12

SPUTNIK

By the late fifties, the Arkestra did not appear to have much of a future in Chicago. An economic downturn blunted the prospect of black uplift as audiences grew thin. Its regular gig as the house band at Budland turned spotty after 1957. Abraham booked the band where he could, one-nighters at the Pershing Hotel or off-night jobs at Club DeLisa.1 Queen’s Mansion, a gay bar opening in the summer of 1958, offered steady work for a while, but between the dwindling of big-band dance venues and the rise of rock and roll, the Arkestra played less and less. Members split for better prospects: Hobart Dotson and Julian Priester, for the New York scene; Art Hoyle, to play with Lionel Hampton. Sun Ra returned to coaching vocal groups on the side, recording several Saturn singles with the Cosmic Rays backed by the Arkestra. He also taped a rock and roll song entitled “Little Sally Walker” as performed in rehearsal by a group called the Crystals, whose smooth harmonies somewhat understate the possibilities of the loopy lyrics: “Little Sally Walker, sitting in a saucer / ride Sally ride.”² Those lyrics would eventually morph into a chant that became a favorite at Arkestra performances: “Little Sally Walker, in a flying saucer.” For now, the band seemed grounded in Chicago. Abraham eventually suggested that Sun Ra look for work elsewhere “because nobody was listening to him there . . . the Chicago newspapers ignored him.”3

But something was happening to the music, too, broadening its scope, pushing its cultural reach beyond the confines of the South Side. To Thmei’s occult message, with its Egyptian wisdom and Afrocentric philosophy, Sun Ra began to add a futuristic dimension, steadily enhancing the Arkestra’s commitment to “the music of tomorrow.” He retrofitted antiquity to the future. Space became a musical obsession, the space of rockets, satellites, and UFOs. As enthusiasts of things occult, Abraham and his Thmei brethren nursed a serious interest in the craze for unidentified flying objects that began in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold’s high-altitude sighting of nine oblong lights over Mount Rainier. The Chicago Sun appears to have coined the term “flying saucer” in its report of that famous incident. Was Chicago peculiarly receptive to alien visitation? Abraham’s library contained much material concerning UFOs, including the sacred scripture of alien-encounter texts, George Adamski’s Flying Saucers Have Landed, published in 1953—the year to which acquaintances date Sun Ra’s earliest public telling of his personal abduction narrative.⁴ The Thmei insider and Saturn vice-president James Bryant recorded a sighting in 1965: “On the 30th October I had a vision their were five lights is in the north East dancing which look like Stars or Saucer lights flying then out of the South two lights” [sic].⁵ For Thmei Research, ufology offered a culturally conducive way of conveying occult wisdom, particularly that of theosophy, given its emphasis on spirit masters from Venus and interplanetary communication. Adamski’s book and others of its ilk promise wisdom through alien encounter, ostensibly authenticated by publications such as Cosmic Voice: Aetherius Speaks to Earth (with an image of Adamski’s flying saucer printed in red on the pale green cover): “Many contacts with people from Mars, Venus and Saturn, are reported, as well as fairly detailed descriptions of Flying Saucers and Mother-Ships from these three planets” (Abraham—or was it Sun Ra?—underlined this passage).⁶

Sun Ra’s interest in all things futuristic reached back to his Alabama days, inspiring both his curiosity about new developments in music and recording technology and his creativity, as early compositions with the titles “Thermodynamics” and “Fission” indicate. But over the course of the fifties it steadily increased. Although the Space Trio, his early group for experimental music, began rehearsing in 1951 or 1952, it took some years for space to become a defining preoccupation in his music. The titles of several of the Arkestra’s first recordings gesture toward the future in a general way (“New Horizons” and “Future,” from Jazz by Sun Ra, Vol. 1, and maybe “Saturn,” from Jazz in Silhouette), but if an ideological agenda drove the early LPs, it primarily involved esoteric wisdom, as a great many of their tracks’ titles suggest: “Call for All Demons,” “Sun Song,” “India,” “Sunology,” “El is a Sound of Joy,” “Enlightenment,” “Ancient Aiethopia,” or “Horoscope.” Things were different with recordings not intended for immediate release. During a small ensemble rehearsal in early 1956, Sun Ra recorded the Saturn single “Adventur in Space” [sic] (copyrighted April 25 of that year but not released for over a decade). Then, in April, possibly at Balkan Studios, he recorded “Blues in Outer Space” and “Space Aura” with a Space Trio sans drums that included James Scales on alto sax and Wilbur Green on electric bass.7

