21

CONTINUATION

The Arkestra lives on in many ways, most powerfully in the work of the musicians it continues to inspire. Still, Sun Ra’s music deserves—and let’s hope will receive—much wider attention than it enjoys among the general run of listeners. Lady Gaga thinks so, too, apparently. The single “Venus,” from her wildly popular album Artpop (2013), opens with a riff that references a familiar Sun Ra title: “Rocket Number Nine take off to the planet . . . to the planet . . . Venus.”1 Lady Gaga’s Venus remains light-years away from Sun Ra’s (the distance between simple sensual satisfaction and “a Beta World”). While few of her millions of fans the world over might recognize the allusion to Sun Ra, her song inserts a meme into the global transmission of musical awareness. Memes do their work, and if even a small percentage of those fans become sufficiently curious to look up those words’ origins, Sun Ra’s reputation could spread fast. They might also discover that the phrase “Rocket Number Nine” has enjoyed a surprising afterlife among other musicians; for example, it provides a name for both a British drum and synth duo (RocketNumberNine, made up of Ben and Tom Page) and an EP by the French electro-pop duo Zombie Zombie (Etienne Jaumet and Néman Herman Düne). Similarly, they might learn that the Arkestra’s rap/chant call-and-response composition “Nuclear War” receives a hipster reprise on Yo La Tengo’s recording by the same name.2 Sun Ra’s creative audacity, his commitment to the impossible, has inspired far-flung innovation in a wide variety of musical genres, from free jazz to funk to hip-hop to deep house. A brief survey of music that channels Sun Ra’s astral influence provides a fitting if incomplete homage to a great artist fiercely devoted to better living through the transformative force of sound.

FREE JAZZ AND FURTHER OUT

Sun Ra’s involvement in the Lower East Side music scene of the sixties resulted in his deep and lasting influence on avant-garde jazz. That influence reaches back to Chicago through his impact on progressive musicians who fell under his tutelage, among them the tenor saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Yusef Lateef and the bassists Wilbur Ware and Richard Davis (not to mention more regular members of the Arkestra). Nor were the influences solely musical. For example, in the midfifties he gave a broadsheet entitled “Solaristic Precepts” to John Coltrane; this may not wholly explain the sax giant’s spiritual turn, but the language of this text does chime with many titles of Trane’s later music, such as “Out of this World,” “Sun Ship,” or Interstellar Space.³ “Warning,” the broadsheet reads; “this treatise is only for Thinking ‘Beings’ who are able to conceive of the Negative reminiscences of Space-Time, as is expressed in Is, Are, Be and reconcepted ‘AM’ which to the initiate is–, a symbol of Not or Non.”⁴ Sun Ra’s abstract spirituality fueled space music from the start and made an indirect but indelible contribution to the musical avant-garde in New York.

Sun Ra’s relationship with the insurgent music known as “free jazz” or “the New Thing” remained uneasy, though he clearly played a major part in its emergence. He involved himself deeply enough in Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts movement to hang and harangue at its Harlem headquarters and accept funding to add players to the Arkestra when necessary.5 In 1968, he scored and recorded A Black Mass, Baraka’s radio play about the Nation of Islam’s myth of Yakub, the demiurge who supposedly created the evil white race.⁶ But for all Baraka’s reasonable insistence on spiritual affinities between Sun Ra and other New Thing innovators—“What Trane spoke of, speaks of, what Ra means, where Pharaoh wd like to go, is clearly another world. In (w)hich we are literally (and further) ‘free’”—Sun Ra himself kept a cautious remove from the province of free jazz.⁷ That little word “free” gave him pause. Not freedom but discipline and precision—those were the virtues he offered his musicians. As mentioned before, he may have given Farrell Sanders the name “Pharoah” and groomed him to replace Gilmore in the Arkestra, but not in the name of freedom.⁸ An infinite distance separates space music from the New Thing, as Sun Ra insisted in a remark worth recalling again: “Space music is an introductory prelude to the sound of greater infinity. It is not a new thing project to me, as this kind of music is my natural being and presentation. It is a different order of sounds synchronized to the different order of Being.”⁹ That different order of being distinguishes Sun Ra’s music from less aspirational excursions beyond the confines of musical convention, giving space music a force that exceeds formal experimentation.

Still, anyone accustomed to the cacophonies of both genres can hear the affinities between the music of the New Thing (“the New Black Music,” as Baraka called it) and that of the Arkestra.¹⁰ Albert Ayler’s primordial invocations, Ornette Coleman’s “harmolodic” flights, Archie Shepp’s guttural plunges, Coltrane’s microtonal trespasses: all occur in the openness of a musical space freed from traditional constraint. All occur, too, in an ensemble setting anchored by a diffuse rhythm section holding that space open for solo exploration (as on Ayler’s Spiritual Unity [1965], Coleman’s Free Jazz [1961], Shepp’s Four for Trane [1964], or Coltrane’s Ascension [1965]).¹¹ Although the difference between such free-jazz excursions and Sun Ra’s space music doesn’t reduce simply to ensemble size, the larger number of members in the Arkestra certainly multiplies possibilities for improvisation. Improvisation, the soul of the New Thing, proceeds more collectively for Sun Ra. While soloists play an important part in producing the sonic ambience of space music (Allen’s screeches, Gilmore’s filigrees), improvisation occurs in the midst of an ensemble that moves all together: in, out, and beyond.

