ISOTOPE TELEPORTATION
Music moves. It transports. In transporting, it transforms. Music can transform worlds. Such is the vision of Thmei and its jazz messenger, Sun Ra. The various avatars of Sun Ra’s Arkestras played during the second half of the century called the twentieth to transform this world. Or better yet, they played to transport people—black people—to a better one. Interplanetary transport: that was the practical purpose of Sun Ra’s music, the transportation of a disfranchised mass from world to world, from planet to planet.
Politics, too, often comes down to transportation: in Europe, making the trains run on time; in America, designing interstate highways; in Chicago, plowing the streets to keep traffic moving, as Mayor Michael Bilandic discovered to his chagrin in the aftermath of the legendary snowpocalypse of 1979.1 In Chicago, Sun Ra began composing the exhilarating ensemble music that would launch him, his musicians, and his myriad audiences on a sonic odyssey to other worlds. In Chicago, he watched the civil rights movement rise like a waking giant. And in Chicago, too, he began to envision an alternative politics equal to that movement’s aspirations. Where other leaders looked to oratory, spirituality, or resistance, whether passive or active, as a means to change, Sun Ra turned to music, approaching it as mass transportation, a politics of prophetic sound.
Sun Ra arrived in Chicago from Birmingham by train, leaving the Magic City from a station he knew well, having grown up in its shadow. He arrived in a city defined as much by public transportation as by lakeside views. And once he was in Chicago, he and Thmei laid the groundwork and built a launchpad for the Arkestra as a vehicle of creative insurgence. Important as Thmei was to the exploration of urban and intellectual space, however, the more material infrastructure merits consideration, too—for instance, the “L,” Chicago’s elevated train. Why not avoid street-level congestion by transporting commuters on a higher plane? As in so many other ways, Chicago is second only to New York in having the oldest elevated railway in America.2 The Chicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad began operation on June 6, 1892, running 3.6 miles in a straight line from Congress Street to Thirty-Ninth. Among its striking features, the Chicago Tribune noted, was the diversity of its patrons, who ranged from “the lunch pail crowd” to passengers “appearing to be gentlemen.”3 Over the next fifty years, the “L” grew, flourished, and drooped until the Chicago Transit Authority acquired it in the 1940s and undertook an ambitious program of modernization. By the 1950s, all-metal PCC 6000 electric transit cars ran the “L” rails.4 Sun Ra came to a city with sleek, modern trains running above the ground on elevated tracks. In Chicago, the iron horse had wings. Trains rumbled above the streets, kicking up a joyous urban cacophony.
Sun Ra captures some of this exuberance in a track from Super-Sonic Jazz entitled “El is a Sound of Joy.” In the lower left-hand corner of the album’s later cover the words “21st Century Edition,” suggest transportation of and into the future. “L” sounds like “El,” and Sun Ra would have known that “El” is a Semitic word meaning “deity,” cognate to the Hebrew Elohim, father of all humankind, creator of all creatures. Interminable equations. In Chicago, the supreme deity is also a train. Sacred source of a sound of joy. Kevin Whitehead suggests that Sun Ra would have been “impressed with a city where a ride on the train system [. . .] might hurtle one through open space above the earth one minute and then into a subterranean netherworld the next—the realms of the angel and the demon in rapid succession.”5 And indeed, the tune plays a sinuous alto sax against a dark baritone groove. But Sun Ra’s piano solo offers a punctuated dissonance that gestures toward something else, perhaps a future untempered by angels and demons alike. Joy. The sound of El.
