9

EL SATURN

The Arkestra was a collective and a collaborative enterprise. Thmei Research provided its intellectual inspiration; Sun Ra, its spiritual and musical direction. Yet he frequently disclaimed creative authority over the music it made: “Every musician in the band was part of the composition process.”1 The Arkestra would never have taken flight, however, without the indefatigable energy of Alton Abraham. It is convenient to credit Sun Ra with the creative achievements associated with the Arkestra in its many avatars. After all, he composed and arranged most of its music, choreographed its performances, and even managed the lives of its most devoted members. Sun Ra deserves to be acknowledged for changing the history of jazz and arguably that of black culture in general. But Abraham deserves credit, too. As its business manager, he made the Arkestra an industry unto itself, a viable if shaky commercial venture that, against the odds, performed and recorded for forty years under Sun Ra’s leadership—and continues to play to this day. Sun Ra and Abraham worked together like the two halves of a brain: Sun Ra the creative right hemisphere and Abraham the calculating left. They collaborated to extraordinary effect over the course of many years to make the Arkestra and its music an engine of cultural and social change.

If Abraham was an artist, then commerce was his medium. In some ways a true creature of Bronzeville, he brought an entrepreneurial spirit to Thmei’s activist agenda and saw an opportunity to establish another kind of urban institution that could promote a better life for blacks. His experience as a member of the Knights of Music gave him connections that would benefit the fledgling band. Sites describes the wide variety of venues the Arkestra played in Chicago: “commercial music clubs, social dances, pageants, gay bars, churches”—wherever the band could make a buck.2 Social clubs in particular sponsored a wide range of musical functions, and according to Sites, Abraham frequently booked the Arkestra to play for them. Traditional venues supporting large ensembles (such as the Grand Terrace and the Parkway Ballroom) were going the way of zoot suits and fedoras, good for an occasional night out but hardly the latest fashion. As clubs got smaller, so did the bands that played them, a point Abraham made years later in a note listing the core members of a stripped-down Arkestra: “It became necessary to use six men when clubs would not pay for a big band.”³ The business of managing a jazz orchestra at a time of economic retreat from large-scale entertainment proved challenging, particularly for a man whose day job earned him $350 a month.⁴ The Arkestra was a labor of commitment and love.

Making records would be essential to the group’s success as a musical and activist enterprise. Sun Ra devoted a lot of energy to recording in the early and midfifties, either scoring arrangements for other musicians in recording studios or rehearsing more personal projects at home. His interest in recording technologies was long-standing. In Alabama he acquired an early wire recorder, using it to record his own ensemble as well as more established units, such as Henderson’s or Ellington’s, when they played in the area.⁵ In Chicago, his recording machines seemed to be rolling perpetually. The drummer Bugs Hunter, who would assume primary responsibility for recording the Arkestra some years later, remembers Sun Ra carrying some such device wherever he went and saving everything he recorded.6 The habit would yield some interesting results. A home recording of “Deep Purple” made in 1948 with the violinist Stuff Smith eventually saw release, but not until 1973, on an LP with the same title.⁷ Sun Ra experimented with small groups in his small space, recordings not meant for release but instead intended for the edification and advancement of the musicians involved.

The most inspired of these rehearsal recordings were made with several vocal groups. In the mid- to late fifties, probably at Abraham’s urging, Sun Ra began working intensely with vocal ensembles, male groups with names such as the Lintels, the Nu Sounds, the Cosmic Rays, the Qualities, the Metros, and the Clockstoppers. These groups fell somewhere between Sun Ra’s journeyman work as an arranger and the more experimental aims of the Arkestra. Abraham and Sun Ra were exploring the possibility of commercial success with singers. The Lintels sang doo-wop, tunes including “Blue Moon,” “Blue Skies,” and “Baby Please Be Mine.” The Nu Sounds covered mostly standards, such as “Honeysuckle Rose” or “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” newly arranged in sweet harmonies backed by Sun Ra’s adventuresome piano. The most inventive of these groups was the Cosmic Rays, which occasionally performed with the Arkestra and was captured in that setting on a rehearsal tape from 1958 singing haunting minor harmonies on the Sun Ra originals “Africa” and “Black Sky and Blue Moon.” Music from these rehearsal tapes appears on a compact disc released in 2003 and entitled Spaceship Lullaby.⁸ It makes for enlightening listening because it reveals Sun Ra working not only with great promise in a popular idiom but also in the mundane way of a musical director: coaching Roland Williams of the Nu Sounds by singing his part to demonstrate its syncopation (“do-daboo-day”) and playing the piano intro to “Holiday for Strings” to communicate its feel (“’cuz I want you to hear it”). Sun Ra taught his musicians by example and demonstration, call and response. He fit voices to parts, harmonies to words, in a way that communicates a comfortable mastery of popular vocal music.

