18

BLACK MAN IN THE COSMOS

Sun Ra and the Arkestra left New York a year before humankind first landed on the moon. According to Szwed, the quiet gentrification of the East Village meant that the noise of rehearsals on Third Street began to attract frequent police attention, so that when the building that housed the Arkestra’s core members went up for sale, Sun Ra felt the pull of other possibilities. Marshall Allen’s father owned property in Philadelphia—“the city of brotherly shove,” as Sun Ra called it—and proved willing to rent a row house in Germantown on generous terms.1 So in the fall of 1968, Sun Ra and his closest Arkestra associates moved to 5626 Morton Street, some of them (including Sun Ra) for the rest of their earthly lives. Through their devotion to space music and the communal life it inspired, the place soon came to be known as the House of Ra. Marshall Allen still lives there and has kept the Arkestra alive and flying since 1993, when Sun Ra left the planet.

The move coincided with a number of changes already reshaping the Arkestra. Typical of a large ensemble, the membership beyond the inner orbit (Gilmore, Allen, Jacson, and a few others) saw frequent changes, many players unwilling or unable to sustain the discipline and precision necessary to play Sun Ra’s music. Several key and seasoned musicians left as the sixties rolled to a close, without much more to show for the Arkestra’s efforts than an astonishing series of innovative, unpopular records. Pat Patrick, the great baritone saxophonist who had played with Sun Ra (with a little time off to get married) since the Space Trio, began gigging seriously with other bands—a big loss on the low end. But a bigger one came with the departure in 1966 or 1967 of Ronnie Boykins, the extraordinarily nimble and creative bassist who had laid the foundation for Sun Ra’s space music. Both would play intermittently with the Arkestra in coming years, but without their particular contributions in the lower registers, its sound would Doppler shift to the blue, as if approaching rather than receding. Moving to Philadelphia meant filling empty chairs with local players, compromising the collective intuition of an ensemble once capable of unutterably sensitive, surprising, and inspired improvisation. Bugs Hunter, who ran tape machines for much of the music recorded in New York and remained with the Arkestra long afterward, remarked in less than flattering terms about the effect of losing old hands: “You’d have these other musicians to take their place, but they couldn’t read. They couldn’t read Sun Ra’s music anyway. So he had to put on a show, so he would have John [Gilmore] and Marshall [Allen] play and the drummers [who] knew the arrangements.”2 Sun Ra often worked without a bassist because he couldn’t find one to play his arrangements. In the previous remark, what Hunter lacks in generosity he may make up for in honesty. Sun Ra found himself with musicians whose abilities changed what the Arkestra could do, but not necessarily for the worse. He always claimed that people were his instruments. Different people inspired different sounds.

Hunter implies that the quality of those instruments affected Sun Ra’s “show,” and he’s right. Not long before leaving New York, Sun Ra added new elements that enhanced the Arkestra’s live performances. Space costumes, poetry, audience participation, even the occasional windup toy had sparked the Arkestra’s shows since its nights at Chicago’s Wonder Inn and Queen’s Mansion. But those were club dates. Rock and roll may have helped euthanize large jazz ensembles, but it also provided means for resurrection. In mid-June 1967, the radical music critic and promoter John Sinclair booked a show at Wayne State University’s Community Arts Auditorium that put Sun Ra and his Myth-Science Arkestra on the same bill with MC5, the proto-punk band of headbangers schooled in anarchism, amplification, and the avant-garde. And why not? MC 5 admired the Arkestra’s dedication to improvisation and outer space. Sun Ra might gain a new generation of listeners, on a scale that made the New York loft scene look like microcircuitry. Miles Davis saw it, too: rock venues amped musical performance to previously unimagined levels of excitement, celebrity, and maybe even money.3 The MC5 show was successful enough to secure the Arkestra an extended residency in Detroit two years later. Sinclair could wax enthusiastic about space music and its astral architect: “One Sun Ra is worth 10,000 astronauts, one million Richard Nixons.”⁴ Something clicked that June night at Wayne State. The Arkestra discovered that it could mesmerize rockers as forcibly as hipsters and in larger numbers. Sun Ra proved his crowd appeal, at least to young whites. By April 1969 (wearing slit-eyed shades, a tiger-striped tam, and a Mona Lisa smile), he would stare them down blankly from a yellow-tinted cover of Rolling Stone.⁵