Phil Cohran, a trumpet and string player with the Arkestra in Chicago from 1959 to 1961, affirms the collective character of its improvisation in the emphasis he places on the first-person plural: “We didn’t have any models, so we had to create our own language. It was based on sound. It wasn’t just something you could pick up and physically deal with. Space is a place, and you had to think space, to expand beyond the earthly plane—that’s why everyone was so creative.”12 Only an ensemble schooled tirelessly in discipline and precision could improvise so extensively—and beautifully—together, the hallmark sound of the Arkestra during the New York years. Terry Moran notes the results with approval in a review of The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra (1966) for Sounds and Fury: “Sun Ra presents, here, the first new-thing big band, and his music sounds almost entirely improvised.”¹³ Moran finds improvisation of such consistency in a large ensemble a remarkable achievement: “This is demanding music for the players, and a new musical world for the listeners.”¹⁴ This new musical world’s difference from the world of everyday life—even reimagined as a space of freedom—sets Sun Ra spiritually apart from many of his free-jazz compatriots. Another review from 1966, this one in Down Beat, crystallizes the difference: “Sun Ra plays from a place beyond everyday consciousness. He senses other planes of existence known to musicians, poets, and sorcerers for as long as there has been man. [. . .] If the music has any value to those outside, it is as a bridge to this other state of being.”¹⁵ Collective improvisation, precise and disciplined, conjures other planes of there.

Sun Ra nevertheless inspired a rising generation of musicians to explore the possible and impossible worlds of open sound, particularly in Chicago. Cohran remained behind when the Arkestra made its move to New York, but he became an important circuit routing its musical approach to new receivers. He would always remain devoted to Sun Ra: “He taught me the one thing that really made a difference in my life, and that is: whatever you want to do, do it all the time.”16 Cohran played in Chicago with his own band, the Story Tellers, as well as occasionally with Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Big Band. When jobs grew scarce and musicians fled in large numbers to the coasts, Cohran seized the initiative; in 1965, he and his fellow musicians Abrams, Jodie Christian, and Steve McCall formed the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), aspiring (in the words of its charter’s first principle) “to cultivate young musicians and to create music of a high artistic level for the general public through the presentation of programs designed to magnify the importance of creative music.”¹⁷ The organization remains to this day an active source of musical support, inspiration, and education. It quickly attracted the participation of a host of innovative musicians, among them Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, Chico Freeman, and Wadada Leo Smith. Cohran established a new band for its first performance, the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, which would eventually regroup around several session players at Chess Records and release two important LPs on Cohran’s own independent label, Zulu Records, both in 1968: On the Beach and Malcolm X Memorial.¹⁸ Through the ministrations of Maurice White, whom Cohran tutored musically, the Artistic Heritage Ensemble eventually morphed (without its founder) into a band that achieved much greater renown: Earth, Wind, and Fire, whose predilections for Egyptian iconography and elaborate stage shows payed clear homage to the Arkestra.¹⁹

One of the most vital—and vitalizing—effects of the AACM was the emergence of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, in some ways the streetwise, terrestrial counterpart to the Arkestra’s cosmic space machine. Roscoe Mitchell (saxophone), Lester Bowie (trumpet), and Malachi Favors Maghostut (bass) initially played together in the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, the title of whose first record set an agenda in good keeping with Chicago’s Arkestral heritage: Sound (1966). The band soon became known as the Roscoe Mitchell Ensemble, but in 1967, with the addition of Joseph Jarman (saxophone) and Phillip Wilson (drums), its named changed again after ads for a performance in Paris billed them as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Fiercely committed to moving beyond musical convention, the Art Ensemble innovated in several ways, adding “little instruments” to the jazz arsenal (bells, whistles, noisemakers, percussive objects, etc.), opening the whole field of composition to improvisation, and incorporating noise into the sonic palette of serious music. Its members’ frequent performances in African headdresses, masks, or face paint evoked the antic spirit of the Arkestra, but without overt reference to antiquity or astral black futures. The Art Ensemble of Chicago pursued the possibilities of unfettered sound into the deeps less of outer than of urban space. A family resemblance to the Arkestra’s music nevertheless characterizes recordings as different as the ambient People in Sorrow (1969) and the much funkier “Theme de Yoyo,” from the soundtrack album Les Stances à Sophie (1970).20 Not astro-infinity but ethnic vicinity: the Art Ensemble has remained true to the task of musical insurgence in situ.

Another important group that took inspiration from Sun Ra’s music and stage performance is the underappreciated ensemble called the Pyramids, founded in the early seventies by the saxophone player Idris Ackamoor along with Kimathi Asante and Margaux Simmons, all of them students at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Ackamoor felt himself “attracted to the theatricality of Sun Ra” and conceived of the Pyramids similarly, as a musical troupe with a cultural mission.²¹ A year studying abroad, first in Europe and then in Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, and Kenya, gave Ackamoor direct experience of African cultures.²² The way they combine music, theater, and dance made a lasting impression and helped to inform the Pyramids’ theatrical approach to playing music with an African feel, one that that included colorful costumes and dynamic dance. In the tradition of El Saturn, the band released three self-produced LPs with black-and-white covers on their own label, Pyramid Records: Lalibela (1973), King of Kings (1974), and Birth/Speed/Merging (1976).²³ By turns raucous, meditative, and stately, the music on these records (which quickly became underground classics) fully earns its recent description as “Afrofuturistic psychedelic spiritual jazz.”²⁴ Much of it appears on the 2009 compilation Music of Idris Ackamoor, 1971–2004.25 Although the Pyramids disbanded in 1977, and Ackamoor moved west to found the renowned San Francisco performance company Cultural Odyssey, a recent return to touring and the studio put the ensemble back in the spotlight in a way that reinforces its debt to Sun Ra. A recent release by the Pyramids bears the auspicious title Otherworldly.²⁶ Ackamoor describes it in terms that honor the Arkestra’s space-age legacy: “It basically goes beyond the confines of Earth, in the sense that it really gives the feeling of ‘extra’—of interplanetary music, a music that you could hear on another planet.”²⁷ Space music continues to inspire new innovation.