But even here Sun Ra tinkered and innovated, following an expansive impulse that pressed beyond the boundaries of the pop song. This impulse is clearly on display in the two-part tune entitled “Chicago USA,” possibly written as a contest entry for a new city song to replace Fred Fisher’s “Chicago, Chicago, That Toddlin’ Town.”9 Long thought lost, “Chicago USA” resurfaced on rehearsal tapes, confirming John Gilmore’s recollection that “when you would hear the songs, they would depict Chicago perfectly. . . . The words make you feel it.”¹⁰ While Sun Ra was not a prolific lyricist, his writing for the vocal groups shows some skill. “Chicago USA” tracks the movement of public transport from the South Side’s University stop, at 1200 East Sixty-Third, through the Loop and on to the much whiter world accessible from the Jackson, Monroe, and Washington stops. Sites reads the reversal of history implied by the order of these presidential stops as time travel, a return to national origins that attempts to erase the country’s “brutal racial history.”¹¹ But the track (think music as much as train) moves into the future, too, imagining an expansion of livable space for blacks that the Arkestra will also mutter, rollick, and scream to produce. Public transportation is a terrestrial spaceship propelling blacks from the South Side to alien worlds.

In 1954, Sun Ra copyrighted another song with a similar trajectory, “Bop is a Spaceship Melody,” sung by the Nu Sounds. It anticipates his hard turn to space themes and hints at the dissonance to come. The title feels uneasy: is bop a spaceship? A melody? Both? By the midfifties, bop was a lot of things. Calling it a “spaceship melody” makes it a musical vehicle to worlds as barely comprehensible as that odd phrase. Another phrase that first appears in this song would become central to the Arkestra’s extraterrestrial aspirations: “interplanetary harmonies, interplanetary melodies.” Sun Ra would recycle it later in the Arkestra’s more ambitious repertoire. His inventive work with small vocal groups thus splits the difference between commerce and culture. Regrettably, it would come to an end when the Arkestra started to take off.

Abraham understood the importance of recording to both the Arkestra’s music and its mission. Rehearsal tapes were one thing, but the general public could not access them. The band needed to record commercially to spread the Thmei message as widely as possible. The obvious problem with that ambition was commerce, the bottom line. Black musicians generally fell prey to cultural exploitation: unscrupulous, white-owned record companies with their promises and their contracts and their neocolonial dreams of profit over people. The local blues factory, Chess Records, provided a blatant example: sure, the company recorded and promoted the masters of Chicago blues (Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, and Howlin’ Wolf, to name a few), but how big were the profits of those magnanimous Chess brothers? Did they run a recording studio or an analog plantation? The obvious solution was to follow the lead of Vee-Jay Records, Vivian and James Bracken’s label based in nearby Gary, Indiana, a black-owned enterprise that offered black production of black music (at least initially) made by the likes of Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker. Why not found another independent black record label? It was a bold idea at a time when most black jazz musicians recorded for white-owned labels.12 Sun Ra was clearly grooming the vocal groups for commercial success. His work with the Arkestra would follow suit. In 1956, Abraham and Sun Ra, with support from Thmei, registered an independent record company with the American Federation of Musicians: El Saturn Research. Saturn Records. A black label for black musicians playing music for a better world.

