A host of musical stars paid tribute to the late Ray Charles at a special concert in California Wednesday night. Artists including Stevie Wonder and Michael McDonald performed the blues singer's hits at the tribute show hosted by legendary comedian Bill Cosby. Cosby quipped to the audience which included Quincy Jones and Travis Tritt that Charles, "lived more lives than any 900 hundred of you." He also shared some of his memories of the star, including an occasion when the blind musician appeared at a jazz festival backed by an all white band. Cosby said, "I said to Ray, 'Your band is all white'. He said, 'That's funny. They don't sound white'." Charles passed away aged 73 when his liver failed earlier this year. All proceeds from the tribute concert will go to the Morehouse College Centre in Atlanta, to which Charles donated $2 million during his lifetime.
From: http://www.imdb.com/news/wenn/
Friday, October 01, 2004
Monday, September 27, 2004
Hightplayer: The Jazz Ladies, cont'd
nightplayer: The Jazz Ladies, cont'd: "
The Jazz Ladies, cont'd
Sarah Vaughan
Sassy
1924-1990, lung cancer
Possibly the greatest technical singer of jazz... ever. She possessed perfect pitch, and was a master of timbre and tonal changes, singing as if her voice was just another instrument in a band. Started in her church's choir at a very young age, and was accompanying on their organ by age 12. She got her break at the Apollo Theater in 1942, where she was picked up by Earl Fatha Hines and his big band, thanks to then band member Bill Eckstine. She followed Eckstine when he formed his own band, then spent the rest of her life singing solo and recording almost every jazz standard in existence with countless collaborations with every kind of jazz musician and ensemble. She enjoyed decades of popularity for her various recordings of popular songs, and won a Grammy despite her failing health in 1982 for a recording of Gershwin tunes."
The Jazz Ladies, cont'd
Sarah Vaughan
Sassy
1924-1990, lung cancer
Possibly the greatest technical singer of jazz... ever. She possessed perfect pitch, and was a master of timbre and tonal changes, singing as if her voice was just another instrument in a band. Started in her church's choir at a very young age, and was accompanying on their organ by age 12. She got her break at the Apollo Theater in 1942, where she was picked up by Earl Fatha Hines and his big band, thanks to then band member Bill Eckstine. She followed Eckstine when he formed his own band, then spent the rest of her life singing solo and recording almost every jazz standard in existence with countless collaborations with every kind of jazz musician and ensemble. She enjoyed decades of popularity for her various recordings of popular songs, and won a Grammy despite her failing health in 1982 for a recording of Gershwin tunes."
Friday, September 24, 2004
Slobakan.com > Ellis L. Marsalis Sr. Dies
: Wednesday, September 22, 2004 :::
OBITUARIES@ 20:53:25 - 2 views Ellis L. Marsalis Sr., the patriarch of a family of world famous jazz musicians, including grandson Wynton Marsalis, has died. He was 96.
MarsalisÂ’ son, Ellis Jr., is a prominent New Orleans pianist and music professor who mentored crooner Harry Connick Jr. as well as four musician sons: Wynton, the trumpeter; saxophonist Branford; trombonist Delfeayo and drummer Jason.
Ellis Sr., who died Sunday, was involved in the civil rights movement through ownership of a motel in suburban New Orleans whose guests included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and musician Ray Charles.
OBITUARIES@ 20:53:25 - 2 views Ellis L. Marsalis Sr., the patriarch of a family of world famous jazz musicians, including grandson Wynton Marsalis, has died. He was 96.
MarsalisÂ’ son, Ellis Jr., is a prominent New Orleans pianist and music professor who mentored crooner Harry Connick Jr. as well as four musician sons: Wynton, the trumpeter; saxophonist Branford; trombonist Delfeayo and drummer Jason.
Ellis Sr., who died Sunday, was involved in the civil rights movement through ownership of a motel in suburban New Orleans whose guests included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and musician Ray Charles.
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Yahoo News > Reuters > S.African Musician Masekela Tells of Drug Risks
Wed Sep 8, 9:18 PM ET
By Peter Apps
TEMBISA, South Africa (Reuters) - Exile, alcoholism, drug addiction, discrimination, failed marriages -- South African jazz icon Hugh Masekela has been through them all.
Now he has now broadened his act beyond music to include educating township children on the dangers of addiction, talking about more than four decades on drugs and alcohol.
"I've had a long dysfunctional life," he told Reuters after speaking to a school in Tembisa township outside Johannesburg.
"I wouldn't like to see them go through the drug addiction, the womanizing, just the craziness. I think it's very important to warn them but also to warn them to have passion for what they want to be."
Born in 1939, Masekela grew up in Johannesburg's Alexandra township, where he says music flourished as the white apartheid government clamped down on rights.
Shortly after his school closed because the Anglican cleric who ran it refused to obey the government's edict that blacks receive less education, Masekela left a letter to his parents saying he was abandoning learning and going off to make his life in jazz.
He never looked back.
MUSIC IN HIS EARS
"All I hear is music in my ears," he wrote to them. "Nothing else seems to matter."
Playing a trumpet donated by American jazz legend Louis Armstrong, he first joined a band in South Africa before leaving for London in 1960 and then traveling on to the United States.
His 1968 single "Grazing in the Grass" hit the number one spot around the world, but he was frequently in trouble with the authorities, being arrested several times for drug possession in the United States and Zimbabwe.
Masekela, who was briefly married in the 1960s to Miriam Makeba, the first black South African singer to gain international fame, returned to Africa numerous times.
He played at a concert during the festivities around the famed 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" fight between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, the capital of the former Zaire.
Remaining in exile "only in body," Masekela returned to South Africa in 1991 to tour the country as the apartheid system was in its death throes.
"We played to ... audiences for four months all over the country." he said. "That was a joy because that was my return home, but it's been like that ever since."
In his autobiography "Still Grazing," he says after his return to South Africa his addictions continued, with his partners and investors closing down his Johannesburg night club as they realized he was a bad risk and was losing money.
After a last night of cocaine, alcohol, smoking and sex, friends helped him check into a clinic in Britain.
"They turn you into a different person," he warns children in Tembisa about drugs. "Just say no. No thank you."
"Just say no. No thank you," they chant back.
Despite the end of apartheid, Masekela says the country still has a long way to go in its reforms. South Africa has one of the widest divisions between rich and poor in the world.
IF MUSIC COULD CHANGE THE WORLD
"We're not being chased by police any more and we're not harassed, but we're still poor," he said.
"If the people who control the economy are not willing to show charity and goodwill, then circumstances will always remain the same."
His latest song talks about AIDS (news - web sites), poverty and violence, but Masekela says he expects his music to have limited impact.
"If music could change the world, Bob Dylan (news) and Bob Marley would have changed it long ago," he said.
"I'm just a mirror of my society. I don't think music can make miracles. It might bring awareness to certain people but it's just a drop in the ocean."
Now aged 65 and happily married to his fourth wife, Masekela says that while he still enjoys his music he doesn't want to continue forever.
"I don't plan to be doing this when I'm 70," he told Reuters after a concert. "I've got other things to do, books to write, grandchildren to raise and laughs to laugh."
From: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=769&u=/nm/20040909/music_nm/safrica_masekela_dc&printer=1
By Peter Apps
TEMBISA, South Africa (Reuters) - Exile, alcoholism, drug addiction, discrimination, failed marriages -- South African jazz icon Hugh Masekela has been through them all.
Now he has now broadened his act beyond music to include educating township children on the dangers of addiction, talking about more than four decades on drugs and alcohol.
"I've had a long dysfunctional life," he told Reuters after speaking to a school in Tembisa township outside Johannesburg.
"I wouldn't like to see them go through the drug addiction, the womanizing, just the craziness. I think it's very important to warn them but also to warn them to have passion for what they want to be."
Born in 1939, Masekela grew up in Johannesburg's Alexandra township, where he says music flourished as the white apartheid government clamped down on rights.
Shortly after his school closed because the Anglican cleric who ran it refused to obey the government's edict that blacks receive less education, Masekela left a letter to his parents saying he was abandoning learning and going off to make his life in jazz.
He never looked back.
MUSIC IN HIS EARS
"All I hear is music in my ears," he wrote to them. "Nothing else seems to matter."
Playing a trumpet donated by American jazz legend Louis Armstrong, he first joined a band in South Africa before leaving for London in 1960 and then traveling on to the United States.
His 1968 single "Grazing in the Grass" hit the number one spot around the world, but he was frequently in trouble with the authorities, being arrested several times for drug possession in the United States and Zimbabwe.
Masekela, who was briefly married in the 1960s to Miriam Makeba, the first black South African singer to gain international fame, returned to Africa numerous times.
