WONDER INN
“Play it. Play it, Sun Ra!”
1960. The Arkestra is gigging at the Wonder Inn, swinging hard on one of Sun Ra’s compositions, “Space Aura,” sixteen hammering bars of harmonized saxophone jabs punctuated by a slithering trumpet reveille.1 John Gilmore then takes off on tenor for two tone-pounding choruses, attacking notes from below, garroting them from behind, making them wail. George Hudson follows on trumpet, quavering and snarling over those harmonies until the head returns and the Arkestra churns to a cacophonous finish, resolving on a darkly beautiful chord, Gilmore’s tenor two octaves below Hudson’s trumpet—but a quarter tone above the pitch.
Play it, Sun Ra!
The Wonder Inn. Say it fast and it’s “wonderin’,” a place of possibility and speculation: the Arkestra’s steady gig for more than a year, sometimes seven nights a week (after six hours of rehearsal). Just south of Seventy-Fifth at Cottage Grove, the Wonder Inn occupied a red brick building, with frosted glass blocks in front flanked by two doors and capped with a crenellated parapet. The door on the left opened directly into the club, a single long room with a bar along one wall and tables along the other. At the far end, a small stage stood under a gazebo-like dome decorated with an ivy motif hung from the ceiling.
The space barely contained the Arkestra. Crammed behind Sun Ra’s piano, the band played intrepid sets that could last for hours, making the room reverberate with expansive, often experimental sounds. As patrons drank and hustled and talked, occasionally urging the music on, the Arkestra played with audacity and imagination, one of the best working bands in Chicago—or anywhere else. Its members took their music seriously but made it entertaining, too, eschewing the austerities of the beboppers, with their aloof virtuosity and windowpane shades. Their attire was sharp but relaxed, even playful; they sported bow ties and jackets with skinny lapels, their heads topped sometimes with a fez and sometimes with a space hat blinking red and green in the smoky light.
They followed Sun Ra’s music down pathways to unknown worlds. They were space explorers, six to ten players in close solar orbit. They pursued musical perihelion, aspiring beyond worldly music to skirt the sun—often as the tape rolled, as it did on that night in 1960 at the Wonder Inn. Released as Music from Tomorrow’s World in 2002, long after the passing of both club and composer, the recording provides a high-altitude transmission from the Arkestra in flight. Joy echoes in the air. The crowd comes alive with booze and chatter. The spacious set list includes standards, show tunes, originals, and a hip instance of exotica.
The Arkestra could play anything—and on this recording it does so with discipline, energy, and wit. By turns tender and raucous, the music soars and swings sideways. Something funny begins to happen. There is a joker in the pack of charts. Sun Ra calls “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” the old Gershwin number, and the Arkestra serves up a staid cover as straight as anything Fletch ever played, until it breaks into song with a wink and a nudge: “The stories you’re liable / To read in the Bible / They ain’t necessarily so!”2 Really? They ain’t? A soft voice follows whisper-lisping something barely audible over the Inn’s din, something a bit weird and a little lyrical. A poem maybe?
Imagination is a magic carpet
Upon which we may soar
To distant lands and climes
And even go beyond the moon to any planet in the sky.
It’s Sun Ra’s voice, in recitation mode. A wry preacher, he calls a question that ends in a shout: “If we are here / Why can’t we be there?” The Arkestra laughs, sputters, and launches full throttle into “How High the Moon,” the standard beloved of the bebop set now turned propulsion device for space travel to another world. And why not?
Why can’t we be there?