And it has done this for decades, even outside the orbit of jazz. The Arkestra’s whole approach to making and performing music—do it yourself on a shoestring and never mind the bollocks—provided an example to punk musicians who shared its commitment to imminent change and to noise as a means of provoking it. No band took the lesson more to heart than Detroit’s MC 5, the hard-rock/proto-punk unit whose members listened carefully to Sun Ra’s music and liked what they heard. In 1967, their good friend and future manager John Sinclair suggested they play a gig with the Arkestra at the Community Arts Theater auditorium at Wayne State University.²⁸ Sinclair worked as a jazz journalist (writing for Down Beat, Vibrations, and Guerilla: A Newspaper of Cultural Revolution) and political activist (founding the White Panther Party, a parallel to the Black Panthers).²⁹ His interest in Sun Ra and the music of the New Thing generally took an openly political form, which he encouraged MC5 to advance in their music and onstage. Witness the White Panther News Service press release from 1969 that, channeling Sun Ra, reveals a readiness to make music that “speaks to the worlds of the greater potentials awaiting the peoples of the worlds at every future point on every future plane.”³⁰

MC 5 may have been more concerned with demanding conventional freedoms on this particular planet, but Sun Ra’s space music drove the band’s creativity to extraordinary rock and roll heights—and volume. The long closing track “Starship,” on Kick Out the Jams (1969), pays glorious, chaotic tribute to the Arkestra’s inspirational improvisations, taking harmonic distortion into spaces only Jimi Hendrix could navigate safely. Sinclair again booked Sun Ra and the Arkestra to perform with MC 5 for several shows in 1969, arranging their stay in a house next door to the rockers, whose “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” antics eventually tried the patience of the high priest of discipline and precision.31 Sinclair’s bust for marijuana possession later that year put any formal association between the bands to an end, but MC 5’s redirection of the Arkestra’s sound remains a crucial link between it and a commercially viable, Detroit-based youth culture that would include Iggy Pop and the Stooges.

Sun Ra’s rock influence treads a politically progressive line. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth tells how a late-blooming interest in jazz led him into the deeper reaches of improvisational music—next stop Mars! Moving to New York in the midseventies, Moore became alert to extensions beyond the boundaries of traditional black music: Sunny Murray, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp—the whole New Thing. He came to know Sun Ra’s music initially through MC5: “The first real Ra thing I heard was on Kick out the Jams. That track ‘Rocket No 9.’ [. . .] That was such an amazing track.”³² Moore began buying El Saturn records and attending Arkestra performances around New York—in Tompkins Park, for instance, or at the Knitting Factory, where, Moore recalls, Sun Ra would often hold forth on subjects of his peculiar, imperative interest:

the way he did this talk was, you could hear him talking coming down the stairs to the stage, so the whole place went silent. It was like this matinee lecture by Sun Ra. And then he just walked onstage mid-speaking and he stood on stage and he would just go off on all these tangents about jazz musicians being angels, the messengers. He talked about race politics, about why Americans need to put their bad energy down and listen to the messages from the angels, from the antique blacks, because that’s where the true information is as far as like saving the world.³³

Through musicians such as Moore, Sun Ra’s wisdom passed to a new generation and a new genre. Moore attests to the importance of a compilation of the Arkestra’s New York material entitled Out There A Minute and produced by Blast First Records (1989): “That was a heavy record for a lot of people you know, for a lot of people in my world, that was the first time they had heard him.”34

Sun Ra took a liking to Moore, another young rocker open to new tomorrows. In 1992, the Arkestra and Sonic Youth shared a stage in Central Park for one of Sun Ra’s last gigs before he left the planet. Moore remembers it with gentle awe:

It was a heavy gig. It was really a magical gig. [. . .] Ra comes out, they play first and then Sonic Youth plays, and getting ready there’s a downpour, within ten minutes of their set, the clouds move out and the sun comes out. And we’re just looking at each other thinking, “Is this for real, can he really be doing this?” And he was already in a wheelchair. [. . .] He still had the orange beard and a smile on his face but he wasn’t talking. His motor skills were a bit challenged. And when he came out there, the sun came out. Crazy.³⁵

Even in physical decline, Sun Ra could change the world.

The joyful noise he bequeathed persists today in the freer registers of collective improvisation. New York continues to sustain a community of Lower East Side musicians devoted to sonic exploration, although economic realities make it ever harder for it to stay alive. With the closing in 2010 of the club Tonic, on Norfolk near Delancey, many musical experimentalists and cross-cultural hackers lost a place that had sustained their spaceflights. No one has been more devoted to pursuing that community—and the legacy of improvisation that Sun Ra helped bequeath—than the noisecore guitarist Marc Ribot, whose various bands (Prosthetic Cubans, Ceramic Dog, and Spiritual Unity) cross florid improvised sounds with divergent musical lineages: the Latin combo, the power trio, the free ensemble.³⁶ In the context of free jazz, Ribot’s work with Henry Grimes, the famed New Thing bassist who played with Albert Ayler, among many others, takes improvised music past all musical form and into a space where feelings, freed from reference, rise, torque, soar, and dissipate. The Arkestra’s legacy resounds forcefully in Spiritual Unity: space music rushing to infinity. Others received it, too, the spirit as it spread: in Philadelphia, the noisy experimental collective Need New Body, one of whose members as a child knew Sun Ra, the elder man’s music the soundtrack of higher innocence; in London and Stockholm, The Thing, a lean trio churning and growling toward something postapocalyptic; in Japan, the Shibusashirazu Orchestra, whose blaring brass section warps soul jazz into kabuki chaos; in Brooklyn, Paris, and Brazil, the recombinant researches of Amayo’s Fu-Arkist-Ra, which fuses Chinese Lion Dance rhythms, kung fu, and Nigerian Afrobeat.37 These bands receive and relay the Arkestra’s musical example to yet unknown worlds as they continue the drive into outer blackness.

