16

SPACE MUSIC

Interstellar Low Ways contains a message from Sun Ra to his listeners printed in caps on the back cover: “THE IMPOSSIBLE IS THE WATCHWORD OF THE GREATER SPACE AGE. THE SPACE AGE CANNOT BE AVOIDED AND THE SPACE MUSIC IS THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING THE MEANING OF THE IMPOSSIBLE AND EVERY OTHER ENIGMA.”1 Sun Ra expected the Arkestra’s music to do more than flock the walls of a space-age bachelor pad. In his hands, the commercial idiom of space pop became a vehicle of insight and change, a means of understanding the “meaning of the impossible” and living accordingly. In this way, music becomes more than music, transfigured into philosophical inquiry, social criticism, and a way of life. Space music explores possibilities other than those endorsed by contemporary preoccupations, however scientifically plausible or socially progressive they appear. It pursues aims higher than that of landing humans on the moon or even achieving equality among them on Earth. It aspires to nothing less than transforming reality. Space music performs the impossible, transporting people to better worlds. “When I talk about outer space,” Sun Ra once said, “people listen. People are sleeping, and I’m here to wake them up from their slumber. The right music can wake people up.”2 And the right music is space music, which moves people by force of sound: “You got to reach people with all kinds of sounds now. Sounds. That’s what they need. They got to have sound bodies now. Sound minds.”³

As Sun Ra and the Arkestra, including its chief studio engineer, Abraham, understood things, sounds produce remarkable effects, and not merely as a function of the latest recording technologies. For all their playful jacket testimonials of recording technique (“Solar Fidelity,” “Galaxtone,” etc.), El Saturn records mostly remained low-tech fare compared with their commercial counterparts. Sound, not the equipment reproducing it, could touch and transform minds and hearts—physiologically and in real time. The long and wandering manuscript typed on Mount Sinai Hospital letterhead contains an interesting commentary on the “tone science” that informs the Arkestra’s approach to music. It ponders in detail the force of sound as vibration: “these invisible sound-vibrations have great power over concrete matter. They can both build and destroy.” The writer, likely Abraham, illustrates this principle by describing how powder on a brass plate assumes “beautiful geometrical figures” when a violin bow drawn across its edge causes the plate to vibrate.⁴ Then the author draws a revealing human parallel:

If one note or chord after another be sounded upon a musical instrument, say, a piano, or preferably a violin, for from it more gradation of tone can be obtained, a tone will finally be reached which will cause the hearer to feel a distinct vibration in the back of the lower part of the head. Each time that note is struck, the vibration will be felt. That note is the “key note” of the person whom it so affects. If it is struck slowly and smoothingly it will build and rest the body, tone the nerves and restore health. If, on the other hand, it be sounded in a dominant way, loud and long enough, it will kill as surely as a bullet from a pistol.⁵

The shift in the first sentence from “note” to “tone” (a favorite Sun Ra permutation) registers the agenda of the Arkestra’s space music. The fundamental unit of Western music, the note, cedes here to tone, less a precise (and written) point of pure sound than a smear, a gradation, whose “distinct vibration” produces bodily effects. There might be more to sound than meets the ear. The vibrations it communicates can be conducive to health—or harm. Sounds build bodies, tune them up or turn them out. New sounds might build better bodies or transport them to better worlds.