Sun Ra remembered the founding of El Saturn as an act of humanitarian generosity meant to sustain creative work that the commercial record industry might dismiss:

It was backed up by some people who were unselfish, and some people who felt that what I was trying to do in music was being hampered by commercial folks and other people who said it was too far out, and about twelve people got together, some musicians and others, one of them is a rabbi, he’s a black Hebrew, he’s in Israel now—and they put up the money, and they established us a record company, Saturn, so that I would be heard regardless of commercial folks. They did that. So then the foundation of it was for to get this music out there to people, and they put these records out, they put the money in it; they didn’t ask for no money; it’s the most unselfish organization ever been on this planet. They didn’t ask for no money. They said this music should be heard by people.13

In Sun Ra’s account of El Saturn’s founding, stress falls on its social mission to reach an audience without being compromised by “commercial folks.” This is not to say, however, that El Saturn would eschew commerce altogether. However generous its initial backers may have been (much about the company’s financial operation remains mysterious), the label’s purpose was to produce and sell records, even if the music on them was challenging. “I didn’t want to go through all the starving in the attic and all that foolishness,” Sun Ra said in a later interview. “I wanted to bypass that particular trauma they put on artists.”¹⁴ The point was to keep the business of recording this new music in the hands of the people who created it, an aim Szwed describes as “so daring, so unprecedented, as to be heroic in the music business.”¹⁵ Thmei members were at the helm and would remain so. Abraham served as the company’s president, promoter, and chief recording engineer. Lawrence Allen managed record distribution.¹⁶ James Bryant assisted on the business side as an authorized representative, signing invoices as “James Bryant III V.P.”¹⁷ El Saturn was the culture-industry wing of Thmei Research as an activist organization. It would promote Thmei’s agenda commercially, or try to do so, directing business operations toward the ends of black enlightenment and advancement.

Saturn, the sixth planet out from the sun, a gas giant belted by rings: in astrology, the ruling sign of discipline, authority, and self-control; in Roman mythology, the god of generation, wealth, agriculture, and the Capitoline Hill; in Greek mythology (as Cronos), the youngest of the Titans, who ineffectually ate his children to avoid dethronement. Abraham and Sun Ra understood these associations, choosing Saturn for the name of their label to reap the advantage of this rich symbolism. Through a devotion to discipline and authority, El Saturn would bestow personal and collective abundance, gilding commercial enterprise with occult wisdom.

Thmei took such symbolism seriously, as various publications in Abraham’s possession indicate. Part of an astrological series entitled The Books of the Planets, Edward G. Whitman’s pamphlet The Book of Saturn avers that “from a general standpoint Saturn can be said to govern the business side of life,” granting “the quality of patience” to allow “proper time for the developing and maturing of plans” and influencing “the political and public sides of life [by] giving capacity for the rendering of service of a very high quality to the state and to people generally.”18 In a theosophically oriented publication, Cosmic Voice: Aetherius Speaks to Earth, the titular spirit master (“born on the Planet Venus—3456 years ago!” but now from Saturn, “the location of the Seat of Interplanetary Government”) speaks of “magnetic energies radiated via Saturn” that will “help the world as a whole.” He closes his message with a benediction: “May the Blessings of the Masters of Saturn and the Sun fall upon your heads this night, so that you may know that God dwells silently with you all.”¹⁹ Invoking Saturn with the name of their record label was no joke for Abraham and Sun Ra. “El Saturn Research” announced commitment to occult counter-knowledge as a means for producing a better life—by making and selling records.

It was a do-it-yourself organization for reinventing reality. El Saturn would manage the production, promotion, and distribution of the Arkestra’s music, maximizing profits for the musicians, minimizing exploitation by executives, and advancing the Thmei message of better living through music. It would coordinate studio recording and small-batch record pressings with the mundane tasks of stamping jackets, pasting labels, filling orders, and booking gigs. However homegrown, El Saturn was a business. Rather than resist capitalism, Abraham embraced it in the spirit of Bronzeville, approaching it as the best available means for creating and sustaining a community of black artist-activists. Enlightened commerce to enlighten consumers: El Saturn products would become more than the mute hieroglyphics Marx claims commodities to be. They would sound and they would sing, often covered in Egyptian hieroglyphics. They would celebrate rather than exploit the labor that created them and inspire continuing creation. Sketches in one of Abraham’s record books show his hopes reaching much higher than the top of the music charts, however. One depicts a four-story building with the words “El Saturn Wisdom Research Culture Art Foundation” in big letters on the ground floor. The second floor houses the “Department of Sound,” the third bears the label “Space Communications,” and the top floor is reserved for El Saturn’s loftiest undertaking, “Cosmic Research.”20 El Saturn Records aspired to do more than press vinyl and make a buck. As Abraham imagined it, the company would function as the corporate sponsor and scholarly archive of Thmei’s message and the Arkestra’s music.

