20

TOKENS OF HAPPINESS

From the start, with the founding of El Saturn Research in 1954, music served Sun Ra as the vehicle for his vision, and the music business, independently conducted, served as the means of distributing it. The film Space Is the Place, however, provided opportunities to reach audiences far wider than those possible through El Saturn, with its mail-order vagaries and cash-on-the-barrelhead operations. Blue Thumb Records (founded in 1968 and home to such well-known artists as Captain Beefheart, the Crusaders, the Pointer Sisters, and Hugh Masekela) expressed interest in recording the Arkestra’s boisterous sounds. For two days in October 1972, Sun Ra and his Astro Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra occupied Chicago’s Streeterville Studios, producing enough music for four LPs. The session yielded Space is the Place for Blue Thumb, as well as a second LP that was never issued and whose master disappeared.1

This foray into the commercial music industry came with no small business vigilance. According to the producer Ed Michel’s liner notes for a reissue of Space is the Place, Blue Thumb’s contract with Sun Ra set conditions that only an entrepreneur with his foresight could have negotiated. Paragraph 5, concerning the “actual ownership of masters,” stipulates, “Company shall have the exclusive and perpetual right to manufacture, advertise, sell, lease, license or otherwise exploit the same throughout the planet Earth.” Paragraph 6, with an eye to other markets, claims “similar rights on planets other than Earth,” namely: “Company agrees that all rights discussed in paragraph 5 above, as well as all rights of distribution and retail sales, on planets other than Earth (including but not limited to Saturn, Pluto, Jupiter, and Mars) shall belong to Sun Ra.”2 Sun Ra clearly anticipated wide audience appeal for Space is the Place.

An even bigger opportunity knocked when ABC/Impulse! approached Abraham and Sun Ra. Working through Michel, the label tendered a proposal to reissue the bulk of the El Saturn catalog and record several new LPs. It was an appealing deal, especially considering ABC’s marketing and distribution capabilities. The Arkestra might finally see commercial success in the house that Trane built (Impulse!). But Abraham and Sun Ra proved to be wily contract negotiators. In the liner notes for a later Evidence CD, Michel describes how they responded to ABC’s “standard Artist’s Contract (‘Everything You Have Is Ours . . . ,’ spelled out in some detail over seven pages).”³ Abraham put the contract in his briefcase and took it home to examine. Michel continues: “This is the place to remind ourselves that the business of making and selling records in the ’70’s (or now whathehell) isn’t exactly Rocket Science. But the business of Sun Ra is, more or less, Rocket Science. One definitely needs to be on one’s toes. Or, perhaps, someone else’s.”⁴ Abraham revised or rather “simply retyped the contract, turning everything on its head, with ABC, rather than Saturn, at the short end of the stick.”⁵ Abraham had been running a record company too long to be duped by the paper promises of industry executives.

ABC began issuing new pressings of old El Saturn recordings in colorful new covers (Jazz in Silhouette, Angels and Demons at Play, Nubians of Plutonia, The Magic City—the contract called for thirty reissues). It recorded several entirely new LPs, too: Astro Black, Pathways to Unknown Worlds, Cymbals (unissued), and Crystal Spears (also unissued).6 But without explanation, ABC suddenly canceled the contract, relegating released work to the cutout bins and unreleased work, for a time, to oblivion.⁷ The Arkestra ultimately realized little gain, financially or otherwise, from the arrangement. Sun Ra waxed bitter over the outcome of this bid for commercial viability: “Impulse was going to spend almost a million dollars in publicity. They were going to put out fourteen LPs at one time. Something happened where they didn’t keep their contract.”⁸ Szwed suggests that the debacle with ABC/Impulse! at least broadened Sun Ra’s audience and earned the Arkestra more reviews and greater press.⁹ Be that as it may, Sun Ra returned to the DIY ways of El Saturn Research, flirting only occasionally with mainstream media exposure and fame. On May 20, 1978, he and the Arkestra made a guest television appearance on Saturday Night Live, and a decade later they played joyously on David Sanborn’s Night Music, on CBS.¹⁰ But mass celebrity eluded them. They remained a gorgeous curiosity, these musicians from outer space. The National Endowment for the Arts named Sun Ra a “Jazz Master” in 1982, making him among the first to receive that distinction.¹¹ Birmingham would welcome back its errant son in 1987, when he accepted induction to the Alabama Music Hall of Fame.¹² But Sun Ra’s renown remains muted in relation to his vast achievement.