AFROFUTURIST DIVERSIONS

Sun Ra frequently receives homage as the father of Afrofuturism, the cultural and creative movement driven by African Americans with “other stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come.”³⁸ While he never used the term himself (it wasn’t coined until the year he left the planet), his devotion to tomorrow’s worlds, to astro-black mythology, and to the latest advances in keyboard technology lends credence to his stature as progenitor of this prolific line of contemporary black creativity.³⁹ The stories Sun Ra told about things to come may contain spiritual vibrations stronger than those of his Afrofuturist heirs, but they set a course for the future using musical technologies of propulsion and life support that provided an inspirational precedent for later instrumentalists and afronauts. The Arkestra’s music, myth, and theatrics proved powerfully provocative to Afrofuturist imaginations, including those better attuned to terrestrial than intergalactic frequencies. Their futures may not always resemble Sun Ra’s in spirit, but these musicians inherited his charge to change a world uncongenial to black aspirations.

George Clinton responded by envisioning a future built by and for blacks with thick bricks of funk. His bands Parliament and Funkadelic preach uplift on the downbeat, imagining a better tomorrow in unapologetically earthly terms. Their big bottom end and heavy rhythm ground funk in the viscera—the body’s proof against captivity, the source of its life, its own infinite potential. Clinton and company create a funkier tomorrow in which blacks live out the riches of sensation, led by a music that heals what ails them individually, producing unison on the beat. As the title of one tune puts it, “Everything Is on the One.”40 Clinton redirects Sun Ra’s space program back to this world. Asked about his cosmic precursor, Clinton once quipped, “This boy was definitely out to lunch—same place I eat.”⁴¹ But they probably ordered from different menus. Clinton strips astro-black mythology of its interplanetary thrusters and lands it safely on planet Earth. The sprawling collective of musicians and singers that became known as Parliament-Funkadelic (or more commonly, P-Funk) after Clinton merged his two bands resembles the Arkestra in the vitality of its message and theatricality of its performance. Interestingly, they began in the fifties as a doo-wop group, running a course parallel to Sun Ra’s, if ultimately one more popular and profitable.

In a string of extraordinary recordings from the midseventies (Chocolate City [1975], The Mothership Connection [1975], The Clones of Doctor Funkenstein [1976], and Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome [1977]), Clinton sketches a musical blueprint for a near future in which blacks turn majority and regulate their lives through the powers and possibilities of funk.⁴² It’s alien invasion with a difference, as the opening of The Mothership Connection makes clear: “Do not attempt to adjust your radio,” smooth-talks the black announcer; “we have taken control as to bring you this special show. We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving.”⁴³ Then comes an homage to Sun Ra, togged in fur cape and platform shoes: “Welcome to radio station WEFUNK, we-funk, or deeper still the Mothership Connection, home of the extraterrestrial brothers, dealers of funky music, P-Funk, uncut funk, thuh bomb.”⁴⁴ Clinton’s Afrofuturism, another instance of the genre that antedates its definition, forgoes spiritual exploration for the more worldly ambition of reanimating black life through P-Funk, deploying, where necessary, “specially designed afronauts capable of funkatizing galaxies.”45 They’ve landed—and they’re black!

What Clinton loses in philosophical nuance, he gains in crowd appeal, as is joyously documented in the film George Clinton: The Mothership Connection (1998), which shows thousands of fans roaring as they watch the mothership itself (shaped peculiarly like the Apollo mission’s lunar lander) descend on the auspicious site of Houston, home of NASA’s Mission Control.⁴⁶ The door slides open and out struts Dr. Funkenstein—in white fur. Clinton reverse engineers astro-black mythology for popular consumption, forsaking space music for heavy-hoofing Earth tones. If imitation is a form of flattery, however, maybe Sun Ra offers Clinton the greater homage. His own rollicking funk album, On Jupiter (1979), pays knowing tribute to Clinton, most directly on the track “UFO,” whose unison chant over a solid groove (“UFO, . . . where you go?”) sounds like Parliament in jazz drag.⁴⁷ Clinton may take Sun Ra’s music places it doesn’t usually go, but Sun Ra takes it back and launches funk into outer space.⁴⁸

The Afrofuturist impulse found its way into hip-hop almost from the start. While Sun Ra himself may not have found the idiom entirely to his liking (on a panel with Ice-T at a music journalism conference in New York, he remarked that it “concerns itself far too much [with] material necessities”), his example opened a space where musical activism and innovation could meet.⁴⁹ One of the great originators of hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa (born Kevin Donovan in the South Bronx), stepped into that space with the commanding twelve-inch single “Planet Rock,” recorded with his group Soul Sonic Force in December 1981 and released early the following year. The planetary scope of its refrain, “You gotta rock it don’t stop it,” and its electronic foundation (a mélange that spans from Germany’s Kraftwerk to Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra) align “Planet Rock,” however loosely, with Sun Ra’s spacious experimentalism.⁵⁰ Bambaataa also shares the instinct to view music as part of a larger social initiative, consolidated in his case under the cultural banner of the Universal Zulu Nation. His efforts on behalf of both hip-hop and black uplift in the Bronx have yielded him heavy recognition as “Amen Ra of Hip Hop Kulture,” making Bambaataa a direct descendant of the Sun God of jazz.51

