I adore Sun Ra. He and his band were always inspiring, entertaining, and lived in their own musical universe. During a two-week period in the fall of 1974, while I was living in Berkeley, I went to see Sun Ra and his musicians ten times! (This movie features most of the people who were in the band during the period I saw them.)
The show was very different each time, although a few of the space-themed songs, including “Space Is The Place,” generally turned up in the set. One set was entirely Fletcher Henderson arrangements, played straight except for some of the solos. Another set was a forty-five minute two chord vamp that ended with John Gilmore, (the band’s legendary tenor sax player who showed Trane a few things) and Sun Ra, arm in arm, dancing and singing “God Bless The Child” together (including the bridge) and somehow making it fit over the two (very odd) chords. At another show, Sun Ra announced upon entry that “Anyone who doesn’t want to travel to Jupiter should leave the room now.” Nobody did. I don’t know where we went, but it was far from Telegraph Avenue.
Sun Ra had a set of very old keyboards out of which he conjured the most unique sounds ever while leading the band, and MCing the show with an otherworldly charm. Their books of arrangements were enormous, the largest I’ve ever seen. Each one was easily the size of two phone books stuck together, and ragged charts hung out of the sides. Most of the musicians played three or four instruments, many of which I had never seen before, in addition to their regular ones. Some sets, Gilmore wouldn’t even touch his sax, playing a second drum set along with the regular drummer.
When the space permitted, they set up projectors and ran slides and home movies, consisting of scenes from countries they had visited, African and space themes, and whatever other visuals might complement the show. These were projected on the walls and ceilings while they played. Even for 1974 it was very low-tech, and they didn’t need any help visually, but there was something very moving about the juxtaposition of the slide show and the music. You could see why they went to the trouble.
They also sold self-produced albums at the shows, the first band I ever saw do this. I still have them. Their stage uniforms looked like they were made from curtains by somebody’s mother, but they wore different ones each night, with complementary skullcaps. Sometimes local players augmented the band, though there was a a core of about fourteen that were always there. The locals all wore the uniforms too!
The non-musical highlight was talking with John Gilmore at the Keystone Corner between sets. I was very nervous about even approaching such a legend but he could not have been kinder. He took me and my questions completely seriously. It was the first time I had ever talked with a true musical master, and his presence and manner were as inspiring and affecting as his music. I had never met a musician so dedicated to the pursuit of excellence; he was almost monk-like in his demeanor, very different from my rock and blues heroes. He had very deep eyes that had seen much, about which I suspect he chose to say little. John spoke slowly, deliberately, and seriously.deeply affecting. I asked him some questions about the harmonies he was using in his solos, and he said that they collected scales and other musical ideas in their travels and worked them into the music. asked him how much they rehearsed and he said, with a look that was half exhaustion and half pride, “ALL the time.”I talked with some of the other musicians later, at other shows, but none of them struck me the same way John Gilmore had.
A couple of years later, I took a jazz history course at the University of Hartford taught by the late, great Jackie McLean. Jackie was usually polite when discussing other musicians, but he had very definite, hard-won opinions. It was always clear when he didn’t have much use for something. We were all in awe of him, and with good reason. One day, with some nervousness, I asked him in class what he thought about Sun Ra’s music, and his reply surprised us. “I came up with Sonny Rollins and Bud Powell and we all knew and learned from Bird and then I played with Miles and Mingus and had my own groups. Sun Ra’s band is the only other group I would ever even consider playing in now, if he asked me. That’s the only gig I can think of now where I would really learn something.”
It was a remarkable thing for a young musician to witness for an extended period: a big-band sized group of musicians touring and doing something absolutely unique as well as it could be done with total commitment and no possibility of any reward beyond the music itself. Sun Ra and his Arkestra, by their very existence, threw down the gauntlet. “You think you’re serious about music? We’ll see if you know what serious means. This is serious. We’re walking around here with these albums and uniforms that we made and these gigs that we set up ourselves because we’re not waiting for anybody else to do what we all know needs to be done.”
After a long period of not listening much to Sun Ra, I saw the band a year or two before his passing, and it was still great, but they were relatively much more successful and the DIY charm of the period I saw was no longer. In a peculiar turn of events, my son Liam was born the day Sun Ra left us for the spaceways forever, May 30, 1993. I’m not sure what to make of this.