The music remains misunderstood, too. A tendency persists among critics and fans alike to dismiss Sun Ra’s turn, or rather return, to the swing music of his early days as the quaint nostalgia of an aging jazz master or even the taming of a once tempestuous imagination. Wikipedia proves representative: “Beginning in the 1970s, Sun Ra and the Arkestra settled down into a relatively conventional sound, often incorporating swing standards.” The article then offers a quotation from Sun Ra almost obligatory in this context: “They tried to fool you, now I got to school you, about jazz, all about jazz.”¹³ The implication is obvious. Sun Ra turns pedagogue in his later years, more concerned with transmitting tradition than transforming the world. Never mind that contemporary reviews of later performances stress the sheer invention of his return to swing, such as this one from the Philadelphia Inquirer regarding an outing in 1988: “The Sun Ra specialty is taking standards and presenting them in the manner of an extraterrestrial on a New Year’s Eve jag. His use of harmony, melody, rhythm, timbre and electronics defies the commonplace—even the avant-garde, as most of us understand it.”14 Some listeners heard continuing experimentation in Sun Ra’s rendering of swing tunes. Later performances mixed past and future without regard to “tradition” in some honorific sense, “capering,” in the words of a critic writing two years later in the Chicago Tribune, “through free-blowing collective improvisations, honking and bleating backward through time to odd renditions of Ellington, Monk, Cole Porter, and the mentor Fletcher Henderson; kicking in the hyperspace to ethereal tunes from the 21st Century.”¹⁵ Sun Ra was no swing traditionalist reviving an antiquated style to preserve it perfectly in auditory amber.

One of the reasons for his “return” to swing is so obvious it’s hard to see: only later in his career, with his increasing opportunities to play for large—and paying—audiences, was he able to sustain the large ensemble swing requires. Economics partly drove the chamber-scale experimentalism of the New York years. Bigger crowds and venues demanded and rewarded bigger bands, whose ideological importance to black culture Sun Ra never overlooked. He unambiguously bemoaned the passing of those ensembles: “That’s one thing very bad about the black race that they don’t have any big bands. They used to have some, but the wrong kind of black folks got in charge and they downgraded music.”¹⁶ The Arkestra resuscitated swing to re-upgrade the music and restore dignity and grace to blacks as creators. But Sun Ra had never left swing very far behind. The course of his recording career shows him releasing LPs focused on standards even in the midst of intense invention: Sound Sun Pleasure!! (recorded in Chicago in 1958; released in 1970), Holiday for Soul Dance (recorded in Chicago in 1960; released in 1970), and Bad and Beautiful (recorded in New York in 1961; released in 1972).¹⁷ The overall number of recorded originals may exceed that of standards over the course of the Arkestra’s career, but the latter never fell out of its repertoire; their number simply dwindled to fit its diminishing size. Even the early live recording made at the Wonder Inn in 1960 contains old familiars: “’S Wonderful,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” and “How High the Moon.”

The better documentation of later performances (especially all those audience tapes made after recording technology became easily portable) seems to show the Arkestra increasing its commitment to swing, but little comparable evidence of early set lists exists. What can be said with confidence is that, from the seventies onward, the Arkestra had a wide array of swing tunes in its repertoire. The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra shows over fifty in regular rotation, with another sixty-plus called occasionally—and over twenty played, according to best available information, only once.18 The late Arkestra was, to say the least, swing literate. Legends of note-for-note rehearsal of recorded standards—including mistakes—find confirmation in its enormous (for lack of a better word) erudition.¹⁹ Some of these tunes had, like “’S Wonderful,” been in the Arkestra’s repertoire from the start, but they reentered it with a vengeance in the midseventies: songs such as “Yeah Man!” and “Big John’s Special” from the Henderson book; Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “Take the ‘A’ Train”; Coleman Hawkins’s “Queer Notions” and the song he made famous, “Body and Soul”; the old favorites “King Porter Stomp” and “Limehouse Blues”; Brooks Bowman’s “East of the Sun”; and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.”

