He is a miracle of the highest order, a grand eccentric, and true genius of the cosmos. A peerless 20th century composer, a poet, a brilliant pianist, a live performance visionary, one of the greatest to ever have lived. A man who may or may not have tripped to Saturn, where the doomed pettiness of Earth living was revealed to him.
He is legible as a great American artist, but like many great American artists, he insists on his home being somewhere else. His music fused the American avant-garde to jazz, the wabi-sabi of bebop to the big band. He made the electric piano into the instrument of the future. He released more than a hundred albums, many through his own recording company, the rarest ones embossed with his personal artwork. Beautiful orchestral pop music, colossal free jazz freakouts, haunting solo piano recitals, straight up big band jams, John Cage collabs. If you can do it in jazz, he did it, and he may be back, someday, to do it all again, if the universe demands. He is Sun Ra, and this world is not his home.
In 1993, Ra passed away at his Earth home of Birmingham, Alabama. In his absence, Marshall Allen, a saxophonist and Ra’s sideman since 1957, became the leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra, an unconventional, Philadelphia-based big band orchestra with expansive membership, so named because it is meant to be an “Ark” to the greater consciousness of the stars. Year after year, decade after decade, the Arkestra has traveled the world, sporting handsome lycra costumes and performing the great man’s music for audiences everywhere.
“Portland has become our West Coast home,” said Knoel Scott, a saxophonist serving as the Arkestra’s bandleader in the stead of the now 101-year-old Allen. (Touring may not be as easy as it was, but he’s still recording, don’t worry.) On February 27, the band was playing their third night in a row of packed houses in their customary Hollywood Theatre homestand, a nearly yearly occurrence, accompanied by an improvised A/V display by the Portland video art collective Spoiler Room. It was a remarkable evening of music and art, a beautiful journey that you, the reader, should seek out the next time they come into town.
The Arkestra rolled in with a 15-piece band. Some of the musicians pulled double duty, switching between horns and hand percussion, allowing for easy flips in style, even over the course of a single song. During their performance of “Love in Outer Space,” one of Ra’s most iconic compositions, the song began as a big band style excursion, something the Duke would have put together. But as it went along, more and more of the horn players sat their brass down and picked up their hand drums, the song morphing into polyrhythmic exploration, that beautiful melody now floating on a sea of tumbling percussion.
Chris Hemingway, the Arkestra’s baritone saxophone player, summarizing the world of Sun’s art said, “Ra’s music is transcendent. It’s always in flight, it’s always a journey, and it’s always in flight.”
“Sun Ra’s music is so spiritual, it takes you to so many different avenues,” says George Grey, the group’s drummer for the evening. “Being a musician, a drummer, you do have to be versatile in the stylings. You go from big band, to straight ahead, to avant-garde, to funk, Afro-Cuban. Any cat can’t do this if you just concentrate on one idiom.”
“He had a divine purpose, a vision that brought all of us here,” says Cecil Brooks, a trumpet player.
“They said they wrote my name on the wall when I was in high school,” says Brent White, a younger member of the band who plays trumpet. “I was predestined by the universe to be in this band. I didn’t know about Sun Ra until I got in the band. You get initiated in it, it’s like a religion. You learn more and more about readings, more and more about history. It’s really great. I get to be a part of a continuation of history, 70-year-old music from when jazz started.”