Space was working its way into Sun Ra’s repertoire, initially more as a thematic than a musical gesture. “Space Aura,” for instance, erupts in hard-bop overdrive, the head a blistering sixteen bars of harmony to squirm by. Nothing about the tune bespeaks space beyond its title, but citations of this sort will be one way Sun Ra puts the space in space music, creating words with which to hear its newness. “Adventur in Space,” on the other hand, feels more experimental than the other tunes do, if not necessarily more space-like. This piano fantasy eschews melody, offering instead a procession of clumping chords over a vaguely Latin rhythm. Space here seems synonymous with adventure, a declaration of independence from traditional song forms and a premonition of things to come. Sun Ra’s work was on the verge of a quantum leap forward in daring and innovation, heralded by the opening of the Arkestra’s repertoire to include such compositions.

This development wasn’t simply an aesthetic choice on the composer’s part. By introducing notions of space into his music, Sun Ra was aligning it with larger cultural currents, in effect making a bid for wider impact, influence, and recognition. Black life on Chicago’s South Side may have driven his interest in music of expansive possibility, but American culture more generally gave it wings, or rather fins, for flying into space. The language of space that found its way into Sun Ra’s music referenced the preoccupations not simply of a black jazz composer in Chicago but of the entire nation and probably of the entire developed world. After all, postwar America had, with no little fanfare and self-congratulation, entered “the Space Age”; this phrase, widely familiar by the midfifties, had been coined to describe the opening of a new epoch and to mark an atmospheric shift in cultural climate. Its earliest use dates to the work of a British journalist named Harry Harper, who published a book in 1946 with the clairvoyant title Dawn of the Space Age.8 That sun rose over America and shone for a quarter of a century. Sun Ra bathed his music in its light. He did so with increasing cunning, humor, and willfulness as the fifties unfurled. The booklet accompanying Transition’s Jazz by Sun Ra, Vol. 1 bore the title “Preparations for Outer Space.” It names the purpose of music to come, redirecting the Thmei agenda from the urban space of Chicago’s South Side to the outer space of American dreams.

Sun Ra’s recollection of his days in Washington Park shows that he pursued this purpose deliberately, with care and imagination. It came to inform all aspects of the Arkestra’s work, from the studio to the stage. At some point in the late fifties, Sun Ra introduced the space togs that would become the Arkestra’s sartorial trademark: capes festooned with ringed planets and suns, metallic headgear, flowing silver-lamé shirts, and “moon boots.” Costumes began to get florid when Abraham acquired the wardrobe of a defunct opera company, but Sun Ra exploited their cultural implications:

We started [wearing space-related costumes] back in Chicago. In those days I tried to make black people, the so-called Negroes, conscious of the fact that they live in a changing world. And because I thought they were left out of everything culturally, that nobody thought about bringing them in contact with the culture, none of the black leaders did that . . . that’s why I thought I could make it clear to them that there are other things outside their closed environment. That’s what I tried with those clothes.9

Clothes as cultural pedagogy and creative resistance: the Arkestra’s space-age wardrobe provided its audience with a visual tutorial in the preoccupations of American culture at large, pushing them imaginatively beyond the confines of the South Side into a world obsessed with outer space. What place (those clothes force the question) would blacks have in the Space Age as America imagined it?