He played at a concert during the festivities around the famed 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" fight between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, the capital of the former Zaire.
Remaining in exile "only in body," Masekela returned to South Africa in 1991 to tour the country as the apartheid system was in its death throes.
"We played to ... audiences for four months all over the country." he said. "That was a joy because that was my return home, but it's been like that ever since."
In his autobiography "Still Grazing," he says after his return to South Africa his addictions continued, with his partners and investors closing down his Johannesburg night club as they realized he was a bad risk and was losing money.
After a last night of cocaine, alcohol, smoking and sex, friends helped him check into a clinic in Britain.
"They turn you into a different person," he warns children in Tembisa about drugs. "Just say no. No thank you."
"Just say no. No thank you," they chant back.
Despite the end of apartheid, Masekela says the country still has a long way to go in its reforms. South Africa has one of the widest divisions between rich and poor in the world.
IF MUSIC COULD CHANGE THE WORLD
"We're not being chased by police any more and we're not harassed, but we're still poor," he said.
"If the people who control the economy are not willing to show charity and goodwill, then circumstances will always remain the same."
His latest song talks about AIDS (news - web sites), poverty and violence, but Masekela says he expects his music to have limited impact.
"If music could change the world, Bob Dylan (news) and Bob Marley would have changed it long ago," he said.
"I'm just a mirror of my society. I don't think music can make miracles. It might bring awareness to certain people but it's just a drop in the ocean."
Now aged 65 and happily married to his fourth wife, Masekela says that while he still enjoys his music he doesn't want to continue forever.
"I don't plan to be doing this when I'm 70," he told Reuters after a concert. "I've got other things to do, books to write, grandchildren to raise and laughs to laugh."
From: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=769&u=/nm/20040909/music_nm/safrica_masekela_dc&printer=1
Yahoo News > Reuters > S.African Musician Masekela Tells of Drug Risks
Wed Sep 8, 9:18 PM ET
By Peter Apps
TEMBISA, South Africa (Reuters) - Exile, alcoholism, drug addiction, discrimination, failed marriages -- South African jazz icon Hugh Masekela has been through them all.
Now he has now broadened his act beyond music to include educating township children on the dangers of addiction, talking about more than four decades on drugs and alcohol.
"I've had a long dysfunctional life," he told Reuters after speaking to a school in Tembisa township outside Johannesburg.
"I wouldn't like to see them go through the drug addiction, the womanizing, just the craziness. I think it's very important to warn them but also to warn them to have passion for what they want to be."
Born in 1939, Masekela grew up in Johannesburg's Alexandra township, where he says music flourished as the white apartheid government clamped down on rights.
Shortly after his school closed because the Anglican cleric who ran it refused to obey the government's edict that blacks receive less education, Masekela left a letter to his parents saying he was abandoning learning and going off to make his life in jazz.
He never looked back.
MUSIC IN HIS EARS
"All I hear is music in my ears," he wrote to them. "Nothing else seems to matter."
Playing a trumpet donated by American jazz legend Louis Armstrong, he first joined a band in South Africa before leaving for London in 1960 and then traveling on to the United States.
His 1968 single "Grazing in the Grass" hit the number one spot around the world, but he was frequently in trouble with the authorities, being arrested several times for drug possession in the United States and Zimbabwe.
Masekela, who was briefly married in the 1960s to Miriam Makeba, the first black South African singer to gain international fame, returned to Africa numerous times.
He played at a concert during the festivities around the famed 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" fight between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, the capital of the former Zaire.
Remaining in exile "only in body," Masekela returned to South Africa in 1991 to tour the country as the apartheid system was in its death throes.
"We played to ... audiences for four months all over the country." he said. "That was a joy because that was my return home, but it's been like that ever since."
In his autobiography "Still Grazing," he says after his return to South Africa his addictions continued, with his partners and investors closing down his Johannesburg night club as they realized he was a bad risk and was losing money.
After a last night of cocaine, alcohol, smoking and sex, friends helped him check into a clinic in Britain.
"They turn you into a different person," he warns children in Tembisa about drugs. "Just say no. No thank you."
"Just say no. No thank you," they chant back.
Despite the end of apartheid, Masekela says the country still has a long way to go in its reforms. South Africa has one of the widest divisions between rich and poor in the world.
IF MUSIC COULD CHANGE THE WORLD
"We're not being chased by police any more and we're not harassed, but we're still poor," he said.
"If the people who control the economy are not willing to show charity and goodwill, then circumstances will always remain the same."
His latest song talks about AIDS (news - web sites), poverty and violence, but Masekela says he expects his music to have limited impact.
"If music could change the world, Bob Dylan (news) and Bob Marley would have changed it long ago," he said.
"I'm just a mirror of my society. I don't think music can make miracles. It might bring awareness to certain people but it's just a drop in the ocean."
Now aged 65 and happily married to his fourth wife, Masekela says that while he still enjoys his music he doesn't want to continue forever.
"I don't plan to be doing this when I'm 70," he told Reuters after a concert. "I've got other things to do, books to write, grandchildren to raise and laughs to laugh."
From: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=769&u=/nm/20040909/music_nm/safrica_masekela_dc&printer=1
By Peter Apps
TEMBISA, South Africa (Reuters) - Exile, alcoholism, drug addiction, discrimination, failed marriages -- South African jazz icon Hugh Masekela has been through them all.
Now he has now broadened his act beyond music to include educating township children on the dangers of addiction, talking about more than four decades on drugs and alcohol.
"I've had a long dysfunctional life," he told Reuters after speaking to a school in Tembisa township outside Johannesburg.
"I wouldn't like to see them go through the drug addiction, the womanizing, just the craziness. I think it's very important to warn them but also to warn them to have passion for what they want to be."
Born in 1939, Masekela grew up in Johannesburg's Alexandra township, where he says music flourished as the white apartheid government clamped down on rights.
Shortly after his school closed because the Anglican cleric who ran it refused to obey the government's edict that blacks receive less education, Masekela left a letter to his parents saying he was abandoning learning and going off to make his life in jazz.
He never looked back.
MUSIC IN HIS EARS
"All I hear is music in my ears," he wrote to them. "Nothing else seems to matter."
Playing a trumpet donated by American jazz legend Louis Armstrong, he first joined a band in South Africa before leaving for London in 1960 and then traveling on to the United States.
His 1968 single "Grazing in the Grass" hit the number one spot around the world, but he was frequently in trouble with the authorities, being arrested several times for drug possession in the United States and Zimbabwe.
Masekela, who was briefly married in the 1960s to Miriam Makeba, the first black South African singer to gain international fame, returned to Africa numerous times.
He played at a concert during the festivities around the famed 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" fight between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, the capital of the former Zaire.
Remaining in exile "only in body," Masekela returned to South Africa in 1991 to tour the country as the apartheid system was in its death throes.
"We played to ... audiences for four months all over the country." he said. "That was a joy because that was my return home, but it's been like that ever since."
In his autobiography "Still Grazing," he says after his return to South Africa his addictions continued, with his partners and investors closing down his Johannesburg night club as they realized he was a bad risk and was losing money.
After a last night of cocaine, alcohol, smoking and sex, friends helped him check into a clinic in Britain.
"They turn you into a different person," he warns children in Tembisa about drugs. "Just say no. No thank you."
"Just say no. No thank you," they chant back.
Despite the end of apartheid, Masekela says the country still has a long way to go in its reforms. South Africa has one of the widest divisions between rich and poor in the world.
IF MUSIC COULD CHANGE THE WORLD
"We're not being chased by police any more and we're not harassed, but we're still poor," he said.
"If the people who control the economy are not willing to show charity and goodwill, then circumstances will always remain the same."
His latest song talks about AIDS (news - web sites), poverty and violence, but Masekela says he expects his music to have limited impact.
"If music could change the world, Bob Dylan (news) and Bob Marley would have changed it long ago," he said.
"I'm just a mirror of my society. I don't think music can make miracles. It might bring awareness to certain people but it's just a drop in the ocean."
Now aged 65 and happily married to his fourth wife, Masekela says that while he still enjoys his music he doesn't want to continue forever.
"I don't plan to be doing this when I'm 70," he told Reuters after a concert. "I've got other things to do, books to write, grandchildren to raise and laughs to laugh."