Afrofuturism of a vaguely Arkestral kind also fueled other important hip-hop projects. Kool Keith (Keith Thornton), whose career began with the pivotal outfit Ultramagnetic MCs, pursues alternative tomorrows in his music under a number of aliases, among them Dr. Octagon, Dr. Doom, Black Elvis, and Dr. Ultra.⁵² His work as Dr. Octagon most closely parallels the Afrofuturist prospects of space music, if not its aspirations to infinity. Dr. Octagon, in the words of Wikipedia, is a “homicidal, extraterrestrial, time-traveling gynecologist and surgeon”—a far cry, perhaps, from the cosmic, free-form pharaoh, but a creature nevertheless capable of viewing earthly life from an astral perspective.⁵³ When “rap moves on to the year 3000,” as Dr. Octagon chants on the semi-eponymous compact disc, the present dwindles to a point of insignificance, and other futures become imaginable, even necessary (Dr. Octagonecologyst, 1996).⁵⁴ A group (really a supergroup) that extends this Afrofuturistic impulse to the ambitious task of imagining a whole future world consists of the producer Dan the Automator, the rapper Del the Funky Homosapien, and Kid Koala on turntable. They call themselves Deltron 3030. Their 2000 release by the same name, set in the year 3030, narrates the resistance of a “mech” (i.e., mechanical) soldier and computer whiz against a hauntingly familiar (as if impossible to unimagine) New World Order.⁵⁵ Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist speculations may remain in the realm of myth, but Deltron 3030 puts black science fiction to the shared cause of inventing alternatives to racist containment.

Sun Ra makes a direct, exhortatory appearance in the remarkable work of Madvillain, the fierce hip-hop duo consisting of MF Doom (Daniel Dumile) and Madlib (Otis Jackson Jr.). Their debut recording, Madvillainy (2004), contains the track “Shadows of Tomorrow,” which samples portions of the Arkestra’s tune by the same name, as well as lines from the film Space Is the Place, in a manner that acknowledges the urgency of Sun Ra’s wisdom.⁵⁶ Other artists, too, make heavy use of Sun Ra. The most thoughtful of these uses perhaps come from DJ Spooky, in recordings such as Viral Sonata (released under the name Paul D. Miller, 1997) and Celestial Mechanix (2004), or more recently, Azealia Banks, whose track “Atlantis,” from Fantasea (2012), samples “Twin Stars of Thence.”57 Janelle Monáe makes Afrofuturism a mainstream pop commodity on ArchAndroid (2010) and The Electric Lady (2013).⁵⁸ Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist influence continues to inspire new possibilities among a wide range of producers, rappers, and performers.

FUTURES OF ELECTRONICA

For all his jazz stature, Sun Ra’s greatest current influence may reside in the digital deeps of electronica. The inheritance makes technological sense. From the Sound Mirror to the Minimoog to the elusive Crumar Mainman, Sun Ra conducted a lifelong exploration of the possibilities, musical and cultural, made available by the latest technologies of sound production and reproduction. He was among the first (as was Ray Charles) to record using an electric piano (1955), and in 1990 he won Down Beat’s annual International Critics Poll for synthesizer.⁵⁹ For all his love of the analog Minimoog’s volcanic sound palette, he proved masterly at adapting to less flexible devices, as on the legendary late-1970s recordings made in Italy for the Horo label, New Steps and Unity.⁶⁰ Captured in an unusually spare quartet format (sax, trumpet, drums, and keyboards), Sun Ra used the Crumar Mainman heavily, apparently having stumbled upon it stashed in a closet at the Rome studio. Working without a bass, he played his own bottom lines on the synthesizer, programming it for live performance (as can be heard on El Saturn releases Disco 3000 and Media Dreams [both 1978]).⁶¹ But it isn’t only as an instrumentalist that Sun Ra deserves electronic homage. The Arkestra’s vast discography preserves a seeming infinity of material for sampling and remixing. Unknown worlds remain to be built, modeled, and remodeled from these unbounded reserves.

An exhaustive account would be—exhausting. A few salient instances of Arkestra-inspired electronica should suffice, followed by closer encounters with several master practitioners. Charles Cohen deserves mention as an analog virtuoso (he favors rare Buchla instruments), as his Music for Dance and Theater (2013) testifies.62 Sun Ra’s example taught him that the synthesizer could serve well for live performance. Early instances of sampling occur in work by the Frenchman Frédéric Galliano (Nangadef Maafric [1996], which samples “When There is No Sun,” from Soul Vibrations of Man) and the Australian group the Avalanches (Electricity [1999], which samples “Say,” from Strange Celestial Road).⁶³ Sonic Fiction (2003), by Portugal’s Spaceboys, owes a general debt of inspiration to the cosmic aura of Sun Ra’s electronic sounds, as do the more recent offerings from RocketNumberNine, such as MeYouWeYou.⁶⁴ The Dining Rooms, an Italian ambient/electronica/jazz duo, covers “Astro Black” on their album Tre (2003) in gorgeous deep synthetic sound currents, the breathy soprano of Anna Clementi sitting in for June Tyson.⁶⁵ Tyson’s version rings out over a dance beat on a remix of “Astro Black” by Freedom Satellite on an Austrian compilation entitled Vienna Scientists V: The 10th Anniversary (2009).⁶⁶ A stirring electronic tribute by the producer Mono/Poly (Charles E. Dickerson) entitled “Ra Rise,” from Golden Skies (2014), communicates, hauntingly, the awe that dawns with a new world.⁶⁷ Tellingly, the creators of these tracks hail from many lands, including France, Portugal, England, Italy, Austria, and the United States, which documents the global musical flows Sun Ra’s space music induces. Space is the Arkestra’s place, but its music wraps the planet.