El Saturn’s earliest records were singles, 45 rpm disks that could be produced cheaply in small numbers. The very first El Saturn single was long thought to be a recording of the Cosmic Rays with “Bye-Bye” on side 1 and “Somebody’s in Love” on side 2. But Robert L. Campbell, Christopher Trent, and Robert Pruter show that the honor goes to the Arkestra’s recording of “Super Blonde” and “Soft Talk.”²¹ More Saturn singles by the Arkestra as well as other artists would follow, most notably a side by a fringe R&B performer named Yochannan (also spelled Yochanan and also known as the “Muck Muck Man” for his Saturn single entitled “Muck Muck”), who wore open-toed sandals in all weather, sported crazy “sun colors,” and claimed descent from the sun.²² As the new standard medium for serious jazz recording, however, the LP loomed inevitably on Saturn’s horizon, the main challenge being how to finance its more costly production.²³ Enter Tom Wilson, an African American with a Harvard degree who started a daring label called Transition that aimed to record the most progressive music going—and did so, signing Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and Sun Ra to their first sessions as leaders.²⁴ Abraham found Wilson’s approach to financing record production attractive. It was, in Corbett’s witty phrasing, “a bit of a pyramid scam,” soliciting contributions from sponsors ostensibly to support particular recordings but in reality to sustain general operations.²⁵ In a letter to Adolph Hicks dated January 1, 1957, Abraham (like Sun Ra, a devotee of the caps lock) wrote, “WE, EL SATURN, ARE EXPANDING OUR BUSINESS, DUE TO DEMANDS FROM THE RECORD SHOPS AND RECORD DISTRUBUTORS.”26 El Saturn would produce LPs in the Wilson mode: “WE HAVE ADOPTED A SIMILAR PROGRAM TO TRANSITION.” Abraham, however, promised investors a higher return (“MORE THAN THREE TIMES THE AMOUNT INVESTED”), plus the added Thmei bonus: “THEY CAN BUILD A BETTER FUTURE FOR THEMSELVES AND THEIR FAMILIES BY WORKING WITH OUR PROGRAM OF LP ALBUM INVESTOR SPONSORSHIP.”²⁷ Investment with a progressive return: Abraham’s business model turns a pyramid into the launchpad for a better future.

Transition recorded Sun Ra and the Arkestra at Universal Studios on July 12, 1956, yielding the Arkestra’s first LP.²⁸ It was a willfully innovative session, nineteen takes yielding ten tracks, eight of them Sun Ra originals.²⁹ Transition released the LP in early 1957 under the title Jazz by Sun Ra, Vol. 1, auguring a second volume. Although recorded, it never appeared on the label because Wilson folded the company later that year, taking a job with United Artists Records.³⁰ An ad announcing Jazz by Sun Ra, Vol. 1 in Down Beat dated December 26, 1956, celebrates the record’s originality in sans serif caps: “FAR-OUT AS THE WEST COAST JAZZ . . . BASIC AS BASIE . . . LIVE CONCERT FI!!! A Fantastic New Jazz Conception by SUN RA, SUN God of Jazz.”³¹ Many of the tunes underscore the music’s newness with forward-looking titles, for example, “Transition,” “Future,” and “New Horizons,” the last a beautifully composed and hypnotically slow thirty-two-bar meditation that provided the LP its thematic focus and featured Art Hoyle on trumpet over spacious reed harmonies and Sun Ra’s plunking, angular piano.

Only one blues appears on the record, its sixteen-bar head strutting through minor changes and a melody that does not resolve so much as dangle over the coming solos. “Possession” takes a Harry Revel confection (a waltz written for Les Baxter’s Perfume Set to Music and arranged here in four by Eutrace U. [“Prince”] Shell) and adds some darker flavors to haunting effect. “Sun Song,” the LP’s last track, features Sun Ra’s weird Wurlitzer with chimes and timpani, the trumpet playing evocatively over the tonal center. It’s a tune without melody whose free-form piano interlude gives way to the return of those soothing chimes. Bells (credited to six of eleven musicians) splash transient colors across the whole LP, and chthonic rhythms add a register that feels as old as the arrangements are new. Jazz by Sun Ra, Vol. 1 lives up to its advertising hype.