From: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=769&u=/nm/20040909/music_nm/safrica_masekela_dc&printer=1
MissionCreep.com > Sun Ra:Stranger from Outer Space by Mike Walsh
In tomorrow's world, men will not need artificial instruments such as jets and space ships. In the world of tomorrow, the new man will 'think' the place he wants to go, then his mind will take him there. -- Sun Ra, 1956
Nothing about Sun Ra's six-decade musical career could be called normal. He recorded somewhere around 200 albums, although no one knows for sure. He toured the world, was revered in Europe, and staged at least three 100 piece concerts, one at the pyramids in Egypt. He was the subject of several films, pioneered the use of electronic keyboards like Moog synthesizers, created his own independent record label, and influenced countless jazz and rock musicians. His pronouncements were drenched in his unique cosmic mysticism, and his band members claimed he had telepathic powers. Most importantly, he made music, as he wrote, "rushing forth like a fiery law."
Sun Ra claimed that he was sent to earth from outer space to save humanity and bring harmony to the world. If you were lucky enough to catch Sun Ra's live show before he died in 1993, you probably believed him.
Mr. Ra came from the tradition of vaudeville, swing, and Chicago show clubs. He was also deeply spiritual, and his live shows encompassed all of these elements. They were several hour ritualistic ceremonies featuring a hot orchestra of a dozen or more (referred to as the "Arkestra"), poetry, light shows, dancers, marches through the audience, and squealing sax solos.
Sometimes the band members would take the stage to the chant of "Heigh-ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go." Most shows included a long percussion jam with the horn players switching to persussion instruments, many of them homemade. If he was in the mood, Ra would take a synthesizer solo that inevitably erupted in a volcanic crescendo.
The Arkestra members wore colorful, glistening outfits that were a combination of African tribesman garb and outer space suits. As was appropriate for a high priest, Sun Ra usually wore the most outrageous outfit, with a headdress and flowing cloak.
Jerry Gordon, who co-owns Evidence Music, which has re-issued twenty early Sun Ra albums on CD, remembers being overwhelmed by the first Sun Ra show he saw in the early 70s.
"It was an incredible concert," he says. "It was music like I had never heard before. Ra and the dancers were wearing capes. Fans on the floor blew the capes so they looked like multicolored wings. They had a spiral light on John Gilmore during his solos that created a tunnel effect. Ra was also using lights to make it look like he was sticking his head in a black hole in space. It was just unbelievable. I considered it holy music, music people should hear."
If you didn't get a chance to see Sun Ra perform, you should seek out Space is the Place, an early 70s movie starring the jazz master from Saturn himself. Ra floats about in a rocket ship propelled by his music and does battle with the FBI, NASA, and other supernatural bad guys. The movie has a cosmic humor, and like Sun Ra it is at times fascinating, indecipherable, and absurd.
The Arkestra makes several appearances in the film in full regalia, and the soundtrack, also re-issued by Evidence, is full of ferocious full-orchestra jams. Horn, percussion, and synthesizer freakouts move in and out like waves of turbulence on sixteen tracks of Sun Ra favorites.
Sun Ra's costumes are extravagant, even for him. The film was directed by filmmaker Jim Newman, who has since admitted that even he doesn't understand it. (Space is the Place is currently available on video from Rhapsody Films.)
If you find earth boring
Just the same old same thing
C'mon sign up with
Outer Spaceways, Incorporated
Sun Ra was born Herman P. Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama. His father left the family when he was a child, and he was raised mostly by his aunt and grandmother. 'Sonny,' as he was nicknamed, received a piano for his seventh birthday, and with little musical training, taught himself to read music.
He formed his own band in high school, and an associate from those days recalls that back then Sonny was able "to get different rhythms and peculiar notes."
Sonny went to Alabama A&M on a scholarship, where he led the student band. He would transcribe the popular swing band tunes from the radio and soon have his band playing them.
While in college, an incident took place that transformed his life. He claimed that he had been transported into a spaceship by aliens, who informed him of his higher calling. He dropped out of college and, for several years leading up to World War II, played throughout the South with various Birmingham-based bands. He had to play behind a curtain in certain southern clubs because the white patrons objected to the sight of black musicians.
It was during this time that Blount developed a rehearsal style that he would use the rest of his life: he turned his living quarters into a rehearsal and recording studio and practiced virtually around the clock. He also recruited a cadre of musicians--not quite a 'band' because they performed in public very infrequently--and gave them free music lessons if they were willing to show up at his house on short notice and try out his arrangements.
During World War II, Sonny Blount was jailed for being a conscientious objector. He was so engrossed in music and his research in ancient black cultures and so adverse to violence, that fighting in a war was inconceivable to him. He left Birmingham for good after the war and moved to Chicago, a jazz hotbed.
He was soon hired as the practice pianist at the popular and glamorous Club DeLisa, which had show girls, comedians, singers, and floor shows. At the DeLisa he got to work with his idol, Fletcher Henderson, one of the originators of the swing sound.
Even in the '40s other musicians spoke of the strangeness of the music he played. Erskine Hawkins said of Blount in the '40s, "Sun Ra would go into chords that nowadays are pretty common but back then were in another world." He was nicknamed "Moon Man" for his spacey lingo and far-out music, although he went by the stage name of Sonny Lee.
In the early '50s, he formed small groups that played mostly be-bop and standards. He slowly increased the number of musicians in his combo. Some of them were still in high school. As trumpeter Phil Cohran explains, "He had a lot of trouble with the so-called good musicians. He became successful when he started training young guys."
John Gilmore, the band's tenor saxophone mainstay for the next four decades, joined Le Sony'r Ra, as he was known then, in 1953 after a stint in the Army. Pat Patrick and Marshall Allen, sax players who would work with Sun Ra for decades, also joined up during this early period.
By the mid-'50s, he had dubbed himself Sun Ra, and the band, which had grown to a dozen players, was known as his 'Arkestra.' In 1956, he established Saturn Records to produce and distribute his records.
This was an extremely creative period for Ra, who would write new material constantly and sleep very little. His band practiced, recorded, and played virtually every day. After a few years, Ra had whipped the outfit into a tight, focused, swingin' machine. It was an eccentric ensemble that could swing or play exotic mood pieces.
By the late '50s, Ra was incorporating odd instruments into the Arkestra's sound, like zithers, timbales, chimes, claves, all kinds of bells and gongs, and things with names like "solar drum," "space lute," and "boom bam." He also had the Arkestra wearing space costumes, like helmets with flashing lights and propellers. Some of the early costumes were hand-me-downs from a Chicago opera company.
The Arkestra's sound was becoming increasingly abstract. Ra was experimenting with pieces that dealt more with sound coloring and texture than structure. He was also utilizing African rhythms with multiple percussionists, which was unusual for the late '50s.
In 1961, the Arkestra moved to Montreal briefly and, following a series of aborted gigs, then to New York. By that time, only Gilmore, Allen, and bassist Ronnie Boykins remained with the Arkestra.
Within a few years, Ra built the ensemble back up to full strength with New York musicians and began to attract attention. He was part of the "free jazz" revolution taking place in Greenwich Village in the '60s along with John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and others.
"As we started adding New York musicians, we started moving to the avant-garde," said John Gilmore. "That was right in our bag, and we were ready for it because Sun Ra had trained us in Chicago, playing half tones and quarter tones, stuff like that."
By the mid-'60s, Sun Ra and the Arkestra weren't just visiting deep space; it was their permanent residence. The music had become an otherworldly mix of atonal, aberrant, sounds and effects. Sun Ra had transformed his eccentric big band of hard bop soloists into a experimental open-improvisation ensemble. Ra was becoming "the philosopher-king of Afro-psychedelia," as writer Michael Shore put it.
Ra's music of this period was typified by counter melodies, off-key horn barrages, polyrhythms, titanic organ and synthesizer solos, and dissonant note clusters. The works were getting longer and the solos more stretched-out. A piece might be in several different keys, in no key at all, or in Ra's so-called "space key." When he was charged with being too eccentric, Ra pushed himself even further into the void.
Despite the pioneering far-outness, Sun Ra objected to the term "free" jazz. His pieces weren't free. They were carefully crafted, structured works.
The Arkestra was known by a variety of names including the Solar Myth Arkestra, Cosmo Jet Set Arkestra, Myth-Science Arkestra, Intergalactic Research Arkestra, and Astro-Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra. The pay was usually so low that many of the musicians played outside gigs with other bands.
In late 1968, Ra moved the Arkestra to Philadelphia. "To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth," he later explained, "and that was Philadelphia, which is death's headquarters."
Actually, the Arkestra was faced with eviction from the house it rented in the Lower East Side, so the band relocated when Marshall Allen's mother offered them a rowhouse in the Germantown section of the city. "We didn't have anywhere else to go," Gilmore said.
In the late '60s, vocalist and dancer June Tyson joined the arkestra. Ra had decided to spread his message through lyrics as well as music, and Tyson fit the Arkestra perfectly in spirit and style. She eventually became Sun Ra's foil, confidently espousing Ra's puzzling ideology. She said that when she was on stage singing Sun Ra's lyrics, she thought of herself as a celestial being.