Sun Ra adapted to larger spaces by enlarging the dramatic aspects of performance, purposefully enhancing the visual, linguistic, and mythological registers of the Arkestra’s music. Astro-black mythology became more than a conceptual framework for outlandish activism. It provided a cosmic backdrop for any given musical performance that enlarged it to operatic proportions. The Arkestra aimed no longer merely to play space music but to perform musical rituals that would immerse listeners in the cosmo-drama of astro-black mythology. The times required it, and the venues encouraged it. Documents indicate that Abraham took an active role in booking the Arkestra in large halls across the United States and soon in Europe, and the definitive discography, The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra, attests to a permanent spike in the frequency of live recordings after 1968.⁶ That was also the year when Sun Ra added a new dimension to the ensemble, one that would modify its look and sound in a way that made space music more accessible and challenging at the same time.

Through the recommendation of Lem Roebuck, who occasionally arranged gigs for the Arkestra in New York, Sun Ra auditioned and enlisted its first female member, June Tyson.7 The Arkestra had developed as a boy’s club—or fraternal order—not merely as a function of jazz tradition. As a confirmed bachelor, Sun Ra harbored a deep distrust for the influence women could wield over his musicians. But allowing Tyson a role onstage, and an important one at that, brought vitality and drama to performances that, for all their costumes and improvisation, might otherwise have felt distant or cerebral. Tyson focused the ensemble’s energy and the audience’s attention in ways that allowed the music to pivot rapturously around her. Her crystalline voicings doubled Sun Ra’s gibbous exhortations with intensity. Her dynamic dancing crossed the Arkestra’s incipient chaos with coherence. Tyson’s rapt but regal female presence blessed astro-black mythology with living evidence that its other worlds included otherness as a means to apprehending them: blackness with a female difference. Szwed notes, too, that Tyson “helped liberate Sun Ra from the keyboards,” allowing him to come forward on stage as the guiding force of the Arkestra and audience alike.⁸

With the addition of the singer and dancer Vertamae Grosvenor (and others when occasions called—sometimes seven or eight), the Arkestra’s visual dimension burgeoned to sustain a cosmo-drama that became the mainstay of performance. Szwed describes it in the lush detail available to one who witnessed it repeatedly.⁹ For those born too late (or too provincial) to participate, that cosmo-drama lives on in the dreams of other media: recordings, transcriptions, videos, films, breathless memories, third-hand rumors. Its content remained consistent, but its presentation could vary with the venue, audience, band membership, or mood. The basic premise resembled many a Baptist sermon, but served up in space-age bunting: death appears on the brink of triumphing over life on planet Earth, and only a profound change of heart among its inhabitants can save them. The cosmo-drama offers salvation through music, song, dance, and spectacle. Perhaps a lone percussionist would begin, and then other musicians would enter singly or in groups, building to a torrent of sound that would suddenly fall silent with the entrance of Sun Ra, usually accompanied by Tyson.