The shimmering taffeta that synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, and mixing boards weave in response to that influence might constitute the Arkestra’s most potent musical legacy. Electronica receives and reinvents space music more urgently than do other idioms, even jazz, which reveals something important about Sun Ra’s example. It isn’t simply that it provides content for samples, covers, or wholesale homage—as it does in the haunted psychedelia of Sun Araw (Beach Head [2008], for instance), whose independent Sun Ark Studios pays obvious respect to the spirit master, or the radicalized lyrics of the rapper Sun Rise Above, aka Sun R.A., who like many others dons the mantle of black musical activism (as he does on “Every Day I Wake Up on the Wrong Side of Capitalism”).⁶⁸ The Arkestra’s music falls (un)naturally into electronica. The radical commentator Kodwo Eshun helps explain why. In regard to the relationship between technology and sound, machines and music, Eshun credits electronica with a science of its own: “Machine Music doesn’t call itself science because it controls technology, but because music is the artform most thoroughly undermined and recombinated and reconfigured by technics.”69

Technology reconfigures music. Sun Ra used technology to recombine and invent sounds. He practiced a science of creating new musical possibilities. In this sense, space music is not really about the future. It is the future come to trouble the present by measure of its difference, artifice, and alienness. In Eshun’s words, “It alienates itself from the human; it arrives from the future. Alien Music is a synthetic recombinator, an applied art technology for amplifying the rates of becoming alien. Optimize the rations of excentricity [sic]. Synthesize yourself.”⁷⁰ Become Sun Ra. Herman Poole Blount did. Electronica acknowledges and reconceptualizes the alien in space music. No longer something to be feared or resisted, the alien (arriving perhaps from Saturn?) offers a model for a new kind of life and another kind of creativity: sampling, sequencing, and synthesizing recombinant sounds. Electronica advances the emancipation from musical form that Sun Ra initiated, harnessing machine rhythms to drive open-ended explorations of sounds with no necessary trajectory, purpose, or destination beyond their own recursive occurrence.

Some of the best producers of such music working today credit Sun Ra with an inestimable influence. Osunlade, a musician and producer from St. Louis who is also a Yoruba priest, takes Sun Ra for an example of a wholly spiritualized creativity, as alien in its devotion to infinity as it is in its pursuit of Afrofutures.⁷¹ Sun Ra suffuses the spirit of Osunlade’s music and occasionally its content, too, as he does on the track “Satellite beneath the Stars,” from the 2013 double LP A Man with No Past Originating the Future, whose title provides a synopsis of the great Saturnian’s career.⁷² Sun Ra presides over this music like an ancestral presence. He similarly informs the work of Mike Huckaby, the reigning deity of Detroit techno whose devotion to the art of the mix has led him to become a major educator of machine music. Huckaby’s admiration for the masterly management of audience feeling that Sun Ra displayed in performance provides a surprising link to the club scene where techno thrives: “He could introduce a sense of tension or calamity within a chord progression, and easily resolve it with a sense of beauty.”73 Perhaps surprisingly, the Arkestra’s music can inspire sustained dancing. In recognition of this unexpected potential, Huckaby devotes the first two volumes of his Reel to Reel Edits (twelve-inch tweaks of jazz recordings) to Sun Ra tunes including “UFO,” “Antique Blacks,” and “Space is the Place,” gently “restructuring the original’s instrumental elements so that they’re more DJ-friendly and danceable.”⁷⁴ However strange the thought of clubbing with the Arkestra, the technologies of electronica allow Huckaby to reproduce its music for a new crowd of listeners and dancers.⁷⁵

The same holds for producers whose work owes Sun Ra a deep conceptual debt. The British electronic duo Africa Hitech (Mark Pritchard and Steve Spacek) make their allegiance clear on their debut album from 2011, 93 Million Miles (the distance from the Earth to the sun).⁷⁶ It’s eclectic fare, ranging across multiple territories but centered (or maybe decentered) on Arkestral spaces, as the titles of various tracks indicate: “Future Moves,” “Cyclic Sun,” “Light the Way.” The last-named track samples “When There is No Sun,” from the Sun Ra Quartet’s New Steps (1978). The phrase “Light the way” counterpoints “When there is no sun” over ambient electronics with enough insistence to contravene nothingness with nothing more than synthetic sound. The Arkestra provides similar fortitude to the music of Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison), a Los Angeles producer who, as a relative of Alice Coltrane and her grandson Ravi, provides a living link to the freer passages of jazz. The track “Arkestry,” from Cosmogramma (2010), asserts a heavy musical pedigree that other tracks confirm: “Intro//A Cosmic Drama,” “Sateliiiiiiiitee,” and “Do the Astral Plane.”⁷⁷ Synthetic sounds weave and warp alternative worlds in service to Sun Ra’s message of uplift, as Flying Lotus confirms in an interview: “I really think if we’re going to send out vibrations, they should be positive. Try and uplift the people.”⁷⁸ Recombine vibrations in the Kingdom of Not. Keep it unreal. The Arkestra achieves a synthesized and sampled afterlife in the digital archives of electronica.

And the Arkestra lives on nowhere more potently than in the extraordinary music of another Los Angeles producer, Ras G (Gregory Shorter Jr.), also known as Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program. The full nom de synth answers the question put to a captive Sun Ra by FBI agents in Space Is the Place: “Is there an African space program?”79 Indeed there is, one run by Ras G. Much more aggressively than most of his peers do, Ras G explores the deep space of sounds freed from the constraints even of instrumentation. The Arkestra’s joyful noise morphs into spattering hiss and ambient skittering, as on the first track from Back on the Planet (2013), and the Afrikan Space Program voyages into worlds beyond human tolerances (“we have a whole nother world up here, a whole nother planet”) where only electronics can go.⁸⁰ Afrikan electronica. Ras G quotes the visual symbolism of Sun Ra’s ancient Egypt (the pharaoh’s headdress, the ankh, the eye of Horus) and overwrites it with the stylings of a more contemporary Afrophilia, the Rasta’s locks, beard, and shades—Ras Tafari!