The increasing urgency of that question, and Sun Ra’s answer, becomes clear even in the production history of Super-Sonic Jazz, released by El Saturn in 1957. It isn’t simply that the title refers to the wizardry of aviation. Sun Ra also celebrates outer space as a cultural and musical aspiration—overtly so on a redesigned jacket first used in 1961. Also created by Claude Dangerfield and known as the “void” cover for its mélange of disparate jazz images dancing in an abyss, it comes with a lesson in listening printed on the back: “With your mind’s eye you are invited to see other scenes of the space age by focusing your eyes on the cover and your mind on the music. The scenes are from the space void.”¹⁰ Supersonic jazz requires listening with the eyes. The back of the void cover also bears two Sun Ra poems whose titles openly declare his newly expanded musical agenda: “Points on the Space Age” and “The Space Age Cannot Be Avoided.”¹¹ Given Sun Ra’s belief that his music transposes his poetry (and vice versa), these poems provide the word track, so to speak, to the sounds first released as Super-Sonic Jazz, unabashedly repurposed to a space-age agenda. Sun Ra’s lyrics chart a course to the stars and beyond: “This is the music of greater transition / To the invisible, irresistible space age.”¹² “Points on the Space Age” declares a break with musical history, consigning the music of the past to “museums of the past.” A music of outer space will be every bit as “big and real and compelling”; it is the music of a future that already exists: “The music of the future is already developed / But the minds of the people of earth must be prepared to accept it.” To the Arkestra falls the task, then, of educating Earth in a future already here, inserting its people into “the moving panorama of the outer spacite program.”13

“The Space Age Cannot Be Avoided” provides the philosophical foundations of this education. Washington Park points to Saturn and far beyond: “the greater future is the age of the space Prophet, / The scientific airy-minded second man.”¹⁴ Sun Ra’s message is simple tone science insofar as “The greater power of the future greater / Greater music is art.” Future music, the Arkestra’s music, will be (and is) greater by the power of two (“greater / Greater”). Sun Ra displaces the rhetoric of the Thmei broadsheets into a poetry of outer space and greater art: “Art is the foundation of any living culture” (a sentiment reminiscent of the broadsheets).¹⁵ Then comes a canny riposte to Cold War jingoism: “The new measure of determination as to whether a nation / Is ready to be a greater nation is art. / A nation without art is a nation without a lifeline.” By placing his space program for future music in a Cold War context, Sun Ra ushers onto the world stage a people—black people—whose main access to political agency is culture, the art they make, the music they produce. By implication, black art trumps the destructive wonders of technoscience, “because art is the airy concept of better living.”¹⁶ Sun Ra’s poems—and the music they manifest—channel new worlds to come that have already arrived, a “Tomorrow beyond Tomorrow” that (pace American democracy) founds a new political order: “THE KINGDOM OF THE SPACE AGE.”¹⁷ Such is the creative force of Sun Ra’s cultural politics, propelling the Thmei message of black uplift into the heart of American culture, with its imperialist ambitions and space-age dreams. Artfully and on a plume of music, Sun Ra blasts blackness into space.

Liftoff came in Chicago—not a bad place for imagining an alternative space program. The Manhattan Project, the technoscientific enterprise that did more than any other both to end World War II and to usher in the world that came afterward, took a major step forward at the University of Chicago, where, in 1942, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard engineered the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction in a laboratory made from a squash court under the stadium at Stagg Field.18 The following year the Manhattan Project moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, leaving behind seeds of the Space Age. Sun Ra’s interest in outer space as a musical theme attests to their germination and astonishing growth: by the late fifties, the Space Age was culturally ubiquitous. It named a new era in which American society in general took space for a desideratum. Talk of the Space Age involved everybody, no matter how marginal or low. It provided Sun Ra with a spacious backdrop for Thmei’s otherwise esoteric wisdom. It opened ancient Egypt and contemporary black America to national, international, even planetary concerns. The Space Age cannot be avoided, which is to say that black Americans, however confined to their ghettoes and defined by their past, nevertheless participated in a broader culture increasingly defined by the challenge of space. Blacks would have to create a place for themselves in the coming culture of the Space Age.