Maybe the most provocative thing about the record, however, is the booklet that came with it, a brief manifesto written by Sun Ra explaining his approach to music and its larger implications. This is an important, revealing document. It contains five poems to illustrate his claim that “music is only another form of poetry,” one of which (in case you missed the point) bears the title “New Horizons,” translating the song by that title into words that expand its imaginative prospects: “music pulsing like a living heartbeat, / Pleasant intuition of better things to come . . . / The sight of boundless space / Reaching ever outward as if in search of itself.”32 More is at stake in Sun Ra’s music than simply making the latest in far-out sounds. Throughout the manifesto, emphasis falls on the future (another song title) as the destination this music seeks. His musicians “are dedicated to the music of the future,” and Sun Ra declares that all should share their commitment: “We must live for the future of music.”³³

This is the rhetoric of the Thmei broadsheets, but transposed into a singularly positive mode. Beauty remains the means to a better future, with life as its highest ideal, as Sun Ra claims in his opening paragraph, entitled “THE AIM OF MY COMPOSITIONS”:

All of my compositions are meant to depict happiness combined with beauty in a free manner. Happiness, as well as pleasure and beauty has many degrees of existence; my aim is to express these degrees in sounds which can be understood by the entire world. All of my music is tested for effect. By effect I mean mental impression. The real aim of this music is to co-ordinate the minds of peoples into an intelligent reach for a better world, and an intelligent approach to the living future. By peoples I mean all of the people of different nations who are living today.³⁴

This bold declaration sums up Sun Ra’s whole vocation as composer and performer. Music is his chosen medium because, unlike language, it can be understood by everybody everywhere. The inclusiveness of this vision (all people living today) shows Sun Ra at his most optimistic, turning Thmei’s activist agenda loose on the whole world.

The political potential of recording is such that dreams from Chicago’s South Side can seek universal fulfillment. Music, by means of beauty, might coordinate all minds to produce a living future for all people. “I know,” Sun Ra writes near the pamphlet’s end, “that the dream they dream is life, and LIFE is the sound I seek to express.” He writes as a teacher devoted to life and speaks as a prophet inspired by art: “The well being of every person on this planet depends upon the survival and growth of civilization; every civilization is determined, to great extent, by the scope and development of its ART FORMS.”35 These words evoke not only Sun Ra’s broadsheets but also William Blake’s prophecies. Like Blake, Sun Ra offers his texts with disarming simplicity and vulnerability, closing his manifesto with a poem cannily called “After-Thought”:

I take my magic wand in hand and touch

The mind of the world;

I speak in sounds.

What am I saying?

Listen!

These are the things spoken from

My heart . . .

These are of and are my intimate treasures,

I give them to those who live and love

Both life and living.³⁶

Few musicians ask so much of music as Sun Ra did. Few have so much to offer.

This tactic of using music to advance social and spiritual vision became a mainstay of El Saturn’s business practices. With Transition defunct, this label assumed primary responsibility for recording the Arkestra and promoting its music. It’s typical to approach music as if it were, well, only music. The Arkestra’s music partakes of a whole material culture that gives it shape, weight, and significance. To advance the Thmei agenda through commerce and consumerist pleasures, Abraham exploits the supporting matter of music production. Not content to segregate Sun Ra’s message in a manifesto, he also scatters it across company paraphernalia, encouraging more than just consumption, sowing seeds for the sun. Abraham and Sun Ra radicalize the dubious apparatus of commercial advertising by transforming promotional material for new music into ads for infinity. “My music demonstrates infinity,” Sun Ra once told an interviewer. “Most people can’t comprehend that.”37 Record jackets, catalogs, leaflets, flyers, posters, business cards—all the ephemera of commercial music—collude in demonstrating infinity as part of the process of music production.