This Rasta betrays little nostalgia for African roots, however. He routes ancient Egypt through Ethiopia through empty nothing and outer darkness to desolate effect on tracks such as “Asteroid Storm,” which is utterly bereft of musical bearing, or to more hopeful prospects on “All Is Well,” a digital gesture in Sun Ra’s general direction, and “Find Ya Self (ANU Wrld),” where synth sonics and intermittent rhythms accentuate spoken phonemes or fragments of a phrase until a full one emerges (“you caught me off guard”). When Sun Ra appears in propria persona, as on “Natural Melanin Being . . . ,” Ras G displays a fully virtual wit and wisdom, sampling the Black Pharaoh at his natural blackest over an organ loop: “get to be your natural self. Now the minute you become your natural self, you gonna be alright. Because there isn’t anything better than your natural self. There isn’t anything more beautiful than a black person who is a natural.”⁸¹ This natural fact, indisputable and true, comes scratched, transcoded, and remixed in a technodelic ecology as artificial as it is real: digital wisdom at its most direct.

So pervasive is Sun Ra’s presence in the oeuvre of the Afrikan Space Program that Ras G becomes a self-appointed priest in the virtual church of Ra, custodian of the master’s memory, officiant of theophanies. Or better, perhaps, he serves as a translator, coding space music into digital tongues. This aspect of his work as a producer appears clearest in long mixes, excursions through sonic space that can last an hour or more. Under such conditions, form turns infinitely additive, a sequencing of sequences that spirals into trance: the auditory armature of infinity. That’s how “Cosmic Tones 4 Mental Therapy” works—a forty-five-minute digital “translation” of Sun Ra’s 1967 El Saturn LP by the same title. As with any connotative leap from one language to another, this one communicates the original not literally but by inference, rendering Sun Ra’s open and dilating psychedelia through an array of sonic allusions: a child’s voice, a typewriter, backward speech, electronic drones, sung samples, fades, whorls, and then, at the twenty-one minute mark, June Tyson’s clarion-crisp “Calling planet earth! . . . Calling planet earth!,” followed by a spoken Sun Ra loop, again celebrating “your natural self.”82 In and out, up and beyond, cosmic tones transliterated—not through music, exactly, but via something more primal and prior, sound’s viscid substrate heard by the entrails before the ears. Just as the release from musical constraints feels complete, a sung loop over organ restores the memory of harmony with flutes and cello: those days of clarity and comfort. But Ras G moves effortlessly elsewhere (“smokin’ it up,” spoken over a Latin bass groove), into—where else?—infinity, or so Sun Ra returns to explain: “I’m using it as a synonym for myth [. . .] because it can’t be measured, [. . .] it can’t be proven to exist.”⁸³ Can you prove it? Ras G follows Sun Ra to the edges of an infinity electronically measurable as myth, the nothing that is not there. And is.

HOMESICK ALIEN

“Sometimes I miss Chicago. It’s a very strange place but it’s a big city. It’s more cosmopolitan than New York. It’s better where you can stretch out more. New York have to go up. It can’t stretch out.”⁸⁴ Sun Ra’s remark, like so much of his music, comes as a surprise. Chicago more cosmopolitan than New York? The city of segregation so complete it contained within itself a separate black metropolis? Sun Ra remembers Chicago as a place superior to others in its openness to the cosmos, space stretching out rather than up, reaching toward new horizons. Chicago today remembers Sun Ra, too, doing so more variously and vitally than any other place on the planet, at least in regard to music. The Arkestra’s legacy infuses diverse musical adventures, sometimes so thoroughly that its influence can be hard to detect. It pervades Chicago’s music like the memory of a dream. It isn’t simply that Sun Ra’s example helped establish a lasting local devotion to improvisation and experimentation, institutionalized in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and sustained by a diehard circle of tone scientists. Sun Ra’s sounds for the Space Age—and the new worlds they create—seep into the colors of Chicago’s sonic palette, opening infinite vistas for innovation.

From the angular free blowing of Von Freeman (a sometime Sun Ra sideman) to the word-sound-image fusions of Freeman’s fellow saxophonist Matana Roberts (raised on the South Side), Chicago sustains a musical openness conducive to experimentation.85 It shapes the evocative work of Tortoise (as on TNT [1998]), an indie ensemble that crosses rock, jazz, and electronica to create soundscapes of alluring depth and intensity.⁸⁶ The guitarist Jeff Parker provides a link between Tortoise and the experimental Chicago Underground Trio, one of several “Chicago Underground” avatars that push avant-garde jazz into new territories. Centered in the fierce playing of the cornetist Rob Mazurek and the imaginative drumming of Chad Taylor, the Chicago Underground groups (Duo, Trio, or Quartet) open traditional jazz improvisation to ambient electronic sounds and sampling to create a music strangely suited to a contemporary life saturated by infotech and digital communications (witness Boca Negra [2010] or Locus [2014]).⁸⁷ Space exploration now involves a laptop as much as a Minimoog.