Between the old and new jackets of Super-Sonic Jazz (1957 and 1961, respectively), a sound from tomorrow’s world greeted planet Earth. As J. G. Ballard puts it in his startled recollection, “the call sign of Sputnik 1 could be heard on one’s radio like the advance beacon of a new universe.”¹⁹ Sputnik. Its launch by the USSR on October 4, 1957, challenged US claims to technological and political superiority. It affected the emphasis of the Arkestra’s music, too, making the group’s increasing preoccupation with space seem, if not inevitable, at least pertinent: a purposeful, maybe prankish response to a culture preoccupied with the “Red menace” now reaching its tentacles into space. Sputnik both completed an era in cultural history and inaugurated a new one, which is why the phrase “Space Age” doesn’t appear in Sun Ra’s poetry or music until after its ominous launch. Prior to October 1957, the technological mastery of space remained only a dream, one dreamed fiercely by politicians and scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain but remaining nevertheless fantastical, the stuff of science fiction but not yet science fact. Sputnik made space real. It is no exaggeration to say that its successful launch and operation provoked the invention of outer space as an international if contentiously collaborative creative enterprise.²⁰

Before World War II, space belonged to science fiction. Since the 1930s, tons of pulp paper and miles of celluloid had spread a popular gospel of adventures in space, mostly on alien planetscapes suffering incursions of viscid, bile-spitting BEMs (bug-eyed monsters). It wouldn’t take much to interpret such fantasies as displaced propaganda for dreams of imperial domination. Combined with the relentless pursuit of rocketry by highly respected researchers including Robert Goddard in the United States and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in the Soviet Union, such dreams bled easily into nationalist and imperialist aspirations on both sides of the Atlantic. World War II made them terrifyingly real. Not only did it demonstrate to ghastly effect that the wonders of technoscience could as easily destroy humanity as sustain it (first at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki), but Germany’s development of the V-2 as a means of delivering mass destruction at a distance also ensured that, following the Potsdam Conference, militarized rocketry would be assimilated to state policy, the war’s victors having to differing degrees absorbed the remnants of Hitler’s secret rocket program. The emergence of two superpowers in possession of nuclear weapons set the stage for the Cold War, which dominated foreign policy and domestic politics in both the United States and the USSR. Given these developments, one key to the future of both countries—and maybe the world—would be mastery of space, the medium through which the missiles guiding those policies would fly to rain atomic hell on enemy civilians.

A brief “Missile Age,” then, preceded the Space Age, although that phrase appears with little frequency. In the decade before Sputnik, the world’s superpowers fought the Cold War in rocket labs and on balance sheets, racing to perfect a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead between continents with enough accuracy to pose a viable military threat to civilian populations. Sun Ra’s space music developed in the shadow of this lunacy and voices the resistance of a doubly vulnerable population (urban blacks) to the cultural logic of ballistic missilery. As the fifties unfolded, the Arkestra would come to play in a transcontinental theater of planned mass homicide that supplied both the thematic content of its space music and a larger target for its cultural activism. The history of powered missiles thus helped push the Arkestra toward space music by creating outer space as an arena of aspiration and contest.

Space became more than just medium for missile flight, however. Even more important, at least from an American perspective, was the possibility of spying from the sky, observing Soviet developments and reporting back unobserved: espionage and communications. US officials knew that the USSR possessed big rockets capable of boosting large payloads, but they knew, too, that those missiles were inaccurate. Rather than try to beat the Russians at their own heavy thrust game, US policy makers chose to focus on the smaller-scale technologies of guidance and communications. It was a gamble that presumed the planet to be wrapped in a kind of space open to new technologies of espionage and communications capable of monitoring Soviet research and development. After all, devices using these technologies would constitute much lighter payloads than nuclear weaponry. The United States could cancel the Soviet advantage in heavy thrusters with precision communications equipment. But doing so would require (and this may seem obvious) space through which such technologies could freely fly.21 Was space a free medium for communication and its emerging technologies? Or did sovereign nations own the space immediately above them, and if they did, how far out?