Sun Ra’s space music flies far beyond space pop to become tone science. It explores the effects of sounds on human bodies and being, experimenting with their capacity to induce physical and therefore social change. Long before rappers started “droppin’ science” to hip their listeners to urgent issues, Sun Ra’s tone science advanced a method for creating new futures through music. The Arkestra’s players became tone scientists. “Not musicians,” Szwed emphasizes: “They were exploring sound, experimenting, not re-creating what already existed.”6 These were tones for people in need of special care, as is suggested by Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (the title of an El Saturn recording made in 1963). New sounds to propel them to better worlds. Sounds for the Space Age. Such therapeutic tones would not necessarily sound pretty, nor would the music made from them, in the usual sense, sound musical. “I like all the sounds that upset people,” Sun Ra said in an interview, “because they’re too complacent, and there are some sounds that really upset them, and man, you need to shock them out of their complacency, ’cause it’s a very bad world in a lot of aspects. They need to wake to how bad it is: then maybe they’ll do something about it.”⁷ Tone science shocks in order to awaken its listeners and change them, mentally and physically. James Jacson, who started playing percussion regularly with the Arkestra in New York, put it this way: “What Sun Ra had to do was reverse the state of bodily control, and he would demonstrate it with music and the Arkestra.”⁸ Space music subverts control, opens bodies to a life better than the one contemporary America has provided, especially for segregated blacks.

But there’s also something soothing about its sounds, precisely because they create an opening to other worlds. Abraham once described Sun Ra’s turn to space music as inaugurating “the period of the Major Greater Spiritual Musical Art Forms.”9 Space music communicates a hope so vast it surpasses human understanding, as the following remark by Sun Ra suggests: “Now, my music is about a better place for people, not to have a place where they have to die to get there, I’m not talking about that.”¹⁰ So much for the morbid consolations of Christianity. Any place where death is the price of entry is no place for Sun Ra. Space music aspires to transport people to a better place, not beyond death, but simply without it, the space of music itself, or music of the Arkestra’s kind. If (to reiterate) “space music is an introductory prelude to the sound of greater infinity,” it remains a preliminary gesture, a first-stage booster.¹¹ Not itself the sound of infinity, space music offers a prelude to it, different sounds synchronized to a higher order, sounds expressing the prospect of infinity: “I’m actually painting pictures of infinity with my music, and that’s why a lot of people can’t understand it. But if they’d listen to this and other types of music, they’ll find that mine has something else in it, something from another world.”¹² Sun Ra’s tone science tests this world against sounds from another one, a place where space opens to infinity. Space music challenges listeners to pursue those vistas mindfully: “The real aim of this music is to coordinate the minds of people into an intelligent reach for a better world, and an intelligent approach to the living future.”¹³ Music after infinity: space travel with Sun Ra requires collective aspiration for a life defined not by its end but by its continuation. “I am not of this planet,” said Sun Ra. “I am another order of being.”¹⁴

A music more fully synchronized with that different order of being began to emerge after Sun Ra arrived for an extended stay in New York. The story goes that the Arkestra intended to return to Chicago by car, but a collision with a taxi marooned the band in the city with the most innovative jazz scene in the country.¹⁵ It would prove a productive accident. Szwed describes in detail New York’s vitalizing effect on Sun Ra. The city felt like Chicago turned upright and inside out. The wide expanse of Lakeshore Drive narrowed into Broadway, cutting through Manhattan like a valley of concrete shadow. The segregation of the South Side gave way to new urban possibilities, particularly on the Lower East Side, where the band took up residence at 48 East Third Street in 1962. Once America’s most crowded slum, the East Village was becoming a space of extraordinary diversity, attracting a wide variety of bohemians interested in living creatively and cheaply. Szwed calls it “the closest thing to an integrated community that America could produce,” however fleeting it might have proved to be as the sixties unfolded.16 The East Village offered black artists a space to create and interact, and they responded by forming musical groups, theater companies, writers’ circles, and publishing ventures—in such numbers and with such energy that Szwed suggests the collective results should be considered yet another renaissance for African Americans.¹⁷ The names of the musicians involved, many living within blocks of Sun Ra’s residence, add up to a who’s who of the sixties black avant-garde: Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Simmons, Henry Grimes, Sunny Murray, Cecil Taylor, Wayne Shorter, Sonny Sharrock, Albert and Don Ayler, and a young saxophone player from Arkansas named Farrell Sanders, whom Sun Ra rechristened Pharoah. Uptown in Harlem, LeRoi Jones, soon to change his name to Amiri Baraka, conjured the Black Arts movement out of indignation and word magic. An urban ecology more conducive to sound research—tone science—could hardly be built to order.¹⁸