Another Mazurek initiative, the Exploding Star Orchestra, pays clear and joyous homage to Sun Ra’s Arkestra in both size (up to fourteen members) and substance; its first recording, We Are All From Somewhere Else (2007), narrates a story that begins with a star’s explosion and moves through a series of cosmic transformations that turn a stingray into a rocket into a new-born star.88 Mazurek mixes natural sounds (of electric eels, for instance) with those of traditional and electronic instruments in a setting of group improvisation. As if colluding with the Arkestra, this music evokes unknown worlds, opening new possibilities for what used to be called jazz. The Exploding Star Orchestra keeps faith with such futures in Stars Have Shapes, from 2010, which harks back to Roscoe Mitchell’s early sonic explorations and reaches forward to Sun Ra’s abstract infinity.⁸⁹

Less insistently experimental, perhaps, but more directly in the Arkestra’s lineage is the music of Ken Vandermark, a formidable tenor saxophone player and MacArthur Fellow deeply devoted to free improvisation. Vandermark makes the unusual move of covering what might be called the standards of free jazz: Cecil Taylor’s “Conquistador,” Eric Dolphy’s “Gazelloni,” Ornette Coleman’s “Happy House,” or Sun Ra’s “Saturn” (Free Jazz Classics, vols. 1 and 2 [2001]).⁹⁰ His trio with Hamid Drake on drums and Nate McBride on bass, Spaceways Inc., openly celebrates the Arkestra’s achievement and follows it into Funkadelic’s. This group’s Thirteen Cosmic Standards by Sun Ra and Funkadelic (2000) mixes loving covers of the master’s Chicago-era space music with a barrelful of cosmic slop to make the case for a musical countertradition worthy of the respect reserved for jazz “classics.”⁹¹ The Vandermark 5, the saxophonist’s main group from 1997 to 2010 (from Single Piece Flow to Annular Gift), receives Chicago’s legacy of improvisation like a birthright, churning and chattering hot blasts of sound for the sheer delight of relaying their intensities.⁹² They proliferate new forms of life.

The direct descendant and living heir of Chicago’s unmanufactured avant-garde, Tiger Hatchery (the saxophonist Mike Forbes, bassist Andrew Scott Young, and drummer Ben Baker Billington) incarnates the future of Sun Ra’s better tomorrow. The group’s music recombines torrential free-jazz improvisation with incendiary postpunk noise, creating dissonance that seethes, roils, and convulses in staggering mutations of (dis)organized sound. Sun Ra presides over the trio’s work in sovereign splendor. Tiger Hatchery’s debut recording, Sun Worship (2013), performs its title with unapologetic precision, producing an impossible sonic density and dynamism.93 If Tiger Hatchery provides any indication, the future of space music is now.

Like Borges’s aleph, Chicago seems somehow to contain the whole planet, musically speaking. It harbors one of the most canny, creative, and courageous producers working today: Hieroglyphic Being, aka Jamal Moss. Moss mixes with relentless momentum and programs his machines for hyperspace, splicing (in the words of an interviewer) “the legacies of house music and Sun Ra into abrasive and acutely psychoactive takes on club music, noise, and industrial.”⁹⁴ Born in Chicago in 1973, Moss grew up in the company of the local electronic idiom that became known as “house” (Chicago’s equivalent to New York hip-hop and Detroit techno). He seems to have artfully absorbed it all, turning electronica into a medium for sonic exploration and experimentation of the highest order. Moss approximates Sun Ra’s subtlety as a sound artist, doing so more closely than producers in pursuit of sales and celebrity can. The name “Hieroglyphic Being” references the master almost directly, as do the titles of many mixes, recordings, and their associated images: ANKH (2010), The Sun Man Speaks (2010), Cosmo Rhythmatic (2011), Strange Strings (2011), and Seer of Cosmic Visions (2013), the last of which includes the tracks “Nidhamu” and “Outer Nothingness,” which are also Sun Ra titles.⁹⁵ Moss releases most of his work on his own label, Music From Mathematics, making Chicago the place where space and spirit suffuse electronica.

Moss came to Sun Ra’s music through his adoptive parents’ record collection, learning to appreciate it through its influences:

When it came to finding out that Sun Ra influenced people I thought were cool, then Sun Ra became cool—because, you know, Earth, Wind & Fire or George Clinton or P-Funk, all those cats. And then come to find out that Sun Ra influenced a lot of punk bands or industrial bands I didn’t know, so—you see what I’m saying—that’s part of the evolution of his energy still transforming itself, even though he’s crossed over.⁹⁶

Moss now has a hand in evolving that energy. His uncompromising attention to the timbre and texture of technologized sound brings unusual discipline and precision to his style of production. A Hieroglyphic Being track, for all its fractal static, can feel like a philosophical disquisition, digitized Socratics. Among all producers, he stays truest to the spiritual register of space music, rendering it in a manner faithful to infinity, as potentially endless sonic tapestries signifying, in Sun Ra’s sense, nothing. That’s the celebratory wisdom of “Space Is the Place (But We’re Stuck Here on Earth),” from the double LP A Synthetic Love Life (2013).97 However earthbound his audience may feel, Hieroglyphic Being produces music that opens sonic passages from Chicago to heliotropic worlds, their impossible possibility. Sun Ra lives on digitally, his energy ever evolving.

Sun Ra may have left the planet, but his music remains potently creative. Its influence will only grow, multiplying musical possibilities and transforming people’s lives. Let a musician, then, restate the main motifs of his lives, times, and legacies: Fhloston Paradigm, former member of Digable Planets and resident of Sun Ra’s neighborhood in Philadelphia:

Sun Ra said he that was from outer space, and I really believe that. He was the first one that took the context of science fiction, and appl[ied] it to black people in America. He spoke of alienation within our own country, and trying to get out of this hypnotic funk that programmed us to act a certain way. “You’re black, so you must like this.” Afrofuturism is a hope, a hope for an alternative to how life is here on earth. You can still apply it to the now—you first have to change your trajectory.⁹⁸

“Beta music for Beta people for a Beta world”: the possible has been tried, and it failed.

Try the impossible.