions, plus a few standards, heavily reharmonized. No screeching or low rumbles from the saxes -- they didn't acquire those techniques till after they moved to New York.
There were no Fletcher Henderson charts. With his usual perversity, Sunny waited until 1966 to make his transcriptions for the Arkestra. Then he'd sneak in King Porter Stomp or Limehouse Blues after a twemty minute free improvisation! The Henderson scores didn't become nightly staples till the mid-1970s. There were plenty of blues, but cool and bop-oriented as a rule. The rolling Chicago blues feature didn't enter the Arkestra's repertoire till 1977. Electronics were in their infancy -- Sunny had his Wurlitzer electric piano and occasionally an organ, but no really strange sounds or heavy amplification.
Probably the first thing you'd notice was Sunny's lack of stage presence. That 1955 photo shows him in his customary position -- seated in the back of the Arkestra. Sunny was writing poetry and pamphlets in those days, and the Sun Ra philosophy was already well developed. John Gilmore and Marshall Allen would even hand out Sunny's newsletters on street corners, though as far as I can tell most of the Arkestra musicians were nonbelievers. But Sunny didn't sing or preach to the audience until 1970. In fact, he didn't say much to the audience at all. His barely audible call of Sound of Joy is the only time his voice can be heard on a record made in Chicago.
Costumes, on the other hand, were already in evidence. Sometimes the band wore tuxedos (as in The Cry of Jazz), but glitzier garb soon became the norm. According to Marshall Allen, Sunny on one occasion obtained outfits that a local opera company had discarded after performing William Tell. No doubt the inspiration for the space-age Robin Hood uniforms the band sometimes wore in later years. Art Hoyle remembers "loud green and orange concerns" in 1956. By 1960, the Arkestra was sporting purple blazers, white gloves, and beanies with propellers on top that lit up. And they would release wind-up toy robots into the audience. There were no dancers yet, but the band members were supposed to jump up and down on designated numbers.
Sunny had been talking about outer space for a while, but in the early days his vocal numbers were meant to be performed by cabaret-style singers or doo-wop groups. The space chant, a simple ditty that could be sung by band members (and the audience, if so inclined) didn't appear till 1960. Once he started writing them they stayed in the band's repertoire for years: Interplanetary Music, We Travel the Spaceways, Rocket Number Nine Take for the Planet Venus.
By 1960, there'd been more turnover in the Arkestra. No more lush sax sections: Spaulding was back in Naptown, Charles Davis had resettled in New York, and Pat Patrick was seeking his fortune there as well. Jim Herndon had taken up work that paid more reliably. Sunny was perilously close to what he'd never much cared for: a combo.
There were compensations, though. John Gilmore was no longer a bebopper; he had new things to say on the tenor sax, and his clarinet was available to lighten the texture when required. Marshall Allen had grown steadily under Ra's guidance. Ronnie Boykins already had full command of the ostinato and the bow. Phil Cohran (1927-), an experienced bop trumpeter and a student of Irish and African music, became a regular. A well schooled master of rims and mallets, Jon Hardy, became the chief occupant of the drum chair. Sun Ra always liked to say his music was about "precision and discipline," even on nights when the ensembles were ragged, the percussion verged on indeterminate, and the band was deliberately playing flat. The 1960 Arkestra exhibited precision and discipline as they are normally understood.
The highlight of their year was another trip to the studio. Sunny's band book was bursting; the result was a marathon recording session that lasted all day and produced between thirty and forty titles. I'd guess around twenty of them were eventually released. The stylistic range covered in this one session is incredible: perky recastings of But Not for Me and (believe it or not) Holiday for Strings, a feature for John on Body and Soul, a snappy Big City Blues, lush ballads like Lights on a Satellite, mysterioso numbers like The Others in Their World, Orientalia with titles like Tiny Pyramids and Kingdom of Thunder, and what would now be called World Music -- Angels and Demons at Play, featuring Phil Cohran's zither.
We have time for just two examples. First, a piece that bumps and grinds like a Calumet City special at a brighter tempo, but has the right world-weariness in this version.
[SPACE LONELINESS played here]
Space Loneliness was released right away on a single. Phil Cohran remembers, "When we played it on the radio in 1960 a woman called up the station. She said, It sounds like something that crawled up from beneath the earth and died when it reached the sunlight.'"
The other piece I'd like to play indicates where the Arkestra was headed.
[ROCKET NUMBER NINE TAKE OFF FOR THE PLANET VENUS played here]
No, that wasn't John Coltrane in 1962 -- that was John Gilmore in 1960. And not even Ornette Coleman's bassists were playing like Ronnie Boykins at the time.
After Phil Cohran left the band, Ra began training a young trumpet player named George Hudson, and there were a few more recordings made at rehearsals. But cosmic forces were at work. Up to now the Arkestra had never ventured farther away than Indianapolis. In the spring of 1961, Sun Ra received an offer to play for two weeks at a club called El Morocco in Montreal. As legend has it, the Arkestra was fired after two nights, but they scrounged and got other work. They were booted out of Canada when their six month visas expired, and they made their way to New York City.
Luckily, Pat Patrick and Tommy Hunter were in New York, and Sunny rapidly rebuilt the Arkestra. Rents were high, so they began the communal living that the Arkestra has since been known for. Financially, New York was cruel; the band got virtually no gigs for three or four years. Creatively, it was the right place to be. But that's a story for another time.
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