7

ARKESTRA

Thmei’s street-corner activism, however strident, remained limited to the audience Sun Ra could gather on any given day during a stint in the park. Thmei needed a public address system, a means of spreading its message of building a better world through culture and art. Or maybe a medium that was the message, art that built the better world it announced. For Sun Ra, music was that art, a creative medium that could challenge reality and offer something better in the process: a new sound, a progressive sensibility, a bold promise that however ugly the world might be, a more beautiful one awaited those adventurers who could feel and respond to music’s call. In the late forties and early fifties, Sun Ra devoted much of his creativity toward arranging the music of others, first the Dukes of Swing and then the Red Saunders Orchestra, both regulars at Club DeLisa. But he created his own sounds, too, as his private recordings reveal.1 Sometimes these recordings would feature only himself on piano or organ; sometimes they included other musicians, too, among them the bassist Wilbur Ware and the alto saxophonist John Jenkins.2 Sun Ra’s hunger for new sounds inspired a taste for unusual instruments and new technologies, including the celeste (a keyboard linked to hammers striking graduated metal bars), the Solovox (an early electronic keyboard), the electric piano (Sun Ra was the first jazz musician to play one on a record), and the latest in recording equipment (iron oxide tapes soon replaced the Sound Mirror’s delicate paper). Create and innovate: Sun Ra’s musical ambitions beautifully complemented Thmei’s program of cultural activism.

Realizing those ambitions would require a big band. Sun Ra knew what a big band could do. He had heard many of them perform in Birmingham when he was younger. “The music they played,” he once remarked, “was a natural happiness of love. [. . .] It was unmanufactured avant-garde, and still is.”³ The phrase “unmanufactured avant-garde” communicates Sun Ra’s sense that when such music happens, it moves everything forward in a way that improves life more than just musically:

In the Deep South, the black people were very oppressed and were made to feel like they weren’t anything, so the only thing they had was big bands. Unity showed that the black man could join together and dress nicely, do something nice, and that was all they had. . . . So it was important for us to hear big bands.⁴

Big bands brought a sense of dignity and achievement to black life. For ten years (it must have seemed a lifetime earlier), Sun Ra led the Sonny Blount Orchestra, a twelve-piece outfit regarded by many as the best swing band in Alabama and staffed by players since inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.⁵ It’s a shame they never recorded, but southern territory bands were hardly fodder for record-industry profits. The Sonny Blount Orchestra provided a prototype for the kind of band Sun Ra would assemble in Chicago, with the added benefit of Thmei’s activist agenda to enhance its capacity for improving black life.⁶

Sun Ra’s new band would advance Thmei’s agenda of black uplift, building a better world through music. New sounds would open new prospects for black culture and black people, transforming everyday life by the measure of unprecedented beauty. The ensemble would be both musically and socially progressive. It would be a working band, playing spaces that provided solace to South Side blacks, the lounges, bars, and clubs where music, booze, and dancing could conjure joy in a dreary world. Sites nicely describes the advantage of directing social activism into musical performance: “Operating musically in this black cosmopolitan milieu—the South Side of musical clubs, taverns, and community dance halls—reconfigured the combative political rhetoric of the broadsheets into a more slyly coded utopian appeal.”7 In this way, entertainment can become a vehicle for radical activism. A tune that inspires joy can also convey a sense of uplift, promise, and possibility. By coding political messages as intimate feelings, music can turn confrontation into consolation, confinement into release. It performs the possibilities it promotes, making the world feel like a better place, at least for a time. Thmei and Sun Ra were not the first to make music into a means of creative resistance and social transformation, but few other musicians (let alone political reformers) have invested as much hope in its effects as they did. In a world desperately in need of improvement, music might achieve what politics and religion could not: a wholesale change in the way people live that opens reality to wisdom and beauty.