During the next few years, Ra and the Arkestra traveled several times to California. In 1971, Ra taught a course at Berkeley called "The Black Man in the Cosmos." Few students took the course, although large numbers of Oakland residents attended. The reading list included the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, and books on hieroglyphics. Ra also spent part of each class playing the keyboards. He responded to the puzzled students' questions with a riddle or a knowing smile. He was never paid for the course.
Impulse, a division of ABC, released a handful of Sun Ra LPs in the '70s. These releases gave him wide distribution and international exposure for the first time.
As Sun Ra's reputation grew, he and the Arkestra, which at times grew to thirty members, toured extensively especially in Europe. They even visited Egypt for a spiritual vacation and concert. Gilmore calls the visit to the pyramids, "The most beautiful experience I had on this earth. It made everything worthwhile."
Like many jazz musicians, Ra received much more acclaim in Europe than in the U.S. Unfortunately, the European tours usually generated no more income than was necessary for expenses.
Gilmore remembered the Arkestra returning from a European tour with nothing more than pocket change. "It was rough at pay time with all those guys in the band," he said, "but that's what Sun Ra always wanted, that big sound."
Hundreds of musicians came through the Arkestra over the years, some lasting only a few gigs and some, like saxophonist John Gilmore, lasting decades. But being in the Arkestra was a difficult way of life. The band members never made much money, and Ra demanded discipline and hard work. He banned drugs, alcohol, and women, and band members had to be available for practice around-the-clock.
Despite these inconveniences and Ra's many idiosyncrasies, virtually all of the musicians who came through Sun Ra's Arkestra attest to how much they learned from him.
When asked why he stayed with Sun Ra for forty years, John Gilmore remarked, "He was the first one to introduce me to the higher forms of music, past what Bird and Monk were doing. It's unbelievable that anyone could write meaner intervals than those guys, but he did. When I realized that, I said, 'Well, I guess I'll make this the stop.'"
Gilmore almost left Sun Ra in the '50s but changed his mind. "I learned more from Sun Ra in my first nine months with him than I had my whole life, not only in music but in philosophy and life in general. He elevated my whole scene. He changed my life."
During his 40-year recording career, Sun Ra released well over 100 self-produced records on Saturn and distributed them at his gigs and a few choice record stores. They were usually packaged in white sleeves with wild homemade cover art.
The Saturn records were full of discrepancies that Ra seemed to enjoy. "Some of the records he had recorded in 1956, '57, or '58, and didn't come out until, say, 1965," says Gordon, who sold Sun Ra's records at Third Street Jazz & Rock in Philadelphia. "Stuff from three different years and three different sessions would appear on a record. Almost always the records listed the wrong personnel. Some had no titles, no dates, no documentation. Everything to do with his label was confused, and I believe it was intentionally confused. He'd bring in a Saturn record, I'd sell out of it, but I could never get it back because he'd pressed a different album already. Some of them had no title, just a psychedelic design on the cover."
Outer space is a pleasant place
A place where you can be free
There's no limit to the things you can do
Your thought is free and your life is worthwhile
Space is the place
By far, the oddest element to Sun Ra's career was his eccentric philosophy. He always appeared in an outer space costume and never relinquished his odd ideology, going space-bound whenever it suited his purpose.
"I'm a spirit master," he said. "I've been to a zone where there is no air, no light, no sound, no life, no death, nothing. There's five billion people on this planet, all out of tune. I've got to raise their consciousness, tell them about the wonderful potential to bypass death."
He claimed that cars and rocket ships would one day run on music, presumably his music. He refused to reveal much about his past. "That's his-story," he'd say. "My story is a my-stery." With his soft monotone voice, he gave the impression of a musical Buddha, speaking in riddles and contradictions at every opportunity.
"People loved to question Sun Ra about being born on Saturn, but these things were said to bring people out of their normal, humdrum, everyday reality," says Gordon. "It's not about whether he's telling the truth. He tried to express his vision and get people out of the shadow world with his music. He was an educator and philosopher who tried to enlighten people."
Sun Ra's mysticism was based on faith in a better world elsewhere. "Somewhere in the other side of nowhere is a place in space beyond time where the Gods of mythology dwell," Mr. Ra said. "These gods dwell in their mythocracies as opposed to your theocracies, democracies, and monocracies. They dwell in a magic world. These Gods can even offer you immortality."
Ra confused and confounded the mainstream jazz world, and he found little acceptance or recognition there. Purists ignored him as an eccentric kook, and many jazz critics found his idiosyncrasies annoying. He was the antithesis of slick, smooth, high-profile, commercially-acceptable jazz musician. He simply refused to compromise and preferred to operate as a cult figure outside the jazz establishment.
"A lot of people never got past the costumes and the mysticism," says Gordon, "but Sun Ra was a genius and was not nearly as popular as he should've been. You could put out a college kid doing the music of Sun Ra, and it would probably sell better than Sun Ra."
Near the end of his life, Ra complained about the lack of acceptance and recognition he received in this country. He was especially bitter about Philadelphia. "The city has insulted me," he said in 1988. "I've been in this city long enough to be respected. There's a conspiracy, not by the government, I don't know who, to keep my music down."
In the late '80s and early '90s, Sun Ra did garner national recognition. The alternative rock world embraced him as a major influence. The Arkestra played a gig on Saturday Night Live and jammed in Central Park with Sonic Youth. Robert Mugge made an excellent documentary about him and his space age theology called Sun Ra, A Joyful Noise. He was honored with the Liberty Bowl award from the city of Philadelphia and was voted the top big band in a Downbeat magazine critic's poll. And for the first time, he released two recordings on a major label-A&M.
However, Sun Ra suffered a stroke in October 1992 and returned to his native Birmingham for medical care. (Ever the cosmic jester, when he was admitted to the hospital he listed his address as "Saturn.") On May 30, 1993, the spirit master from outer space left this world. He was 80 years old.
All of Sun Ra's music was steeped in the past but was simultaneously pioneering. He used tradition not to repeat but to take the music somewhere new. Whatever the style, his music always challenged the listener.
"Sun Ra's music didn't need any explanation," says Jerry Gordon. "Once you stopped trying to intellectualize it and just gave yourself to it, the music was self-evident. You can't look for secrets of the universe in it. You understand Sun Ra only by listening to the arkestra and abandoning yourself to the music."
In his music he created a utopian world with its own logic and mysteries. His live shows, like a religious ceremony, invited the audience to take up concerns beyond this world. Part sci-fi shaman, part comic book character, part genius, Sun Ra wanted to lead us to a cosmic paradise through his music. His music was a blessing of mysterious grace from a world only he understood. As he once wrote:
In some far off place
Many light years in space
I'll build a world of abstract dreams
And wait for you
From: http://www.missioncreep.com/mw/sunra.html
Nothing about Sun Ra's six-decade musical career could be called normal. He recorded somewhere around 200 albums, although no one knows for sure. He toured the world, was revered in Europe, and staged at least three 100 piece concerts, one at the pyramids in Egypt. He was the subject of several films, pioneered the use of electronic keyboards like Moog synthesizers, created his own independent record label, and influenced countless jazz and rock musicians. His pronouncements were drenched in his unique cosmic mysticism, and his band members claimed he had telepathic powers. Most importantly, he made music, as he wrote, "rushing forth like a fiery law."
Sun Ra claimed that he was sent to earth from outer space to save humanity and bring harmony to the world. If you were lucky enough to catch Sun Ra's live show before he died in 1993, you probably believed him.
Mr. Ra came from the tradition of vaudeville, swing, and Chicago show clubs. He was also deeply spiritual, and his live shows encompassed all of these elements. They were several hour ritualistic ceremonies featuring a hot orchestra of a dozen or more (referred to as the "Arkestra"), poetry, light shows, dancers, marches through the audience, and squealing sax solos.
Sometimes the band members would take the stage to the chant of "Heigh-ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go." Most shows included a long percussion jam with the horn players switching to persussion instruments, many of them homemade. If he was in the mood, Ra would take a synthesizer solo that inevitably erupted in a volcanic crescendo.
The Arkestra members wore colorful, glistening outfits that were a combination of African tribesman garb and outer space suits. As was appropriate for a high priest, Sun Ra usually wore the most outrageous outfit, with a headdress and flowing cloak.
Jerry Gordon, who co-owns Evidence Music, which has re-issued twenty early Sun Ra albums on CD, remembers being overwhelmed by the first Sun Ra show he saw in the early 70s.