It fell to satellites to adjudicate these questions—and missiles capable of carrying payloads into space. The stakes of the Missile Age, however unacknowledged as a phase of Cold War cultural history, involved the creation of space conducive to US propaganda and espionage. The nation devoted to defending freedom on Earth would defend freedom above it, too—which would be all the better for spying on other nations and communicating the results. Ideology may have fueled the race to launch a satellite into orbit, with both the United States and the USSR claiming superior political vision and technological prowess, but its effect would be the conceptual creation of outer space irreducible to national or territorial sovereignty. Perhaps this was the greatest eventual outcome of the “International Geophysical Year,” which ran from mid-1957 until the end of 1958 and involved sixty-three countries in projects devoted to the advancement of geopolitically useful knowledge: space as a transnational medium for communication and flight.22 While the United States ostensibly lost that race when Sputnik claimed kudos as the first satellite blasted into orbit, it mercilessly exploited a less obvious aspect of the Soviet victory, namely, the vindication of the freedom of space by the orbital flight of a 183.9-pound pinging object over multiple nations and airspaces.²³ The scientific profile of the Soviet achievement secured space as a free medium for producing knowledge—including knowledge, happily, of the state of Soviet missile technology.

An ensuing spate of policies and opinions consolidated this convenient outcome, which was summed up by a best-selling pamphlet produced by the President’s Science Advisory Committee and entitled Introduction to Outer Space (1958). President Eisenhower prefaces this report on the implications of satellite flight with a word of caution: “This is not science fiction. This is a sober, realistic presentation prepared by leading scientists.” He then announces his endorsement of a national and international commitment to space as a free medium: “We and other nations have a great responsibility to promote the peaceful use of space and to utilize the new knowledge obtainable from space science and technology for the benefit of all mankind.”²⁴ Sputnik and other satellites (such as the United States’ Explorer 1, successfully launched into orbit on January 31, 1958) create the free and open space they fly through, and in the words of those leading scientists, perhaps do much more: “These satellites cannot fail to reveal new sights forever hidden from observers who are bound to the earth. What these sights will be, no one can tell.” Possibly they would reveal Soviet secrets as well. One thing is sure: the exploration of a free and open outer space would inspire earthlings “to try to go where no one has gone before.”²⁵

But where is that? Introduction to Outer Space, like US policy more generally, avoids defining the space it names. What is outer space? Where does airspace leave off and outer space begin? Such questions prove unanswerable in political or even scientific terms. A brief from 1958 entitled “Preliminary U.S. Policy on Outer Space” concludes that “the term ‘outer space’ has no generally accepted precise definition.”26 The proposed definitions include the Kármán line, the point at which a vehicle loses aerodynamic lift and becomes a spaceship; for a craft traveling at seven kilometers per second, that occurs at an altitude of roughly fifty-three miles.²⁷ Such a definition of outer space relies on stipulation arising from human interests, making space more a human construct than a fact of nature. Outer space is clearly as much consensual fantasy as reality. US policy makers in the late fifties came to prefer a functional definition that the USSR would follow: outer space begins at the point where satellites traveling seven kilometers per second or faster can achieve a stable orbit around the Earth.²⁸

Tantamount to tautology, such a definition identifies outer space in terms of the vehicles used to explore it, rendering free orbital transit equivalent to the freedom of space itself. Construing outer space as free transit (irreducible to national territory or interest) provides a basis for declaring it a res comunis omnium, a common good for all humankind. That would become the US position, fundamental to Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” policy, which served to maximize both ideological advantage and national prestige: outer space should be accessible to all nations, while the US would explore it for the good of humankind, also known as national security. This rationale led to the passage, in April 1958, of the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which established a civilian rather than a military space agency—NASA—in part to produce “general welfare and security,” as stated in section 102(a): “Congress hereby declares that it is the policy of the Unites States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.”²⁹ By 1959, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (boycotted by the Soviets) could advance as an international convention that “in principle, outer space is, on conditions of equality, freely available for exploration and use by all.”³⁰ The consensual fantasy of outer space, functionally defined and politically deployed, opens freedom to infinity, but does so on the buried assumption that only nations, most obviously the United States and the Soviet Union, could acquire the capacity to explore its deeps and exploit its possibilities.