It would take a special kind of musician to pursue this dream musically. Sun Ra’s earliest gathering of kindred spirits was a small group he called the Space Trio, which served as a laboratory for his early experiments in sound. Laurdine “Pat” Patrick, a gifted musician who would remain a lifelong Sun Ra stalwart, played baritone sax in the group, with Robert Barry on drums, sometimes replaced by Bugs Hunter. A lone recording of Sun Ra and Patrick from a 1952 rehearsal provides some idea of the music that the trio aspired to play: standards with Patrick’s sinewy baritone blowing over peculiar harmonies.⁸ The Space Trio didn’t play gigs, but according to Sun Ra, that wasn’t its immediate aim: “It was for my own edification and pleasure because I didn’t find being black in America a very pleasant experience, but I had to have something, and that something was creating something that nobody owned but us.”9 The allusion in the last phrase to Thelonious Monk’s description of bebop shows how carefully Sun Ra targeted his own music to a black audience.¹⁰ With Thmei’s support, he would broaden its scope and compose for a big band, an ensemble large enough to both emulate the great black swing bands and exemplify collaborative black creativity aspiring to something larger than segregated life.

Sun Ra called this band the “Arkestra.” People in Alabama pronounced the word “orchestra” that way, he claimed. But the name had the appeal of placing mirror images of “Ra” before and behind the sound “kist,” which he believed meant “sun’s gleam” in Sanskrit, forming a triple solarity.¹¹ When assembling the group, Sun Ra sought younger Chicago players, many of them associated with the exceptional music program run by the legendary Captain Walter Dyett at South Side’s DuSable High School. Dyett, a model of disciplined creativity, inspired a generation of Chicago’s greatest musicians. Pat Patrick studied under him, as did the gifted tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, who was born in Summit, Mississippi, but moved to Chicago as a child. After finishing high school, Gilmore served in the air force until 1953, when he joined Earl Hines’s band, earning a reputation around Chicago for inventive phrasing and hard blowing. Sun Ra sensed his coming greatness and invited him on board. Personnel shifted frequently in the early Arkestra, not the least because Sun Ra’s music was difficult and his rehearsals were demanding. He preferred younger players so that he could teach them the score. Early members included Dave Young and Art Hoyle on trumpet; Julian Priester on trombone; James Scales on alto sax; Johnny Thompson and occasionally Von Freeman on tenor; Charles Davis on baritone sax; Richard Evans, Wilbur Green, Victor Sproles, or Ronnie Boykins on bass; and Jim Herndon playing timpani.¹²

By late 1954 the Arkestra was well enough rehearsed to begin gigging, although its personnel continued to shift. An ad in the Chicago Defender for a late-December appearance at Duke Slater’s Vincennes Lounge announces “LE SONYR RA & His Combo,” featuring Robert Barry on drums, Earl Demus on bass, and “Swing” Lee O’Neil on tenor sax. An accompanying photograph features O’Neil so prominently that he looks like the combo’s leader.13 The band soon had a stable lineup that would include Patrick, Gilmore, Evans, and Barry, but others came and went. The Vincennes Lounge gig lasted six weeks, and with Alton Abraham acting as its agent, the Arkestra began to land work elsewhere, too: Shep’s Playhouse for five weeks and an extended stint at the Grand Terrace, which ran ads featuring “Sun Ra, His Electric Piano And Band.”¹⁴ The year 1955 saw the Arkestra becoming established as a regular feature of the Chicago club scene, a status conducive to the Thmei agenda of advancing social change through cultural expression. Sun Ra was still active in Washington Park, but clubs and lounges now became places where he could practice what he preached, performing music with the Arkestra that fulfilled his unique prescription for black uplift: “WE MUST MAKE LIFE BEAUTIFUL.”¹⁵

To Sites’s description of the early Arkestra as “part avant-garde unit, part novelty act,” another quality must be added: part activist organization.¹⁶ The Arkestra was playing music to make a difference both aesthetically and socially. Sun Ra would remind them of it in rehearsal: “You look out at the world and you say, ‘Something’s wrong with this stuff.’ Then you get so mad you can play it on your instrument. Play some fire on it. If you’re not mad at the world you don’t have what it takes.”¹⁷ Rehearsal for Sun Ra involved much more than reading charts and counting time. Practically speaking, it was a way of life. It was not unusual for the Arkestra to practice for eight hours, break to play a gig, and then return to their rehearsal space for even more practice. Sun Ra preached to his players like he did to his listeners in Washington Square. Rehearsals came laced with wisdom—about Egypt, space exploration, infinity—without which the Arkestra’s music would have been just so much empty noise. He didn’t require belief from his musicians; he asked only for understanding, so that they could feel where the music came from, how it should sound, and what it should do: “The world lacks for warriors,” he would say. “You have to prepare yourself accordingly.”¹⁸

