Sun Ra
11/07/2012
10/26/2010
05/25/2010
Space: Still the Place
Sun Ra would have turned 96, in earth years, last Saturday. Marshall Allen, who has led the Sun Ra Arkestra for some 15 years (and played in its ranks for more than 50), turns 86 today. According to recent custom, Allen and the band will perform a birthday gig, in their hometown of Philadelphia, under the aegis of the Ars Nova Workshop. In honor of all of this, here is a piece I wrote for a Style magazine in Philly last year, which provided me with a pretext for interviewing both George Clinton and Maurice White for the first time.
There are worlds, and there are worlds. For the visionary composer, keyboardist, philosopher, bandleader and intergalactic traveler known as Sun Ra, the planet was a way station, and music was both a vessel and a channel. Throughout his earthly career, which roughly spanned the second half of the last century, he engaged an impossibly broad-spectrum sweep of musical ideas: big band swing and bebop along with future-sound electronics and ancient African rhythms, funk and free jazz, psychedelic grooves and Bizarro doo-wop, and much, much else besides. “It was a universal music,” attests George Clinton, the Parliament-Funkadelic mastermind with an intergalactic angle of his own. “There’s no box you can put it in, except that it makes you feel good.”
So is it any wonder that in the 16 years since Sun Ra’s departure, his influence has rippled across so many borders of culture and genre? When soul-punk dynamo Janelle Monáe declares herself “an alien from outer space,” or hip-hop trickster Lil Wayne rants about being a Martian, they’re riding a wavelength best exemplified, if not generated, by the potent precedent of Sun Ra. And those are just the more flagrant manifestations of a process that reaches meaningfully into the worlds of rock, techno and electronica, along with avant-garde jazz and new music. “He never got as much recognition, even posthumously, as he should have,” says Jeff Parker, the guitarist for Tortoise, the acclaimed Chicago post-rock band. “But the influence, man, it’s everywhere.”
Recent Comments