The Arkestra first performed in New York as the Outer Spacemen at Café Bizarre in January 1962.¹⁹ A gig at the Charles Theater soon followed, with advertisements for it announcing “Outer Space Jazz” performed by “Le Sun Ra” and his “Cosmic Jazz Space Patrol.”²⁰ Work was intermittent at first but became increasingly steady, and soon the Arkestra secured a regular place to rehearse and record, the Choreographers’ Workshop at 414 West Fifty-First Street.²¹ Here the band would make many of its most challenging recordings, moving beyond the thematic engagements with space of the Chicago years (as evidenced by titles of records and tunes, commentary on covers, chants, and costumes) to create sounds commensurable with space as a musical medium. Bugs Hunter, Sun Ra’s drummer from his days working Calumet City’s strip clubs, had already moved to New York. He began playing regularly with the Arkestra and took responsibility for recording at the Choreographers’ Workshop, creating the thick reverb, familiar from exotica, that characterized El Saturn’s New York releases.22 Ever the experimentalist, Sun Ra encouraged Hunter to explore how even low-end recording technology might contribute to sound production, turning machines into new instruments in the Arkestra arsenal. The New York records take tone science to new heights.

This is where the serendipity of El Saturn’s approach to release and distribution muddles—or at least complicates—any sense of the Arkestra’s development as a vehicle for space music. Thanks perhaps to the trials of relocation, to personal tensions between Sun Ra and Abraham, or to shaky financing—really, to any number of unclear causes—a lot of material recorded in Chicago didn’t see release until years later, after the band had evolved into a much different, more aggressively experimental ensemble. As mentioned earlier, the music on Interstellar Low Ways was recorded in 1960 but was not released until 1966. Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth, also released in 1966, contains material recorded ten years earlier.²³ The 1959 session that resulted in Jazz in Silhouette also yielded the music on Sound Sun Pleasure!!, which was not released until 1970.²⁴ Rehearsal recordings from Chicago provided the tracks on Lady with the Golden Stockings, released in 1966 and retitled The Nubians of Plutonia in 1967.²⁵ Finally, enough music remained from the marathon Milwaukee recording session of 1960 for two more records, Fate in a Pleasant Mood and We Travel the Spaceways, El Saturn releases of 1965 and 1966, respectively.²⁶

Given El Saturn’s improvisational sense of advertising (the Arkestra’s performances were its main means, backed by mail-order catalogs), it is not as if these records enjoyed a huge demand. But Sun Ra’s goals did not include commercial success. “My music is self-underground,” he said once, “that is, out of the music industry: I’ve made records with no titles, primitive, natural and pure.”²⁷ While selling a few records inspired hopes of sustaining the Arkestra and its experiments, the music industry did not do the same, and El Saturn avoided it and its usual practices. The anonymity Sun Ra associates with his music—its primitiveness and natural purity—all gesture toward the importance of sounds that arise not from popular demand but from more abstract resources. The New York recordings pursue that agenda with the enthusiasm for research implicit in El Saturn’s full name. They constitute a series of experiments in sound.28 Alongside the time-lapsed Chicago recordings, then, appears a string of innovative records that double interplanetary exotica with advanced research in tone science.