Under Sun Ra’s leadership, the Arkestra mounted a joyous musical assault on segregation in Chicago—or anywhere else. Szwed calls the band a “family” over which Sun Ra presided “paternalistically but benignly.” Regarding Sun Ra’s authority over his players, Pat Patrick once remarked wryly, “we’re nobodies with the master.”19 This master’s demands came in the service of a vision for bettering the world that began in demonstrating what blacks can do and how they should do it. In an interview conducted years later, Sun Ra communicated his sense of the Arkestra’s purpose with arresting words:

Well, it’s demonstrating that some people in the form of men can stick together, [. . .] and they’re not with me because I promised them anything, because I always said they’re “in the Ra jail.” And my jail is the best jail in the world, and they learn things in my jail. And that’s what I express: they’re in jail, and they’re not going anywhere, because they can’t . . .²⁰

Coming from a man confined for his beliefs as a conscientious objector, the description of the Arkestra as a jail seems disconcerting. But it acknowledges not only confinement as the social condition of contemporary black life but also wisdom as its great compensation. The best jail in the world is the one that provides the opportunity to forsake ignorance and to learn. That’s how Patrick later viewed his years with the Arkestra: “Sun Ra brought a lot out of me; he broadened my concept and helped me overcome certain inhibitions about playing. The music came to mean a way of life to me. On the whole, I have had a rare and priceless musical experience, one that you cannot go to school to get.”²¹

Specifically, Sun Ra insisted that his players learn discipline. Discipline and precision: these are the watchwords of his music and politics. It may seem surprising, but this great experimentalist, often associated with free jazz, showed no patience for freedom as either an aesthetic or a political ideal. In a 1985 interview he insisted that discipline rules all:

It’s about one minute to midnight for this planet. [. . .] I’m not a politician and I don’t believe in equality. And that makes me a little different. I don’t believe in freedom either because I’ve never had any. I have to work for the Creator whether I want to or not and that’s discipline. I have to do like the Sun and the Stars in the sky. They have to be in the right place all the time. That’s what I have to be. I don’t know what people are talking about when they’re talking about freedom. All superior beings have no freedom. They have to be obedient to the Creator. Talk about freedom. Biggest lie I’ve been told because it can’t be you see. No one is free down here. They never have been and, really, they never will be because if they was free they would not choose to die. But since they die they’re not free. So I’m talking about discipline you see. That made it kind of difficult for me in particular in this country that’s talking about freedom. But I’m talking about discipline.22

Discipline was Sun Ra’s alternative to all the colorful freedoms in the air during the fifties and the sixties, when the Arkestra was earning and learning its wings. Perhaps a legacy of his own confinement at Marienville, his insistence that such freedoms are illusory directs the focus of his music and politics—his music as politics—toward discipline as the means of mastering the creation of beauty under circumstances of constraint. From a cosmological perspective, all things have their place; all movement proceeds under determined impulse. Freedom belongs only to children (or whites) who can’t apprehend the forces that regulate their lives. But a disciplined mastery of these forces, a precise recapitulation of the possibilities for creation that inhere within them—these are the great ends Sun Ra tried to cultivate in his musicians through interminable rehearsal. The Arkestra would be the best-disciplined band in show biz.

And it was a biz. The Arkestra could do little to spread the Thmei message of uplift through art and culture if it couldn’t attract a crowd. It played music built for pleasure—dancing, drinking, strutting the stuff—mixed with bolder sounds to challenge the open listener. Sometimes described as a hard-bop combo or that elusive thing the bebop orchestra, the Arkestra proved capable of playing an extraordinary range of music. Because most of its players were young, hard bop was the thing they were initially after, the holy grail of hip. But Sun Ra’s sound spectrum was too big to be reduced to rhythmic high jinks. Instead, his music encompassed low-register growls and dark harmonies, slithering midrange tones, a panoply of ludic percussion, twangs and squeals and tinkles and wails. Sun Ra, as musicians say, had big ears, and everything he heard (real or imagined) found its way into his compositions, from Latin rhythms to broad harmonies to dissonant chromaticism to exotic soundscapes. Little about his music is willfully alienating, however unfamiliar it may feel at first, and the Arkestra’s early performances (like later ones, for that matter) mixed standards, bebop tunes, and originals in a manner meant to be conducive to happiness. “I don’t think about nothin’,” he would say later in Helsinki, “but reaching people with impressions of happiness.”23 That’s where beauty starts and politics ends. “See, jazz is happiness,” Sun Ra said elsewhere, “and you got very few people playing jazz on this planet.”²⁴ The Arkestra’s music all tended toward communicating happiness as the best evidence of a better world.