These and a legion of other standards found a lasting place in the late Arkestra’s sets, a strategic one, if lists lifted from audience tapes provide any indication. A typical set from the band’s last two decades would begin in cacophony with collective improvisation, move through a few space-themed originals, settle into a series of swing standards, and return (players refreshed?) to more space titles confirming the Arkestra as “Sun Ra’s band from outer space.” Swing provided a center of gravity around which it fell into and out of orbit—often playfully. Sun Ra had a soft spot for novelty tunes—witness his 1966 appearance (with John Gilmore and Pat Patrick) on the LP Batman and Robin or the late Arkestra’s frequent performance of “I’m Gonna Unmask the Batman.”²⁰ Nowhere does he give his pop impulse fuller reign than in his flirtation—or maybe temporary infatuation—with the Disney songbook. It began in earnest with the Arkestra’s 1988 recording of “Pink Elephants on Parade” for Stay Awake, a collection of Disney tunes by various bands, and fulfilled itself the following spring in a series of Disney tributes on the West Coast by “Sun Ra and his Disney Odyssey Adventure Arkestra.”21 Not simply swing standards but, more impishly, omnipopular Disney songs maintained open communication with a planet still far from infinity.

The resurgence of swing and even pop in the late Arkestra’s performances attests to a renewed interest in accessibility and, for lack of a better word, fun. Believing too strictly in those tales of note-for-note rehearsals makes the band seem like a mechanical memory machine. Closer to the truth is a remark that John Gilmore, Sun Ra’s devoted tenor player, made regarding European fans of the Arkestra’s later shows:

The audiences were running around talking about big bands being alive, big band is back after they heard us. They were saying that ’cause it was hot. We’re not able to rehearse all the time, ’cause guys live all over the place, so it’s not as tight as when we were in Chicago. But it is so fresh—no telling what might come out.²²

The big band is alive: Sun Ra didn’t relapse into swing; he resurrected it. According to Gilmore, the late Arkestra was no longer the impeccably drilled unit it had been in Chicago, but that was the source of its vitality. Anything might happen—which is to say that even swing arrangements provided an occasion for the unexpected joys of improvisation. Testimony to the excitement that the late Arkestra still inspired appears on a handbill for a performance for the “Alternative Concert Series” at Haverford College near the end of Sun Ra’s sojourn on planet Earth: “An evening with Sun Ra and his Cosmic Swing Arkestra is an evening of mystery, joy, pageantry and a trip through space, time, dreams and layers of music that add up to an experience unlike any other, part sanctified church, part boody-bump-beautiful-business, part mystic giggles and satire, part swing to the max!”²³

Recall Sun Ra’s dictum that jazz at its best is happiness. The late Arkestra’s swing repertoire, both live and recorded, produces happiness in abundance. There’s nothing retrograde about the joy that Jelly Roll Morton’s “King Porter Stomp” adds to the astral flight of otherwise original compositions on Live in Paris at the “Gibus,” recorded in Paris in 1973 and released in France in 1975. The Arkestra plays with New Orleans abandon and interactive cunning to deliver two minutes and fifty-three seconds of unapologetic pleasure.24 A review from a performance in Chicago almost twenty years later makes it clear that part of that pleasure derived from the creativity of the swing renditions: “Virtually everything that the Arkestra played, from straight-ahead swing arrangements recalling the ’40s to high-decibel, high dissonance improvisations out of the ’60s, recalled Ra’s consistent sense of innovation.”²⁵ Sun Ra put that sense of innovation nakedly on display on a live solo piano recording entitled St. Louis Blues, made for Paul Bley’s Improvising Artists Incorporated in 1977.²⁶ The title track travels back to the beginnings of jazz to discover everything that would emerge later in Sun Ra’s piano playing: clumping chords, surging rhythms, and dissonant harmonies, all over a walking boogie-woogie left hand. Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose” becomes a dalliance with the familiar standard rather than a cover, Sun Ra stating the famous first five notes, then retreating, stating them again, and falling silent for a time, turning this rollicking standard into an etude of itself that forecasts the music of tomorrow.