These were not the first records Sun Ra made in New York. In 1961 he recorded The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra for the Savoy label and Bad and Beautiful for El Saturn, both outings notable—the former, for pushing jazz-ensemble harmony way beyond bebop, and the latter, for scoring standards in low registers with warmth and imagination.²⁹ But beginning in 1962, the Arkestra took flight on a trajectory that would lead it through spaces previously unexplored by jazz musicians. Secrets of the Sun served as a launchpad. It exaggerates an iconoclastic tendency audible in Sun Ra’s music from the start: an attention to transients (all the sonic variations that blur a pure pitch), which vastly extend the range of musical possibility. At the same time, though, it remains faithful to cultural influences, as Sun Ra’s penciled notebook draft of possible jacket copy indicates:

This is the music heralding and reiterating the presence of another age . . . the Space Age. Congratulations to those who have taken photographs of the moon at close proximity and too, this album is dedicated to them & to others who feel a change is in the air & who know that life will never be the same again upon this planet called earth. How rapidly we are moving, and splendidly so, for we have a rendezvous with a better destiny than [scribbled deletion] those former roles we have played in the dream called life.³⁰

Sun Ra refers here to Ranger 7, launched in 1964, which was the first American probe to return photographs of the lunar surface. The Soviet Union’s Luna 3 had already done one better in 1959 with its dark-side photographs.31 Sun Ra’s draft dedication unites Cold War adversaries in an impressive if unevenly shared accomplishment. Secrets of the Sun, as Luna 3 had done before it, follows a bolder trajectory into hitherto unknown space, returning audible impressions of things unseen. Fresh experiments followed with impressive frequency, always to exciting and often provocative results. The Arkestra recorded both Secrets of the Sun and Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow in 1962, releasing them in 1965.³² Other tracks recorded in 1962 and 1963 appeared on When Sun Comes Out (released remarkably quickly in 1963) and The Invisible Shield, a rare record that didn’t appear until 1974.³³

More sessions from 1963 yielded When Angels Speak of Love, out in 1966, and Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, out the following year.³⁴ In 1964, the band recorded Other Planes of There (released in 1966) and taped a live recording (not released until 1974) featuring Pharoah Sanders, who played with the Arkestra during Gilmore’s stint with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.³⁵ In 1965, the Arkestra completed the two volumes of Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra for the ESP label, which brought them out in 1965 and 1966—the Arkestra’s wonder years, with an astonishing total of thirteen records seeing release, six from Chicago and seven from New York sessions, the latter including The Magic City, a miracle of musical invention.³⁶ In 1966, the Arkestra also recorded the beguiling Strange Strings and Outer Spaceways Incorporated for El Saturn, plus performances for a live set entitled Nothing Is on ESP (these records saw release, respectively, in 1967, 1974, and 1969).³⁷ More recordings were to come in New York, but perhaps this is the moment to pause and ponder some fundamentals of space music, the fruits of this marvelous series of sonic researches.³⁸

Three qualities seem worth emphasizing. They are not necessary criteria for space music, nor is that music any less “spacey” without them. They certainly appear in flashes and shards in the Chicago recordings. But the New York work bears witness to a vast expansion and exploration of their possibilities. First among them is openness. Recall this cryptic remark from Sun Ra: “The word space is the synonym for a multi-dimension of different things other than what people might at present think it means. I leave the word space open, like space is supposed to be, when I say space-music.”39 Space is open. Openness constitutes space music, both thematically, as a metaphor plucked from the public language of outer space, and musically, as a suspension of traditional conventions, in particular those regarding time. It may seem odd to say that space music involves the suspension of time, but that’s how space happens musically, as a dilation of regular—and regulated—pulsation. In the Chicago recordings, Sun Ra creates this feeling of suspension during introductory passages such as the one from “Images,” on Jazz in Silhouette, where his piano flirts with time before the band enters at a formal tempo. In New York, flirtation turns habitual, opening space for dilation and play. A quick comparison of two versions of “Space Aura,” one from Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth (recorded in 1956) and the other from Secrets of the Sun (recorded in 1963), illustrates what is happening. By significantly slowing the tempo of this once hard-bop blow fest, space opens up for soloists, Gilmore especially, to spiral and drift. Suspend tempo even further and you get the soundscape of Other Planes of There, a recording that seemingly hangs the Arkestra in space to move with currents of the solar wind. When Down Beat reviewed the record in 1966, it acknowledged this quality of the Arkestra’s sound as the trace of “an age-old transcendentalism” and gave Other Planes of There a rating of four and a half stars, “not only for the beauty of the music when the moment has been seeded [ . . . , but] also for Sun Ra’s persistent activism within the void—his undaunted perseverance in recording the unrecordable. Transcendental as Sun Ra’s music is, it somehow works to involve us more in the everyday.”⁴⁰ Sun Ra calls space music “the introductory prelude to the sound of greater infinity,” but it leads back to social space as the place where its life and ours happens—all the time.⁴¹