"It was an incredible concert," he says. "It was music like I had never heard before. Ra and the dancers were wearing capes. Fans on the floor blew the capes so they looked like multicolored wings. They had a spiral light on John Gilmore during his solos that created a tunnel effect. Ra was also using lights to make it look like he was sticking his head in a black hole in space. It was just unbelievable. I considered it holy music, music people should hear."
If you didn't get a chance to see Sun Ra perform, you should seek out Space is the Place, an early 70s movie starring the jazz master from Saturn himself. Ra floats about in a rocket ship propelled by his music and does battle with the FBI, NASA, and other supernatural bad guys. The movie has a cosmic humor, and like Sun Ra it is at times fascinating, indecipherable, and absurd.
The Arkestra makes several appearances in the film in full regalia, and the soundtrack, also re-issued by Evidence, is full of ferocious full-orchestra jams. Horn, percussion, and synthesizer freakouts move in and out like waves of turbulence on sixteen tracks of Sun Ra favorites.
Sun Ra's costumes are extravagant, even for him. The film was directed by filmmaker Jim Newman, who has since admitted that even he doesn't understand it. (Space is the Place is currently available on video from Rhapsody Films.)
If you find earth boring
Just the same old same thing
C'mon sign up with
Outer Spaceways, Incorporated
Sun Ra was born Herman P. Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama. His father left the family when he was a child, and he was raised mostly by his aunt and grandmother. 'Sonny,' as he was nicknamed, received a piano for his seventh birthday, and with little musical training, taught himself to read music.
He formed his own band in high school, and an associate from those days recalls that back then Sonny was able "to get different rhythms and peculiar notes."
Sonny went to Alabama A&M on a scholarship, where he led the student band. He would transcribe the popular swing band tunes from the radio and soon have his band playing them.
While in college, an incident took place that transformed his life. He claimed that he had been transported into a spaceship by aliens, who informed him of his higher calling. He dropped out of college and, for several years leading up to World War II, played throughout the South with various Birmingham-based bands. He had to play behind a curtain in certain southern clubs because the white patrons objected to the sight of black musicians.
It was during this time that Blount developed a rehearsal style that he would use the rest of his life: he turned his living quarters into a rehearsal and recording studio and practiced virtually around the clock. He also recruited a cadre of musicians--not quite a 'band' because they performed in public very infrequently--and gave them free music lessons if they were willing to show up at his house on short notice and try out his arrangements.
During World War II, Sonny Blount was jailed for being a conscientious objector. He was so engrossed in music and his research in ancient black cultures and so adverse to violence, that fighting in a war was inconceivable to him. He left Birmingham for good after the war and moved to Chicago, a jazz hotbed.
He was soon hired as the practice pianist at the popular and glamorous Club DeLisa, which had show girls, comedians, singers, and floor shows. At the DeLisa he got to work with his idol, Fletcher Henderson, one of the originators of the swing sound.
Even in the '40s other musicians spoke of the strangeness of the music he played. Erskine Hawkins said of Blount in the '40s, "Sun Ra would go into chords that nowadays are pretty common but back then were in another world." He was nicknamed "Moon Man" for his spacey lingo and far-out music, although he went by the stage name of Sonny Lee.
In the early '50s, he formed small groups that played mostly be-bop and standards. He slowly increased the number of musicians in his combo. Some of them were still in high school. As trumpeter Phil Cohran explains, "He had a lot of trouble with the so-called good musicians. He became successful when he started training young guys."
John Gilmore, the band's tenor saxophone mainstay for the next four decades, joined Le Sony'r Ra, as he was known then, in 1953 after a stint in the Army. Pat Patrick and Marshall Allen, sax players who would work with Sun Ra for decades, also joined up during this early period.
By the mid-'50s, he had dubbed himself Sun Ra, and the band, which had grown to a dozen players, was known as his 'Arkestra.' In 1956, he established Saturn Records to produce and distribute his records.
This was an extremely creative period for Ra, who would write new material constantly and sleep very little. His band practiced, recorded, and played virtually every day. After a few years, Ra had whipped the outfit into a tight, focused, swingin' machine. It was an eccentric ensemble that could swing or play exotic mood pieces.
By the late '50s, Ra was incorporating odd instruments into the Arkestra's sound, like zithers, timbales, chimes, claves, all kinds of bells and gongs, and things with names like "solar drum," "space lute," and "boom bam." He also had the Arkestra wearing space costumes, like helmets with flashing lights and propellers. Some of the early costumes were hand-me-downs from a Chicago opera company.
The Arkestra's sound was becoming increasingly abstract. Ra was experimenting with pieces that dealt more with sound coloring and texture than structure. He was also utilizing African rhythms with multiple percussionists, which was unusual for the late '50s.
In 1961, the Arkestra moved to Montreal briefly and, following a series of aborted gigs, then to New York. By that time, only Gilmore, Allen, and bassist Ronnie Boykins remained with the Arkestra.
Within a few years, Ra built the ensemble back up to full strength with New York musicians and began to attract attention. He was part of the "free jazz" revolution taking place in Greenwich Village in the '60s along with John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and others.
"As we started adding New York musicians, we started moving to the avant-garde," said John Gilmore. "That was right in our bag, and we were ready for it because Sun Ra had trained us in Chicago, playing half tones and quarter tones, stuff like that."
By the mid-'60s, Sun Ra and the Arkestra weren't just visiting deep space; it was their permanent residence. The music had become an otherworldly mix of atonal, aberrant, sounds and effects. Sun Ra had transformed his eccentric big band of hard bop soloists into a experimental open-improvisation ensemble. Ra was becoming "the philosopher-king of Afro-psychedelia," as writer Michael Shore put it.
Ra's music of this period was typified by counter melodies, off-key horn barrages, polyrhythms, titanic organ and synthesizer solos, and dissonant note clusters. The works were getting longer and the solos more stretched-out. A piece might be in several different keys, in no key at all, or in Ra's so-called "space key." When he was charged with being too eccentric, Ra pushed himself even further into the void.
Despite the pioneering far-outness, Sun Ra objected to the term "free" jazz. His pieces weren't free. They were carefully crafted, structured works.
The Arkestra was known by a variety of names including the Solar Myth Arkestra, Cosmo Jet Set Arkestra, Myth-Science Arkestra, Intergalactic Research Arkestra, and Astro-Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra. The pay was usually so low that many of the musicians played outside gigs with other bands.
In late 1968, Ra moved the Arkestra to Philadelphia. "To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth," he later explained, "and that was Philadelphia, which is death's headquarters."
Actually, the Arkestra was faced with eviction from the house it rented in the Lower East Side, so the band relocated when Marshall Allen's mother offered them a rowhouse in the Germantown section of the city. "We didn't have anywhere else to go," Gilmore said.
In the late '60s, vocalist and dancer June Tyson joined the arkestra. Ra had decided to spread his message through lyrics as well as music, and Tyson fit the Arkestra perfectly in spirit and style. She eventually became Sun Ra's foil, confidently espousing Ra's puzzling ideology. She said that when she was on stage singing Sun Ra's lyrics, she thought of herself as a celestial being.
During the next few years, Ra and the Arkestra traveled several times to California. In 1971, Ra taught a course at Berkeley called "The Black Man in the Cosmos." Few students took the course, although large numbers of Oakland residents attended. The reading list included the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, and books on hieroglyphics. Ra also spent part of each class playing the keyboards. He responded to the puzzled students' questions with a riddle or a knowing smile. He was never paid for the course.
Impulse, a division of ABC, released a handful of Sun Ra LPs in the '70s. These releases gave him wide distribution and international exposure for the first time.
As Sun Ra's reputation grew, he and the Arkestra, which at times grew to thirty members, toured extensively especially in Europe. They even visited Egypt for a spiritual vacation and concert. Gilmore calls the visit to the pyramids, "The most beautiful experience I had on this earth. It made everything worthwhile."
Like many jazz musicians, Ra received much more acclaim in Europe than in the U.S. Unfortunately, the European tours usually generated no more income than was necessary for expenses.
Gilmore remembered the Arkestra returning from a European tour with nothing more than pocket change. "It was rough at pay time with all those guys in the band," he said, "but that's what Sun Ra always wanted, that big sound."
Hundreds of musicians came through the Arkestra over the years, some lasting only a few gigs and some, like saxophonist John Gilmore, lasting decades. But being in the Arkestra was a difficult way of life. The band members never made much money, and Ra demanded discipline and hard work. He banned drugs, alcohol, and women, and band members had to be available for practice around-the-clock.
Despite these inconveniences and Ra's many idiosyncrasies, virtually all of the musicians who came through Sun Ra's Arkestra attest to how much they learned from him.