Why this attention to mass transit? Sun Ra’s supersonic jazz is more than a pastiche of futuristic sounds, for it explores the archaeology of a particular people’s history, too. African Americans know a thing or two about transportation. Behind Sun Ra’s conception of music as a means of travel, as transport, lies the memory of the Middle Passage, the marine voyage of expropriated Africans crammed into ships and sent across the Atlantic to an American marketplace of body and bone. The vehicular means of this mass transit was, of course, the slave ship, a floating factory of terror and domination. A technological wonder of its age, the slave ship transported dispossessed Africans from a familiar place to an unknowable space, a new and menacing world beyond their ken.6
It is beyond ours, too. When it comes to the Atlantic passage aboard a slave ship, our imaginations are probably limited to a few potent images, the most familiar no doubt being that of the Brooks (often rendered as “Brookes”), a Liverpool slaver that made ten successful voyages in the late eighteenth century, carrying a total of 5,163 Africans, 4,559 of whom lived to be sold in New World markets.7 The familiar and disturbing abolitionist broadside depicting the laden Brooks shows 482 tiny black figures packed on the lower deck and half-decks installed specially to receive them—actually many fewer than the 609 or more the ship could accommodate when fully loaded. This is an image to demoralize the heartiest humanist. Those little black bodies look pretty cramped. Their color neither explains nor justifies their treatment.
But more interesting than the brute fact of this harrowing historical legacy is what Sun Ra does with it. Consider what happens when the image of the Brooks rotates 90 degrees. It becomes a rocket—no less cramped, perhaps, but ready to blast off for worlds other than an American plantation. Perhaps these dislocated Africans weren’t destined for subjugation after all. Perhaps other destinies are possible, alternative destinies. In an interview published in 1984, Sun Ra made the peculiar observation that there might be advantages to entering the United States without a passport:
Never in the history of the world has there been a case where you take a whole people and bring ’em in the country in the Commerce Department. Never before has that happened. It happened here. They bringing ’em in through the Commerce Department. It was possible for aliens and angels and devils and demons to come in this country. They didn’t need no passport. So then they’d come as displaced people.8
The joke’s on America. By trafficking in people, by admitting people without passports through the Department of Commerce, to be then bought and sold, America took aliens into its midst. No wonder they seek new worlds. This one is not their home. Music, the sound ship of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, will become the means of transporting them, mass transit for aliens seeking other climes and brighter futures.
This possibility, this alter-destiny, provides the subject of one of Sun Ra’s most playful, exuberant, kitsch-visionary tunes, “Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus,” recorded in late 1960 but not released until 1966, on the LP entitled Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus, retitled Interstellar Low Ways three years later.9 It anticipates a celestial future for public transportation, updating the old kids’ song “Engine, Engine Number Nine, Goin’ down Chicago line.”10 Between it and the recording of “El is a Sound of Joy” in 1956, Sputnik would ping its way around the globe, a Jupiter-C rocket would hurl the first US satellite into orbit, and NASA would be commissioned to assume responsibility for America’s extraterrestrial future. The Space Age would come to America. “Rocket Number Nine” celebrates its arrival by blasting mass transport into the cold, dark sky. The Brooks goes interplanetary, and the “L” along with it, running off the rails of joyful noise and heading toward more ethereal, abstract horizons.
After opening with a repeated piano figure and a clipped unison chant that some liken to Dizzy Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts” (“zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, up in the air, up, zoom, up, zoom, up in the air [. . .] VenUS, VenUS, VenUS”), the tune morphs into a series of daring explorations of space punctuated by silence and followed with Sun Ra’s rhythmically free piano. Astonishing among these explorations is John Gilmore’s tenor saxophone solo. Blowing on the heels of several miraculous recordings from 1959 (Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come), Gilmore flies free of chord and form, playing lines of varying duration that finally rise in repetition to invoke a center that never arrives. Ronnie Boykins responds with what is less a bowed bass solo than a series of upper-register apologies for what once was music, now attenuated to the point of rumor, fading quietly into empty space. Here, then, is the place of Sun Ra’s interplanetary transport: space. Here is music of astral mobility. It charts a historical course beyond history, from Africa to the Americas, from north to south, from planet to planet. Sun Ra transforms the fell history of the Middle Passage into deep-space exploration, mass transit for a dislocated and perpetually mobile people. Hear the call of the cosmic conductor; we travel the spaceways from planet to plant. First stop Venus. The second stop is Jupiter.