Second among the defining qualities of space music is multiplicity. Sun Ra expresses it best when he says space is synonymous with “a multi-dimension of different things.”⁴² It opens to a multiplicity of musical possibilities that occur without reference to a single regulative order. Sun Ra can work, for instance, with multiple rhythms in a way that makes Stan Kenton, who also explored unusual time signatures and rhythms, seem timid: “Sometimes I might have a 5/4 against a 7/4 against a 3/4 in one measure. It looks like a computer thing on paper.”43 Perhaps multiplicity functions as a corollary of openness: once regular tempo gets suspended, a multitude can crowd in. Sun Ra heads in this direction on “Music from the World Tomorrow,” recorded in 1960 and released on Angels and Demons at Play in 1965: strings, piano, and snapping percussion march, so to speak, to their own drummers.⁴⁴ The true potential of multiplying tempos in such a way suffuses “Reflects Motion,” on Secrets of the Sun. Boykins’s jittery, freewheeling bass opens over an irregular pulse, followed by a lone traps drummer (Scoby Stroman) playing in three until Boykins returns, soon to be overlaid with Sun Ra’s unmeasured piano and Gilmore’s jagged saxophone in and out of unison with Allen’s flute.⁴⁵ The tune is a hurtling bundle of tensions, incommensurable rhythms interacting and pulling apart to create a multisphere of sound. Similar tendencies disrupt musical continuity even further, spreading time over multiple consecutive rhythms to summon space into music like an absent deity, as on “Celestial Fantasy” (1963), released in 1966 on When Angels Speak of Love.

The third quality to emphasize about space music may be the most familiar: improvisation. It’s de rigueur to think of Sun Ra as a master of it, as both a soloist and an ensemble player. All the constitutive qualities of space music come together in improvisation, for such music opens space for multiple members of the Arkestra to improvise, often simultaneously. One of the most compelling aspects of Sun Ra’s later music especially is the intensity of improvisation it sustains: Marshall Allen’s freak-show solos, Gilmore’s flights of stratospheric frenzy, Boykins’s bass ravings and harmonics squeals, and Sun Ra’s own turbulent keyboard storms. But improvisation as Sun Ra understands and (perhaps oddly) composes it does not occur as individual virtuosity in a collective ensemble context. Theorizing the improvisational break as a musical “space between” that “fills and erases itself” in the midst of collective playing, Fred Moten equates the ensemble with “the improvisation of singularity and totality through their opposition.”⁴⁶ But improvisation in Sun Ra’s space music isn’t oppositional; rather, it becomes (as) the space of music itself. The opposition between soloist and ensemble falls to the music’s collective occurrence; “everything is happenin’” all the time.47 This is the sense in which Sun Ra insists that he composes even the most chaotic sounds his musicians make: “I can write something so chaotic you would say you know it’s not written. But the reason it’s chaotic is because it’s written to be. It’s further out than anything they would be doing if they were just improvising.”⁴⁸ Sun Ra can script a collective chaos that exceeds mere improvisation.