What if other players emerged to inherit the void? Nations in another sense, the black sense, or their cultural ambassadors to the universe—perhaps from the South Side of Chicago? The pervasive public language of the Space Age provides tools to build a kind of space different from the one that the two superpowers were racing to master. The Cold War appeared to set political terms for tomorrow’s world, as it “expanded,” in the words of Walter McDougall, “beyond nuclear weapons and espionage into a competition of entire systems, each claiming to be better at inventing the future.”31 But maybe neither liberal democracy nor communism exhausted the future’s possibilities. Maybe the Space Age could open up another kind of space altogether, one irreducible to ideological agendas, even when advanced in the name of freedom.

That was Sun Ra’s insight and gambit: that the public culture of the Space Age could lead beyond a politics of domination. Sun Ra would press space-age words and images into the service of a vision much bolder than either the United States or the Soviets Union could muster, one infinite in reach and inclusive in scope. He would build an alternative space administration, a visionary NASA, beholden only to blacks and powered by sound. He would conduct space exploration by means other than the heavy thrusters and miniaturized circuits of state-sponsored technoscience. He would invent a better future than democracy or communism could imagine precisely because he would imagine it, eschewing the language of policy and propaganda for a poetics of outer space. Music, poetry, performance, and recording would be his means of creating space for exploration. Sun Ra answered his own call to creative resistance with a space program marshaling all the resources of improvised music “to try to go where no one has gone before.” As the fifties drew to a close, the Arkestra advanced its own definition of outer space every time it played.

If something seems funny about a group of intellectuals and crack musicians from Chicago’s South Side womping up an alternative space program from the cultural detritus of the Space Age, it should. Describing the effects of his music, Sun Ra once stressed its playfulness:

There’s humor in all my music [. . .] that sense of humor by which people sometimes learn to laugh about themselves. I mean, the situation is so serious that the people could go crazy because of it. They need to smile and realize how ridiculous everything is. A race without a sense of humor is in bad shape. A race needs clowns.32

Sun Ra clowns his way into outer space. Loopy harmonies, strained rhythms, weird costumes, quirky lyrics: humor hurls the Arkestra into orbit at a time when most blacks had little reason to laugh. In 1957, defense spending consumed 63 percent of the federal budget, and, thanks in no small part to Sputnik, Washington seemed oblivious to the realities of segregation.³³ In view of such circumstances, Sun Ra’s humor could turn deadly serious: “Most people on this planet are lost, it’s a limited existence. They get out there, there’s no right or left, no right, no wrong, no up no down. That’s outer space. So what do we have to go home to? Nothing.”³⁴ Confinement to the South Side of Chicago or any other segregated place means inhabiting a world of nothing. Sun Ra’s space program aimed at creating other possibilities: “Beta music for a Beta people for a Beta world.”

Space music. Sun Ra composed it and the Arkestra played it—more and more as the fifties and the band’s time in Chicago drew to a close. For Sun Ra, space is the place where better living becomes possible through music. So it is ultimately as a sonic metaphor that space acquires its greatest cultural force for Sun Ra. Szwed describes it as “both a metaphor of exclusion and of reterritorialization, of claiming the ‘outside’ as one’s own, of tying a revised and corrected past to a claimed future.”³⁵ Sun Ra’s poetics of outer space unites a rehabilitated past (ancient Egypt) with a realized future (Super-Sonic Jazz) in just this manner. But it moves, too, in all senses of that word. Space as a force and form of sonic ballistics: it becomes as it sounds. Outer and other. Music moving beyond. Space outer, worlds better. A movement into or through the void. Here’s Sun Ra:

When I say space music, I’m dealing with the void, because that is of space too; but I’m dealing with the outer void, because somehow man is trapped in playing roles into the haven or heaven of the inner void, but I am not in that. That particular aim/goal does not interest my spirit-mind and because of that it moves out to something else where the word space is the synonym for a multi-dimension of different things other than what people might at present think it means. So I leave the word space open, like space is supposed to be, when I say space music.36

Sun Ra takes space out. He moves beyond the inner life to outer space. And music propels him. Moves us. Space music. Into the open.