The ensuing show might include a call-and-response homily, chanted melodies and poems, turbulent forays into space music, precise renditions of old swing standards, freaking solos by individual musicians or the whole Arkestra, whirling dancers, shimmering lights, flickering films, or jugglers and tumblers—all framed conceptually by the images and ideals of astro-black mythology. Space costumes flashed through projected images of Egyptian pharaohs. Electronic squeals sliced through rumbling thunder from ancient drums. The Outer Space Visual Communicator splashed kaleidoscopic colors across the stage.10 The cosmo-drama had a purpose, which was to awaken its audience to the greater potentials of another kind of life. “I hate everyday life,” Sun Ra said in an interview. “This planet is like a prison. I’m trying to free people. I’ve observed this planet from other planets and I’ve experienced what I saw in my music.”¹¹ Performing it for big audiences in large spaces suffused with sounds, movements, and images might bring myth to life, altering the destiny of an imperiled planet. As Sun Ra puts it rather more abstractly in “My Music is Words,” “The neglected mathematics of MYTH is the equation differential potential impossible potential potential potential otherness alter-issness.”¹² Cosmo-drama gives that neglected mathematics living vitality.

Sun Ra took the show on the road—internationally—with concerts in England, France, Finland, the Soviet Union, Mexico, and, to his undying delight, Egypt, where he and other members of the Arkestra visited the Valley of the Kings and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Ra came home—if such were possible on planet Earth. The Arkestra increased its reach far beyond either South Side lounges or East Village lofts, promoting a planetary vision for an ailing planet. In a sense, Thmei uplift went global after Sun Ra left New York. Globalization and decolonization (two faces of the same phenomenon) saw to it that astro-black mythology, grounded in the wisdom of Egyptian antiquities and propelled by space-age aspirations, could appeal widely across national boundaries. America possesses no monopoly on either blackness or death. A planetary perspective on black suffering and human subjugation would provide globalization with a conscience irreducible to national identity or imperial ambition. “When I play something,” Sun Ra said, “it obliterates nationality.”13 Astro-black mythology spans nations and dwarfs empires. It boggles common sense, laying a foundation for global—and globalized—interdependence. “Well,” Sun Ra said to a skeptical interviewer, “what I represent is totally impossible. It affects every nation on the planet—on this planet. It affects governments, it affects schools, it affects churches; the whole thing has got to be turned to another kind of thought. A blueprint for another kind of world.”¹⁴

This kind of talk crosses Christianity with utopian science fiction, but with an indelible difference. Sun Ra is black. And so is his blueprint. While it makes sense to notice with Szwed that “Sun Ra’s views on race and the role of black people on Earth change[d] strikingly over the years,” those changes never removed the black from astro-black mythology.¹⁵ They may have indicated dismay at the Arkestra’s neglect by black listeners. They may have opened space music to whites capable of hearing it. But his tendency in later years to chastise black audiences more interested in disco or hip-hop than in cosmo-drama (“I couldn’t approach black people with the truth because they like lies. [. . .] I don’t think of Negroes as my brothers”) does not lessen Sun Ra’s devotion to the cause of black uplift.¹⁶ A planetary perspective forced the issue of a black future at a moment when American popular culture started to acquire global appeal. Cosmo-drama, both now and then, inserts blackness into a mediascape that distributes images of the future to a hungry world. Hence the curious description of his activity that Sun Ra offered in the program for a concert staged to benefit a pan-African study tour for university students: “Cosmo-Drama Intuition Infinity Ambassadorial Communications of Sound, Movement and World Chromatics.”¹⁷

Try a thought experiment: what cultural difference would it make if the entire cast of Star Trek had been black, if the Jetsons had been a black family, if Neil Armstrong had been a black astronaut, if the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had been in actual fact, as both tried so hard to become, black bands? Would the planet be a different place? A black planet, perhaps? Sun Ra’s astro-black mythology and cosmo-drama address a planet teetering on the verge of permanent whiteness. Black people may not hear the message, but black myth declares its necessity: “You go to black people in America and say, show me your myths. How many do they have? None. They got a vacuum and a void in their life. [. . .] They should correct it. Speedily.”18 Sun Ra filled that void with space music and cosmo-drama. Black uplift on a planetary scale requires new invention, perhaps even of a new race to transform the old ones, created in Sun Ra’s image: “I’m in the form of a man, but I’m an angel you know because man has tried a long time to do things. He couldn’t do it. But you know an angel can do a lot of things”—like imagining a black planet or cosmos.¹⁹