When asked why he stayed with Sun Ra for forty years, John Gilmore remarked, "He was the first one to introduce me to the higher forms of music, past what Bird and Monk were doing. It's unbelievable that anyone could write meaner intervals than those guys, but he did. When I realized that, I said, 'Well, I guess I'll make this the stop.'"
Gilmore almost left Sun Ra in the '50s but changed his mind. "I learned more from Sun Ra in my first nine months with him than I had my whole life, not only in music but in philosophy and life in general. He elevated my whole scene. He changed my life."
During his 40-year recording career, Sun Ra released well over 100 self-produced records on Saturn and distributed them at his gigs and a few choice record stores. They were usually packaged in white sleeves with wild homemade cover art.
The Saturn records were full of discrepancies that Ra seemed to enjoy. "Some of the records he had recorded in 1956, '57, or '58, and didn't come out until, say, 1965," says Gordon, who sold Sun Ra's records at Third Street Jazz & Rock in Philadelphia. "Stuff from three different years and three different sessions would appear on a record. Almost always the records listed the wrong personnel. Some had no titles, no dates, no documentation. Everything to do with his label was confused, and I believe it was intentionally confused. He'd bring in a Saturn record, I'd sell out of it, but I could never get it back because he'd pressed a different album already. Some of them had no title, just a psychedelic design on the cover."
Outer space is a pleasant place
A place where you can be free
There's no limit to the things you can do
Your thought is free and your life is worthwhile
Space is the place
By far, the oddest element to Sun Ra's career was his eccentric philosophy. He always appeared in an outer space costume and never relinquished his odd ideology, going space-bound whenever it suited his purpose.
"I'm a spirit master," he said. "I've been to a zone where there is no air, no light, no sound, no life, no death, nothing. There's five billion people on this planet, all out of tune. I've got to raise their consciousness, tell them about the wonderful potential to bypass death."
He claimed that cars and rocket ships would one day run on music, presumably his music. He refused to reveal much about his past. "That's his-story," he'd say. "My story is a my-stery." With his soft monotone voice, he gave the impression of a musical Buddha, speaking in riddles and contradictions at every opportunity.
"People loved to question Sun Ra about being born on Saturn, but these things were said to bring people out of their normal, humdrum, everyday reality," says Gordon. "It's not about whether he's telling the truth. He tried to express his vision and get people out of the shadow world with his music. He was an educator and philosopher who tried to enlighten people."
Sun Ra's mysticism was based on faith in a better world elsewhere. "Somewhere in the other side of nowhere is a place in space beyond time where the Gods of mythology dwell," Mr. Ra said. "These gods dwell in their mythocracies as opposed to your theocracies, democracies, and monocracies. They dwell in a magic world. These Gods can even offer you immortality."
Ra confused and confounded the mainstream jazz world, and he found little acceptance or recognition there. Purists ignored him as an eccentric kook, and many jazz critics found his idiosyncrasies annoying. He was the antithesis of slick, smooth, high-profile, commercially-acceptable jazz musician. He simply refused to compromise and preferred to operate as a cult figure outside the jazz establishment.
"A lot of people never got past the costumes and the mysticism," says Gordon, "but Sun Ra was a genius and was not nearly as popular as he should've been. You could put out a college kid doing the music of Sun Ra, and it would probably sell better than Sun Ra."
Near the end of his life, Ra complained about the lack of acceptance and recognition he received in this country. He was especially bitter about Philadelphia. "The city has insulted me," he said in 1988. "I've been in this city long enough to be respected. There's a conspiracy, not by the government, I don't know who, to keep my music down."
In the late '80s and early '90s, Sun Ra did garner national recognition. The alternative rock world embraced him as a major influence. The Arkestra played a gig on Saturday Night Live and jammed in Central Park with Sonic Youth. Robert Mugge made an excellent documentary about him and his space age theology called Sun Ra, A Joyful Noise. He was honored with the Liberty Bowl award from the city of Philadelphia and was voted the top big band in a Downbeat magazine critic's poll. And for the first time, he released two recordings on a major label-A&M.
However, Sun Ra suffered a stroke in October 1992 and returned to his native Birmingham for medical care. (Ever the cosmic jester, when he was admitted to the hospital he listed his address as "Saturn.") On May 30, 1993, the spirit master from outer space left this world. He was 80 years old.
All of Sun Ra's music was steeped in the past but was simultaneously pioneering. He used tradition not to repeat but to take the music somewhere new. Whatever the style, his music always challenged the listener.
"Sun Ra's music didn't need any explanation," says Jerry Gordon. "Once you stopped trying to intellectualize it and just gave yourself to it, the music was self-evident. You can't look for secrets of the universe in it. You understand Sun Ra only by listening to the arkestra and abandoning yourself to the music."
In his music he created a utopian world with its own logic and mysteries. His live shows, like a religious ceremony, invited the audience to take up concerns beyond this world. Part sci-fi shaman, part comic book character, part genius, Sun Ra wanted to lead us to a cosmic paradise through his music. His music was a blessing of mysterious grace from a world only he understood. As he once wrote:
In some far off place
Many light years in space
I'll build a world of abstract dreams
And wait for you
From: http://www.missioncreep.com/mw/sunra.html
MissionCreep.com > Sun Ra:Stranger from Outer Space by Mike Walsh
In tomorrow's world, men will not need artificial instruments such as jets and space ships. In the world of tomorrow, the new man will 'think' the place he wants to go, then his mind will take him there. -- Sun Ra, 1956
Nothing about Sun Ra's six-decade musical career could be called normal. He recorded somewhere around 200 albums, although no one knows for sure. He toured the world, was revered in Europe, and staged at least three 100 piece concerts, one at the pyramids in Egypt. He was the subject of several films, pioneered the use of electronic keyboards like Moog synthesizers, created his own independent record label, and influenced countless jazz and rock musicians. His pronouncements were drenched in his unique cosmic mysticism, and his band members claimed he had telepathic powers. Most importantly, he made music, as he wrote, "rushing forth like a fiery law."
Sun Ra claimed that he was sent to earth from outer space to save humanity and bring harmony to the world. If you were lucky enough to catch Sun Ra's live show before he died in 1993, you probably believed him.
Mr. Ra came from the tradition of vaudeville, swing, and Chicago show clubs. He was also deeply spiritual, and his live shows encompassed all of these elements. They were several hour ritualistic ceremonies featuring a hot orchestra of a dozen or more (referred to as the "Arkestra"), poetry, light shows, dancers, marches through the audience, and squealing sax solos.
Sometimes the band members would take the stage to the chant of "Heigh-ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go." Most shows included a long percussion jam with the horn players switching to persussion instruments, many of them homemade. If he was in the mood, Ra would take a synthesizer solo that inevitably erupted in a volcanic crescendo.
The Arkestra members wore colorful, glistening outfits that were a combination of African tribesman garb and outer space suits. As was appropriate for a high priest, Sun Ra usually wore the most outrageous outfit, with a headdress and flowing cloak.
Jerry Gordon, who co-owns Evidence Music, which has re-issued twenty early Sun Ra albums on CD, remembers being overwhelmed by the first Sun Ra show he saw in the early 70s.
"It was an incredible concert," he says. "It was music like I had never heard before. Ra and the dancers were wearing capes. Fans on the floor blew the capes so they looked like multicolored wings. They had a spiral light on John Gilmore during his solos that created a tunnel effect. Ra was also using lights to make it look like he was sticking his head in a black hole in space. It was just unbelievable. I considered it holy music, music people should hear."
If you didn't get a chance to see Sun Ra perform, you should seek out Space is the Place, an early 70s movie starring the jazz master from Saturn himself. Ra floats about in a rocket ship propelled by his music and does battle with the FBI, NASA, and other supernatural bad guys. The movie has a cosmic humor, and like Sun Ra it is at times fascinating, indecipherable, and absurd.
The Arkestra makes several appearances in the film in full regalia, and the soundtrack, also re-issued by Evidence, is full of ferocious full-orchestra jams. Horn, percussion, and synthesizer freakouts move in and out like waves of turbulence on sixteen tracks of Sun Ra favorites.
Sun Ra's costumes are extravagant, even for him. The film was directed by filmmaker Jim Newman, who has since admitted that even he doesn't understand it. (Space is the Place is currently available on video from Rhapsody Films.)
If you find earth boring
Just the same old same thing
C'mon sign up with
Outer Spaceways, Incorporated
Sun Ra was born Herman P. Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama. His father left the family when he was a child, and he was raised mostly by his aunt and grandmother. 'Sonny,' as he was nicknamed, received a piano for his seventh birthday, and with little musical training, taught himself to read music.