His music breaks down the traditional distinction between improvisation and composition. Marshall Allen provides a revealing description of the way Sun Ra conducted recording sessions in New York:

Sun Ra would go to the studio and he would play something, the bass would come in, and if he didn’t like it he’d stop it, and he’d give the drummer a particular rhythm, tell the bass he wanted not a “boom boom boom,” but something else, and then he’d begin to try out the horns, we’re all standing there wondering what’s next. [. . .] A lot of things we’d be rehearsing and we did the wrong things and Sun Ra stopped the arrangement and changed it. Or he would change the person who was playing the particular solo, so that changes the arrangement. ’Cos he knew people. He could understand what you could do better so he would fit that with what he would tell you.⁴⁹

People were Sun Ra’s instruments. He arranged what they could do, which included improvisation in the conventional sense. So instead of performing a deviation from scripted material, improvisation constitutes the material, an approach that also collapses the distinction between soloist and ensemble.

It becomes possible, and even inevitable, that improvisation becomes the province of the ensemble rather than its soloists—as prelude to infinity. “When the band reaches a certain point,” Sun Ra confessed about the Arkestra in performance, “the creative forces join us and they play. It’s a romance of two worlds, you might say. They play the instruments . . . sometimes I hook up with the cosmos. And then out of the cosmos comes this sound. And then that is, like, food for people, when they hear that sound. It’s enlightening, it’s encouraging.”50 Improvisation opens musical arrangement to higher creative forces, producing sounds that sustain and enlighten the Arkestra’s listeners. Sun Ra’s approach to improvisation moves worlds beyond bebop’s variations over changes. The recorded results are magnificent beyond reckoning: The Magic City, quite simply the most moving, evocative, and sustained group improvisation to come out of the sixties; its exact contemporary “The Sun Myth” from Heliocentric Worlds, Volume 2, whose sequential studies in tone and transience hang sounds in deep space until they erupt in collective chaos that tapers into silence; and Strange Strings, the uncanny beauty of whose willed illiteracy (the Arkestra playing unfamiliar stringed instruments) stirs unsounded depths of feeing.

The composer Sun Ra plays the Arkestra as his instrument, with multiple tonal registers and harmonic possibilities sounding in real time to transcend time, pushing time into space. Often during performance, when he felt the call to move a composition in fresh directions, he would direct the Arkestra to play a “space chord,” a cacophonous collective disruption that cleared space for new sounds.⁵¹ Improvisation extends what openness and multiplicity invoke: space as the medium of collective aspiration for better worlds. In a magnificent bid for public acknowledgment and acceptance of these exhilarating sounds, the Arkestra played Carnegie Hall on April 12 and 13, 1968. The show’s printed program announces a call to adventure: “THE SPACE MUSIC OF SUN RA: a free form excursion into the far reaches of sound and sight—.”⁵² The performances occurred on a dark stage lit intermittently by projected images of the moon, Saturn, and abstract shapes. Twenty instrumentalists in robes of green, red, and orange blasted and swooped through the full spectrum of Sun Ra’s compositions, accompanied by onstage dancing and offstage singing. Two experimental films added visual luster: Phill Niblock’s The Magic Sun, an abstract short built up from negative black-and-white close-ups of the Arkestra in action, and Maxine Haleff’s The Forbidden Playground, the backdrop for dancing performed by the Edith Stephen Dance Theater.⁵³ Although the New York Times promoted the event with a two-page notice, fewer than five hundred people turned out, only a handful of them African American. Sun Ra had the ill fortune to open at Carnegie Hall only a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and he blamed that atrocity for the show’s poor attendance. But he would continue to enrich the visually dramatic elements of the Arkestra’s performance to the point of mythological depth and grandeur.

A poem entitled “The Outer Bridge,” which serves as an epigraph in the Carnegie Hall program, describes a world somewhere between reality and abstraction:

In the half-between world

Dwell they, the tone-scientists

Sound

Mathematically precise

They speak of many things

The sound-scientists

Architects of planes of discipline54

As tone scientists, the Arkestra’s musicians dwell in music, a bridge to other, outer planes. Space music follows its own science, building abstract worlds of sound.