Sun Ra’s reputation as activist and thinker would win him an unusual appointment in 1971: that of lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley in the newly opened Department of Afro-American Studies. Whether on a concert stage or behind a classroom podium, Sun Ra took seriously his task as educator, a vocation that he first embraced in his year studying education at Alabama A&M University. The course he proposed and taught had a title worthy of his planetary ambitions: “The Black Man and the Cosmos.” It mixed music (often performed by members of the Arkestra) with wisdom delivered as lectures in Sun Ra’s soft, sly, southern accent, punctuated by his favorite interpretive strategies: equations, permutations, puns, and critical exegesis of everything from the Bible to yesterday’s news. A recording of one such lecture survives online for those eager to study with the astro-black master.²⁰ It’s an astonishing lesson, not an exposition so much as a performance of black counter-knowledge incommensurable with conventional academic learning.

Sun Ra’s syllabus gives some sense of his agenda. It comes straight out of Chicago: The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Theodore P. Ford’s God Wills the Negro, Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan’s Black Man of the Nile and His Family, Volney’s Ruins of Empire, and works by Blavatsky and Ouspensky, as well as suggested reading in hieroglyphics, slave narratives, and the Rosicrucians. Contemporary titles included politically bold black writing: Ark of Bones, by Henry Dumas, and Black Fire, the collection of African American writing edited by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal.21 Transported to the Berkeley classroom, Thmei wisdom acquired an institutional authority it never had in Washington Park. In content and style, Sun Ra’s course advanced black counter-knowledge through an unapologetic (and often humorous) critique of American culture. It probably lent his agenda credibility that the Black Panther Party had originally invited Sun Ra and the Arkestra to Oakland, where they lived in a house the Panthers owned, until ideological differences forced the musicians out after a few months. Sun Ra’s stint as an academic proved vexed. He claimed never to have been paid for his lectures, attributing the insult to their incendiary content.²² The academy appeared unready, even under the rubric of Afro-American studies, to sustain a curriculum so visionary, so heretical, as Sun Ra’s.

The Arkestra’s California sojourn yielded an even more important opportunity to educate the planet, however. According to Szwed, a film producer named Jim Newman approached Sun Ra about the possibility of making a documentary of the Arkestra to air on PBS. Somehow the project morphed into feature-length film to be directed by John Coney and called Space Is the Place. Szwed calls it “part documentary, part science fiction, part blaxploitation, part revisionist biblical epic,” and the film is all that and more; most important, it is a vehicle for astro-black mythology disguised as the low-budget cult classic it would become.²³ Szwed cautions against identifying Space Is the Place too closely with Sun Ra’s own beliefs, crediting the screenplay—as the movie does—to Joshua Smith. But Smith didn’t sign on until after production began, and the way Sun Ra, master of improvisation, delivers his lines makes it pretty clear that much of the time he’s channeling Sun Ra, master of improvisation. Nothing if not a canny student of contemporary media (after all, El Saturn served to distribute an activist message disguised as music), Sun Ra seized the chance to make a movie that might reach a wide audience, and with a star like Ray Johnson from Dirty Harry, a black audience at that.

As usual, Sun Ra’s motives involved more than notoriety for himself or his music. Several years later, in a lecture at New York’s Soundscape, Sun Ra would indicate (however casually) why film was such an important medium for his planetary message: “You just like over in a science fiction film now. You’ve outlived, you might say you outlived the Bible, which was your scenario.”24 It’s a remark worthy of William S. Burroughs, and it shows how seriously Sun Ra took popular media as a means of ordering human life. As a scenario for living, the Bible is obsolete. Another kind of narrative has taken its place, this one not so sacred. Sun Ra was informing his audience not that they are watching a science fiction film but that they’re in one, living one. The film they live is the life they lead. By making a science fiction film of his own, Sun Ra aimed to change the scenario its audience lived by. He was offering them, in place of the Bible, astro-black mythology: space is the place.