The full force of the Arkestra’s creativity in a swing idiom comes marching in on an especially vibrant live recording made in Greece, Live at Praxis, 1984.²⁷ It features a broad selection of the Arkestra’s swing repertoire, making up over half the material on two LPs. “Yeah Man!,” written by Noble Sissle and made famous by Fletcher Henderson, was an Arkestra staple, recast in a careful rendering that wildly exaggerates the tune’s rhythmic possibilities. Sun Ra sets a blistering tempo with his plunky intro and snaps his sections to attention, reiterating Henderson’s rhythms with stuttering bravado until their chunky swing gives way to an explosive drive toward broader horizons. “Cocktails for Two,” written by Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow and recorded in 1934 by Duke Ellington, introduces a cluster of standards by showcasing their possibilities for improvisation. Sun Ra’s piano and Marshall Allen’s alto take this one as a duet, in the process using familiar swing changes to clear space for something else. Rhythmically fluid comping allows Allen to explore improvisational cacophony in a relaxed context. At turns winsome, floating, and grisly, he slides and screeches in solo phrases as beautiful as they are frightening.

Sun Ra goes solo to explore “Over the Rainbow” (by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg), turning its timid longing for a world where “skies are blue” into a thundering demand for infinity. Dissonant chords harry the melody, mounting and crashing until they undo it altogether, allowing it eventually to return chastened and refreshed. As John Litweiler would later remark in the Chicago Tribune, Sun Ra’s “Over the Rainbow” communicates “a remarkable piece of self-revelation, for the song’s hope is certainly seductive—and the cruel, angry phrases were an admission that those sentiments are clearly impossible.”28 With Live at Praxis, 1984, the full Arkestra returns to droll treatment of more standards (Horace Henderson’s “Big John’s Special” and Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll”), always with an eye to the happiness they inspire—which is nowhere more apparent than on the mordant Kurt Weil–Bertolt Brecht tune “Mack the Knife.” Recording it here for the first time, the Arkestra whomps up all the fun the song’s icy lyrics work to subvert, James Jacson singing them with a Satchmo growl as Sun Ra croons gently in response. If swing is square, long live the Arkestra!

The Arkestra’s traditional practice of relegating swing and space music to different studio-produced LPs began to break down on late recordings, as two from 1986 indicate. Reflections in Blue contains mostly standards, with the exception of Sun Ra’s early composition in straight swing idiom, “State Street Chicago,” first recorded in 1960, and the twelve-bar title track, with its sumptuous section playing.²⁹ Hours After mixes Gershwin’s “But Not for Me” and “Beautiful Love” (by Wayne King and others) with the Sun Ra originals “Dance of the Extra Terrestrians,” “Love on a Far Away Planet” and “After Hours.”³⁰ The tendency to interlineate space with swing music reaches a glorious apogee on Blue Delight, recorded for A&M in 1988 for its Modern Masters Jazz Series.31 This imaginative exploration of sounds moves effortlessly from one plane of musical possibility to another, as if time has indeed officially ended and space is big enough to include old and new without acknowledging such distinctions. The title track sounds like blues outside history, the horns playing so beautifully as a section as to disavow all trace of arrangement. “Gone with the Wind” (by Allie Wrubel and Herb Magidson) and “Days of Wine and Roses” (Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer) fit easily alongside the throbbing ambience of Sun Ra’s “They Dwell on Other Planes” and the diffuse sonorities of “Sunrise.”

Sun Ra eschewed the either/or of space and swing his critics sometimes require of him. Happiness unites them, as he insists on Blue Delight’s back cover: “The reason I haven’t been playing my compositions for the last five or six years is because I’ve been doing tunes by people who had very nice minds as far as pleasantry and happiness goes. These composers left something of value, little tokens of happiness.”³² If space is the place, happiness is how you get there, the happiness inspired by music played with precision and discipline. But Sun Ra never abandoned space music as a primary propulsion system, as the spirited recording entitled Purple Night demonstrates.³³ Made in 1989, it features twenty-four musicians, including Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, reprising and reinventing a friendly galaxy of Sun Ra compositions. Sun Ra’s creativity seems as infinite as the Creator’s, a possibility he once professed playfully: “They asked me what albums I’m putting out next? And I said there’s one I’ve been holding back for some time. It’s music from the private library of God.”³⁴ Sun Ra would curtail his adventuresome, divinely inspired composing and recording only after the Creator began calling him to other worlds: coyly at first, with a stroke in 1990, and for good with another stroke in 1992. Sun Ra would leave this planet far richer than he found it. However transformative his adventuresome space music may be, it seems fitting that his last recorded work appears on a tribute to Stuff Smith, the great swing violinist with whom he made his earliest home recording, “Deep Purple,” in 1948 on the South Side of Chicago.