He formed his own band in high school, and an associate from those days recalls that back then Sonny was able "to get different rhythms and peculiar notes."
Sonny went to Alabama A&M on a scholarship, where he led the student band. He would transcribe the popular swing band tunes from the radio and soon have his band playing them.
While in college, an incident took place that transformed his life. He claimed that he had been transported into a spaceship by aliens, who informed him of his higher calling. He dropped out of college and, for several years leading up to World War II, played throughout the South with various Birmingham-based bands. He had to play behind a curtain in certain southern clubs because the white patrons objected to the sight of black musicians.
It was during this time that Blount developed a rehearsal style that he would use the rest of his life: he turned his living quarters into a rehearsal and recording studio and practiced virtually around the clock. He also recruited a cadre of musicians--not quite a 'band' because they performed in public very infrequently--and gave them free music lessons if they were willing to show up at his house on short notice and try out his arrangements.
During World War II, Sonny Blount was jailed for being a conscientious objector. He was so engrossed in music and his research in ancient black cultures and so adverse to violence, that fighting in a war was inconceivable to him. He left Birmingham for good after the war and moved to Chicago, a jazz hotbed.
He was soon hired as the practice pianist at the popular and glamorous Club DeLisa, which had show girls, comedians, singers, and floor shows. At the DeLisa he got to work with his idol, Fletcher Henderson, one of the originators of the swing sound.
Even in the '40s other musicians spoke of the strangeness of the music he played. Erskine Hawkins said of Blount in the '40s, "Sun Ra would go into chords that nowadays are pretty common but back then were in another world." He was nicknamed "Moon Man" for his spacey lingo and far-out music, although he went by the stage name of Sonny Lee.
In the early '50s, he formed small groups that played mostly be-bop and standards. He slowly increased the number of musicians in his combo. Some of them were still in high school. As trumpeter Phil Cohran explains, "He had a lot of trouble with the so-called good musicians. He became successful when he started training young guys."
John Gilmore, the band's tenor saxophone mainstay for the next four decades, joined Le Sony'r Ra, as he was known then, in 1953 after a stint in the Army. Pat Patrick and Marshall Allen, sax players who would work with Sun Ra for decades, also joined up during this early period.
By the mid-'50s, he had dubbed himself Sun Ra, and the band, which had grown to a dozen players, was known as his 'Arkestra.' In 1956, he established Saturn Records to produce and distribute his records.
This was an extremely creative period for Ra, who would write new material constantly and sleep very little. His band practiced, recorded, and played virtually every day. After a few years, Ra had whipped the outfit into a tight, focused, swingin' machine. It was an eccentric ensemble that could swing or play exotic mood pieces.
By the late '50s, Ra was incorporating odd instruments into the Arkestra's sound, like zithers, timbales, chimes, claves, all kinds of bells and gongs, and things with names like "solar drum," "space lute," and "boom bam." He also had the Arkestra wearing space costumes, like helmets with flashing lights and propellers. Some of the early costumes were hand-me-downs from a Chicago opera company.
The Arkestra's sound was becoming increasingly abstract. Ra was experimenting with pieces that dealt more with sound coloring and texture than structure. He was also utilizing African rhythms with multiple percussionists, which was unusual for the late '50s.
In 1961, the Arkestra moved to Montreal briefly and, following a series of aborted gigs, then to New York. By that time, only Gilmore, Allen, and bassist Ronnie Boykins remained with the Arkestra.
Within a few years, Ra built the ensemble back up to full strength with New York musicians and began to attract attention. He was part of the "free jazz" revolution taking place in Greenwich Village in the '60s along with John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and others.
"As we started adding New York musicians, we started moving to the avant-garde," said John Gilmore. "That was right in our bag, and we were ready for it because Sun Ra had trained us in Chicago, playing half tones and quarter tones, stuff like that."
By the mid-'60s, Sun Ra and the Arkestra weren't just visiting deep space; it was their permanent residence. The music had become an otherworldly mix of atonal, aberrant, sounds and effects. Sun Ra had transformed his eccentric big band of hard bop soloists into a experimental open-improvisation ensemble. Ra was becoming "the philosopher-king of Afro-psychedelia," as writer Michael Shore put it.
Ra's music of this period was typified by counter melodies, off-key horn barrages, polyrhythms, titanic organ and synthesizer solos, and dissonant note clusters. The works were getting longer and the solos more stretched-out. A piece might be in several different keys, in no key at all, or in Ra's so-called "space key." When he was charged with being too eccentric, Ra pushed himself even further into the void.
Despite the pioneering far-outness, Sun Ra objected to the term "free" jazz. His pieces weren't free. They were carefully crafted, structured works.
The Arkestra was known by a variety of names including the Solar Myth Arkestra, Cosmo Jet Set Arkestra, Myth-Science Arkestra, Intergalactic Research Arkestra, and Astro-Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra. The pay was usually so low that many of the musicians played outside gigs with other bands.
In late 1968, Ra moved the Arkestra to Philadelphia. "To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth," he later explained, "and that was Philadelphia, which is death's headquarters."
Actually, the Arkestra was faced with eviction from the house it rented in the Lower East Side, so the band relocated when Marshall Allen's mother offered them a rowhouse in the Germantown section of the city. "We didn't have anywhere else to go," Gilmore said.
In the late '60s, vocalist and dancer June Tyson joined the arkestra. Ra had decided to spread his message through lyrics as well as music, and Tyson fit the Arkestra perfectly in spirit and style. She eventually became Sun Ra's foil, confidently espousing Ra's puzzling ideology. She said that when she was on stage singing Sun Ra's lyrics, she thought of herself as a celestial being.
During the next few years, Ra and the Arkestra traveled several times to California. In 1971, Ra taught a course at Berkeley called "The Black Man in the Cosmos." Few students took the course, although large numbers of Oakland residents attended. The reading list included the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, and books on hieroglyphics. Ra also spent part of each class playing the keyboards. He responded to the puzzled students' questions with a riddle or a knowing smile. He was never paid for the course.
Impulse, a division of ABC, released a handful of Sun Ra LPs in the '70s. These releases gave him wide distribution and international exposure for the first time.
As Sun Ra's reputation grew, he and the Arkestra, which at times grew to thirty members, toured extensively especially in Europe. They even visited Egypt for a spiritual vacation and concert. Gilmore calls the visit to the pyramids, "The most beautiful experience I had on this earth. It made everything worthwhile."
Like many jazz musicians, Ra received much more acclaim in Europe than in the U.S. Unfortunately, the European tours usually generated no more income than was necessary for expenses.
Gilmore remembered the Arkestra returning from a European tour with nothing more than pocket change. "It was rough at pay time with all those guys in the band," he said, "but that's what Sun Ra always wanted, that big sound."
Hundreds of musicians came through the Arkestra over the years, some lasting only a few gigs and some, like saxophonist John Gilmore, lasting decades. But being in the Arkestra was a difficult way of life. The band members never made much money, and Ra demanded discipline and hard work. He banned drugs, alcohol, and women, and band members had to be available for practice around-the-clock.
Despite these inconveniences and Ra's many idiosyncrasies, virtually all of the musicians who came through Sun Ra's Arkestra attest to how much they learned from him.
When asked why he stayed with Sun Ra for forty years, John Gilmore remarked, "He was the first one to introduce me to the higher forms of music, past what Bird and Monk were doing. It's unbelievable that anyone could write meaner intervals than those guys, but he did. When I realized that, I said, 'Well, I guess I'll make this the stop.'"
Gilmore almost left Sun Ra in the '50s but changed his mind. "I learned more from Sun Ra in my first nine months with him than I had my whole life, not only in music but in philosophy and life in general. He elevated my whole scene. He changed my life."
During his 40-year recording career, Sun Ra released well over 100 self-produced records on Saturn and distributed them at his gigs and a few choice record stores. They were usually packaged in white sleeves with wild homemade cover art.
The Saturn records were full of discrepancies that Ra seemed to enjoy. "Some of the records he had recorded in 1956, '57, or '58, and didn't come out until, say, 1965," says Gordon, who sold Sun Ra's records at Third Street Jazz & Rock in Philadelphia. "Stuff from three different years and three different sessions would appear on a record. Almost always the records listed the wrong personnel. Some had no titles, no dates, no documentation. Everything to do with his label was confused, and I believe it was intentionally confused. He'd bring in a Saturn record, I'd sell out of it, but I could never get it back because he'd pressed a different album already. Some of them had no title, just a psychedelic design on the cover."
Outer space is a pleasant place
A place where you can be free
There's no limit to the things you can do
Your thought is free and your life is worthwhile
Space is the place
By far, the oddest element to Sun Ra's career was his eccentric philosophy. He always appeared in an outer space costume and never relinquished his odd ideology, going space-bound whenever it suited his purpose.