In all these texts, a prophetic quality infects mundane business dealings and makes them portentous of new worlds to come. One business card asks, “Why buy old sounds? Buy new sounds from the future by Sun Ra & his Arkestra.” Another, seasonally adjusted for Christmas, offers a blessing from “Sun Ra & Arkistra”: “To You, Better Life Vibrations, For Always.” A later one quietly recommends “Divine Cosmic Music from the Creator, Spiritual Intergalactic Divine.”³⁸ Yet another depicting a solar boat promotes “Intergalactic infinite creative life spirit energies.”³⁹ An El Saturn catalog from the late fifties, festooned in front with ankhs, eyes, and spaceships, presents the potential customer with an early version of Sun Ra’s poem “The Neglected Plane of Wisdom.” On the back appears a meditation on history as dead, frequently reprinted on flyers and record jackets, that includes a no-nonsense rejection all things past: “The past is DEAD and those who are following the past are doomed to die and be like the past.”⁴⁰ A performance contract promotes Sun Ra’s spiritual as well as musical qualifications: “Be good to your MIND’S MIND/EYE earthlings! . . . Give it a chance to do what all earthlings must do before it crosses the river styx . . . Be bombarded with LIVING-COSMIC-SOUL-FORCE-VIBRATIONS . . . of ‘SUN RA AND HIS INTERGALACTIC INFINITY ARKESTRA’!!!!”⁴¹

Here the rhetoric of advertising (“buy one and get one free!”) communicates a disarming promise of higher living, of a piece with the slogan that appears on much of El Saturn’s printed matter: “Beta music for a Beta people for a Beta world.” Sun Ra glosses this slogan in detail in a broadsheet entitled “the end”:

The plane of wisdom will take those who desire to live to a BETTER DIMENSION of a BETTA LIFE. On the plane of Wisdom, the beta i am is the pilot. ALWAYS BETA IS TWO not one. Good, BETTER, Best. Better (Beta) is TWO. TWO is TO. TO is OT. OT is AUT or OUGHT (SHUD of SHD). SHD is the name of the ancient pre-Christian world.42

A simple business slogan freights a message grounded in antiquity that, read as equation, portends a better world. Abraham sums up the higher purpose of El Saturn in a later note written in pen on a mimeographed promotional flyer:

To bring to this universe, from the All Mighty Living Creator from the heart of All Universes Beyond the Central Sun, the Fruits of the greater impossible thru cosmic vibrating Music, Cosmic tones, Poetry and any other living means to give living cosmic Spiritual food to a spiritually starved and dying world. By permission of the All mighty Living Cosmic Energy Self.⁴³

The signatories listed on this declaration, Alton E. Abraham, Sun Ra, Jihm Brihnt, and Adahm E. Abraham, endorse a business model that descends from above.

An El Saturn record was clearly meant to be more than just a patterned vinyl platter for storing sound. It was intended as a multimedia infinity machine that would coordinate the force of recorded music with visual art, poetry, mystical promises, and technological pronouncements to transform reality. As an independent record company, El Saturn pioneered DIY production in a way that anticipated, among other things, a punk aesthetic yet to come. It pressed records in small numbers and printed jackets to order, often by hand. El Saturn’s first LP, Super-Sonic Jazz, set the pattern for its future production. The Arkestra recorded its tracks at Balkan Studios in March 1956 and RCA Studios that November, before and after the Transition sessions. El Saturn released Super-Sonic Jazz about a year later; the jacket combined Sun Ra’s message with the Arkestra’s music in a way that bound them intimately together. The front bears a spare, stark, red-on-white drawing of piano keys catching flame against a background in which music transforms the world: upraised piano tops stand in for mountains, and a thundering conga appears as the source of the wind, as a planetoid (the sun?) takes wing with stars atwinkle amidst a barrage of lightning bolts. The words “Saturn presents . . .” appear freely drawn above, with “SUN RA and his Arkestra” below. The cover’s elusive designer, Claude Dangerfield, was an Arkestra acquaintance who, like many in the band, had graduated from DuSable High.44