But this is not to say that the music always made for effortless listening. Even early performances challenged audiences with quarter-tone intervals, complex polyrhythms, unconventional tempos, modal scales, and unexpected transitions. This is difficult, inventive work. “The only way anybody could play my music,” Sun Ra said, “I’d have to teach them.” Hence the perpetual rehearsals. How demanding is his music? It might require a whole new sensorium to play: “I suppose it’s the rhythmic feeling. It has sort of a two way thing going. Most jazz will lay over one rhythm, but my music has two, maybe three or four things going, and you have to feel all of them. You can’t count it.”²⁵ Music beyond meter: apparently you can feel more than you can know. This predilection for multiplicity (multiple rhythms, multiple tonalities) comes in the service of more than just aesthetic innovation. It advances the spiritual agenda that underwrites Thmei’s activism, as Sun Ra makes peculiarly clear: “Superior beings definitely speak in other harmonic ways than the earth way because they’re talking something different, and you have to have chord against chord, melody against melody, rhythm against rhythm; if you’ve got that, you’re expressing something else.”26 Something else: that’s what the Arkestra’s music aspires to, another kind of life, a better world. It’s entertainment spiritualized.

By the end of 1955, this avant-garde/novelty/activist ensemble was ready to make a bid for wider influence. In late March, Abraham booked Balkan Studios, at 1425 West Eighteenth Street, and the Arkestra recorded a session that yielded its first 45 rpm singles.²⁷ Although the labels of these and several other early recordings read “Arkistra,” the spelling of the band’s name settled into the familiar “Arkestra” within the year.²⁸ The tracks chosen for its first recording offer an accessible but representative introduction to its music. “Super Blonde,” a Sun Ra composition, shows off the band’s mastery of now-familiar bop conventions. It’s a blues progression with the skittery rhythmic head typical of Charlie Parker’s compositions. Sun Ra opens with a sly piano chorus before the band takes the jagged melody in unison, a big sound for bebop. The trumpet follows with a solo as first piano and then the other horns comp in chunky, deep phrases, making for bebop with a dark difference. Then the tenor swings for twelve bars, followed by a funky and dissonant series of phrases—sublimated traffic noise, an urban infarction. The piece returns to the trombone playing over a kitsch-cool walking bass, a softly preaching baritone sax, and a flirtatious piano; then it’s back to the head, feeling now like an old friend. Pow, out: a carefully composed and disciplined ensemble blues. Two minutes and thirty-nine seconds of pure happiness.

“Soft Talk,” a composition by the trombonist Julien Priester, shows off the Arkestra’s section work, as the horns harmonize the head and trade phrases à la Ellington in staccato recitative. After a punchy eight-bar intro, it’s the standard thirty-two bars more with solos by tenor, trombone, and trumpet. What’s most notable is how composed this tune feels. There is no simple riffing behind solos; the horns serve up a variety of rhythmic figures and then sit out entirely behind the trombone (it’s Priester’s tune, after all). The band then returns to that filigreed head. Unadulterated joy! “Super Blonde” and “Soft Talk” announce the arrival in Chicago of an artful ensemble playing to exceptionally high standards of discipline and delight.

If this is politics, then let the revolution begin. In truth, it was already under way in the clubs, lounges, bars, and even rehearsal spaces where the Arkestra played, a revolution less overtly social than cunningly cultural. Sun Ra and this band of creative black men would transform the world through music, making it a better place through disciplined play and superior wisdom. They would harness the force of sound, drive life beyond its limits, and crash reality into the stars.