The back cover replaces the usual jazz blather by some noted critic with words from someone, either the master himself or perhaps Abraham, beneath the phrase “21st Century Limited Edition.” El Saturn presses the language of manifesto into the service of consumption, transforming jacket copy into jazz testimonial: “All compositions on this LP are designed to convey the message of happiness and hope, a living message from the world of tomorrow.”⁴⁵ An ensuing song-by-song description teaches listeners how to hear them. “Advice to Medics” is “a leap forward into the better unknown.” “Kingdom of Not” is “about a kingdom called Not which although it is not, yet is.” “Medicine for a Nightmare” is “full of fiery counter rhythms,” while “Portrait of the Living Sky” is “a tone poem, a sound etching of rare beauty and life.” The music on this DIY release starts local and rockets beyond: “le Sun Ra’s Arkestra is of chicago origin” but plays “UNIVERSAL MUSIC, A FREE LANGUAGE OF JOY.”⁴⁶ A promotional flyer for the record emphasizes its affinity with the future: “THIS IS TOMORROW KNOCKING AT YOUR DOOR. . . . . TODAY IS THE SHADOW OF TOMORROW BECAUSE COMING EVENTS CAST THEIR SHADOW BEFORE. / ‘THIS MUSIC IS ALIVE’ it IS NOT THE SHADOW, IT IS THE REALITY IN A PREVUE FORM.”⁴⁷ As El Saturn’s debut LP, Super-Sonic Jazz wraps its joyous tomorrow tones in a weave of bold image and visionary text. Abraham designed a product to signify infinity, spiritualizing the common pleasures of consumption.

Not that El Saturn customers could satisfy those pleasures in the usual marketplace way. El Saturn took upon itself the challenge of distribution, too, making the records difficult to acquire. They weren’t available at a music store near you. To buy a Sun Ra LP, you had to attend a performance or mail El Saturn directly and hope for the best. As Szwed notes, local distributors or retailers would occasionally come along: Roundup Records in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Third Street Jazz and Blues in Philadelphia.48 But most sales came at the bandstand in a style of cash payment described by the sax player Danny Thompson, who long managed such matters, as “no bullshit C.O.D.”⁴⁹ This quaint approach to capitalism obviously limited the profit that El Saturn and the Arkestra could derive from recording. According to Sites, “over the first half of 1957 the company’s sales of 450 singles and 78 LPs totaled all of $860.”⁵⁰ Nobody played with Sun Ra for the money. His style of compensation required a deep capacity for faith.⁵¹

Likewise for mail-order sales. El Saturn catalogs included an order form on the back page, where customers could specify the records they wanted “by LP number(s),” but orders also came in letters and on postcards. Mrs. Inez Kelley, for instance, requested that record 208 (Secrets of the Sun) be sent to her apartment in Chicago; William Koehnlein, from Long Island, sent a postcard asking for a catalog, a sticker affixed to the front of the card reading “End war Viet-Nam Now.”⁵² The poet John Taggart typed a request, written on Syracuse University letterhead, that LP “reviewer” copies be sent to MAPS, the magazine he edited.⁵³ A similar request, hand-written, arrived from Nat Hentoff for his columns in Hi-Fi Stereo Review and Cosmopolitan.⁵⁴ Jamey Aebersold wrote a card requesting “literature on any available records by your company.”⁵⁵ Henry “Ankh” Dumas, a young writer whom Sun Ra would befriend in New York (fatally shot in the subway by a policeman in a so-called case of mistaken identity), sent an order on the catalog form followed by a letter of chagrin on Hiram College stationery: “I think I failed to specify WHICH Sun Ra album I wanted” (also no. 208).⁵⁶ Eventually such orders would arrive from all over the world: England, Sweden, Japan, Mexico. A group of “Hungarian jazz lovers” sent in a typed letter describing the difficulties Eastern European fans had in obtaining records (“We can buy some old, second hand jazz records only on the black market for unbelievable amounts of money a 12 inch LP for 10 per cent of my salary for a month!!!”) and asked (in red type) for “some of the records by Sun Ra advertised in Down Beat.”57 In the era before Internet downloads and viral hits, DIY record sales inspired heartfelt pleas and passionate attachments. One letter bore a celestial return address: “Earth (Western), Fourth [sic] heavenly body from the Sun in the Galaxy of Milky Way.”⁵⁸

Such correspondence indicates the public’s receptiveness, however selective, to the higher aspirations of El Saturn’s music. As a business, El Saturn would have to remain satisfied with spiritual rather than commercial success. At some point during its early years, Abraham drafted a disarmingly frank letter to James Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians (Corbett suggests it was never sent), describing exactly what El Saturn wanted to achieve and asking for help.⁵⁹ Amid typical Thmei talk of the wisdom necessary to conquer death in a world “on the brink of disaster,” Abraham shared his belief that El Saturn’s music could breathe life into a dying world:

The only solution that can save Mankind is the Kreation, by the original Kreators only, of a new music that is purposely designed to draw the evil attributes from the hearts and minds of men and to replace those attributes of death with attributes of life through music. During the past five years we have been experimenting with this ATONAL music from outter [sic] space on dope addicts, drunks, angry people, Mental-patience [sic], the depressed and even just plain stubborn fellows. The results obtained were remarkable. [. . .] The only way this world can be saved from being completely destroyed is through music. It must be a new music that is clean, unmarred with the evil thoughts of men, it must contain Life in the form which man has never known and most of all, it must be sent and directed by the “True Kreator (GOD) of All True Living of All Worlds.” We have such a music. It is music from the True Living Kreator called “ATONAL music.”⁶⁰

El Saturn produced music that aimed much higher than commercial gain. For the people involved, the fate of the world depended on it, and not without reason. Five years of experimenting had proven its success. El Saturn produced and promoted music from the Kreator to save a troubled world: atonal music to retune humanity. “All of what you are reading may seem fantastic and unbelievable,” Abraham admitted to Petrillo. But “the True Kreator works in ways unfamiliar to men.”61

With time, El Saturn would find devoted fans, initially in Chicago and ultimately around the world. The Arkestra’s regular gigging on the South Side in the late fifties made the band a fixture of the Chicago jazz scene. One group of boosters, likely with Thmei connections, sponsored Sunday-evening dances at the Pershing Hotel and styled themselves the “Atonites,” a witty portmanteau moniker combining “Aton,” the sun’s disk of Egyptian myth (an aspect of Ra), with “atonality,” musical expression with no defined tonal center. Surviving tickets from Atonite events attest to the delight these fans took in them. One reads, “The Atonites Present An Evening of outer space music and dancing featuring Sun Ra & his Outer Space Arkestra, Saturn and Transition Recording Artists.” Another boasts, “They’re at it again . . . those atonites that is . . . Reaching ’way out of Space! / Bringing to you Earthlings / The Nu Sounds of Sun Ra and his Arkestra. / Dance the Outer Space Way.”⁶² The Atonites reached back to Egypt and ahead to the future, staging weekly events that opened the small space of a South Side lounge to mythological and extraterrestrial vistas. In the words of a later advertisement, “Sun Ra’s group is what happens when Astrology meets technology in the 21st century.”⁶³

Atonite music shows up on Super-Sonic Jazz, where the Arkestra plays tunes that expand the traditional big band vocabulary. “India,” the opening track, remains tonally centered throughout, but from the outset, Sun Ra’s electric piano pursues the outré tones of commercial exotica, a trajectory rife with bright cymbals and rumbling drums that does not develop so much as flash a series of sonic images signifying “the East.” It’s a declaration of independence in keeping with the back cover’s claim that “America is a composite nation and only a composite music can represent the real America.”⁶⁴ “Portrait of the Living Sky” puts first a bass drone and then a recurring tonal figure into a tense and seemingly arbitrary relationship with a piano that skitters and cascades across this musical floor. “Advice to Medics” does something similar with a solo electric piano, as Sun Ra escapes terra firma entirely to flutter at will in the upper registers—until he returns to tempo if not quite to Earth. Maybe this was the tune that once provoked a longtime catatonic case to blurt (in sudden recovery?), “You call that music?”65 It’s hard to tell what key suits the head of the closing track on Super-Sonic Jazz, “Medicine for a Nightmare,” so skillfully does the bass avoid the tonic and so gestural are the trumpet’s short phrases stating something akin to melody. The Atonites’ cherished band was in full swing. But it’s important to remember that they sponsored dances. The Arkestra’s music didn’t only challenge musical conventions. It dislocated them to relocate them in spaces conducive to invigorated life and movement—like the Pershing on Sunday nights. The music El Saturn recorded and sold was entertainment too, turned artfully toward instruction to enrich the lives of its listeners. Beta music makes life beta. El Saturn Research was in the business of bettering the world.