"I'm a spirit master," he said. "I've been to a zone where there is no air, no light, no sound, no life, no death, nothing. There's five billion people on this planet, all out of tune. I've got to raise their consciousness, tell them about the wonderful potential to bypass death."
He claimed that cars and rocket ships would one day run on music, presumably his music. He refused to reveal much about his past. "That's his-story," he'd say. "My story is a my-stery." With his soft monotone voice, he gave the impression of a musical Buddha, speaking in riddles and contradictions at every opportunity.
"People loved to question Sun Ra about being born on Saturn, but these things were said to bring people out of their normal, humdrum, everyday reality," says Gordon. "It's not about whether he's telling the truth. He tried to express his vision and get people out of the shadow world with his music. He was an educator and philosopher who tried to enlighten people."
Sun Ra's mysticism was based on faith in a better world elsewhere. "Somewhere in the other side of nowhere is a place in space beyond time where the Gods of mythology dwell," Mr. Ra said. "These gods dwell in their mythocracies as opposed to your theocracies, democracies, and monocracies. They dwell in a magic world. These Gods can even offer you immortality."
Ra confused and confounded the mainstream jazz world, and he found little acceptance or recognition there. Purists ignored him as an eccentric kook, and many jazz critics found his idiosyncrasies annoying. He was the antithesis of slick, smooth, high-profile, commercially-acceptable jazz musician. He simply refused to compromise and preferred to operate as a cult figure outside the jazz establishment.
"A lot of people never got past the costumes and the mysticism," says Gordon, "but Sun Ra was a genius and was not nearly as popular as he should've been. You could put out a college kid doing the music of Sun Ra, and it would probably sell better than Sun Ra."
Near the end of his life, Ra complained about the lack of acceptance and recognition he received in this country. He was especially bitter about Philadelphia. "The city has insulted me," he said in 1988. "I've been in this city long enough to be respected. There's a conspiracy, not by the government, I don't know who, to keep my music down."
In the late '80s and early '90s, Sun Ra did garner national recognition. The alternative rock world embraced him as a major influence. The Arkestra played a gig on Saturday Night Live and jammed in Central Park with Sonic Youth. Robert Mugge made an excellent documentary about him and his space age theology called Sun Ra, A Joyful Noise. He was honored with the Liberty Bowl award from the city of Philadelphia and was voted the top big band in a Downbeat magazine critic's poll. And for the first time, he released two recordings on a major label-A&M.
However, Sun Ra suffered a stroke in October 1992 and returned to his native Birmingham for medical care. (Ever the cosmic jester, when he was admitted to the hospital he listed his address as "Saturn.") On May 30, 1993, the spirit master from outer space left this world. He was 80 years old.
All of Sun Ra's music was steeped in the past but was simultaneously pioneering. He used tradition not to repeat but to take the music somewhere new. Whatever the style, his music always challenged the listener.
"Sun Ra's music didn't need any explanation," says Jerry Gordon. "Once you stopped trying to intellectualize it and just gave yourself to it, the music was self-evident. You can't look for secrets of the universe in it. You understand Sun Ra only by listening to the arkestra and abandoning yourself to the music."
In his music he created a utopian world with its own logic and mysteries. His live shows, like a religious ceremony, invited the audience to take up concerns beyond this world. Part sci-fi shaman, part comic book character, part genius, Sun Ra wanted to lead us to a cosmic paradise through his music. His music was a blessing of mysterious grace from a world only he understood. As he once wrote:
In some far off place
Many light years in space
I'll build a world of abstract dreams
And wait for you
From: http://www.missioncreep.com/mw/sunra.html
Nothing about Sun Ra's six-decade musical career could be called normal. He recorded somewhere around 200 albums, although no one knows for sure. He toured the world, was revered in Europe, and staged at least three 100 piece concerts, one at the pyramids in Egypt. He was the subject of several films, pioneered the use of electronic keyboards like Moog synthesizers, created his own independent record label, and influenced countless jazz and rock musicians. His pronouncements were drenched in his unique cosmic mysticism, and his band members claimed he had telepathic powers. Most importantly, he made music, as he wrote, "rushing forth like a fiery law."
Sun Ra claimed that he was sent to earth from outer space to save humanity and bring harmony to the world. If you were lucky enough to catch Sun Ra's live show before he died in 1993, you probably believed him.
Mr. Ra came from the tradition of vaudeville, swing, and Chicago show clubs. He was also deeply spiritual, and his live shows encompassed all of these elements. They were several hour ritualistic ceremonies featuring a hot orchestra of a dozen or more (referred to as the "Arkestra"), poetry, light shows, dancers, marches through the audience, and squealing sax solos.
Sometimes the band members would take the stage to the chant of "Heigh-ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go." Most shows included a long percussion jam with the horn players switching to persussion instruments, many of them homemade. If he was in the mood, Ra would take a synthesizer solo that inevitably erupted in a volcanic crescendo.
The Arkestra members wore colorful, glistening outfits that were a combination of African tribesman garb and outer space suits. As was appropriate for a high priest, Sun Ra usually wore the most outrageous outfit, with a headdress and flowing cloak.
Jerry Gordon, who co-owns Evidence Music, which has re-issued twenty early Sun Ra albums on CD, remembers being overwhelmed by the first Sun Ra show he saw in the early 70s.
"It was an incredible concert," he says. "It was music like I had never heard before. Ra and the dancers were wearing capes. Fans on the floor blew the capes so they looked like multicolored wings. They had a spiral light on John Gilmore during his solos that created a tunnel effect. Ra was also using lights to make it look like he was sticking his head in a black hole in space. It was just unbelievable. I considered it holy music, music people should hear."
If you didn't get a chance to see Sun Ra perform, you should seek out Space is the Place, an early 70s movie starring the jazz master from Saturn himself. Ra floats about in a rocket ship propelled by his music and does battle with the FBI, NASA, and other supernatural bad guys. The movie has a cosmic humor, and like Sun Ra it is at times fascinating, indecipherable, and absurd.
The Arkestra makes several appearances in the film in full regalia, and the soundtrack, also re-issued by Evidence, is full of ferocious full-orchestra jams. Horn, percussion, and synthesizer freakouts move in and out like waves of turbulence on sixteen tracks of Sun Ra favorites.
Sun Ra's costumes are extravagant, even for him. The film was directed by filmmaker Jim Newman, who has since admitted that even he doesn't understand it. (Space is the Place is currently available on video from Rhapsody Films.)
If you find earth boring
Just the same old same thing
C'mon sign up with
Outer Spaceways, Incorporated
Sun Ra was born Herman P. Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama. His father left the family when he was a child, and he was raised mostly by his aunt and grandmother. 'Sonny,' as he was nicknamed, received a piano for his seventh birthday, and with little musical training, taught himself to read music.
He formed his own band in high school, and an associate from those days recalls that back then Sonny was able "to get different rhythms and peculiar notes."
Sonny went to Alabama A&M on a scholarship, where he led the student band. He would transcribe the popular swing band tunes from the radio and soon have his band playing them.
While in college, an incident took place that transformed his life. He claimed that he had been transported into a spaceship by aliens, who informed him of his higher calling. He dropped out of college and, for several years leading up to World War II, played throughout the South with various Birmingham-based bands. He had to play behind a curtain in certain southern clubs because the white patrons objected to the sight of black musicians.
It was during this time that Blount developed a rehearsal style that he would use the rest of his life: he turned his living quarters into a rehearsal and recording studio and practiced virtually around the clock. He also recruited a cadre of musicians--not quite a 'band' because they performed in public very infrequently--and gave them free music lessons if they were willing to show up at his house on short notice and try out his arrangements.
During World War II, Sonny Blount was jailed for being a conscientious objector. He was so engrossed in music and his research in ancient black cultures and so adverse to violence, that fighting in a war was inconceivable to him. He left Birmingham for good after the war and moved to Chicago, a jazz hotbed.
He was soon hired as the practice pianist at the popular and glamorous Club DeLisa, which had show girls, comedians, singers, and floor shows. At the DeLisa he got to work with his idol, Fletcher Henderson, one of the originators of the swing sound.
Even in the '40s other musicians spoke of the strangeness of the music he played. Erskine Hawkins said of Blount in the '40s, "Sun Ra would go into chords that nowadays are pretty common but back then were in another world." He was nicknamed "Moon Man" for his spacey lingo and far-out music, although he went by the stage name of Sonny Lee.
In the early '50s, he formed small groups that played mostly be-bop and standards. He slowly increased the number of musicians in his combo. Some of them were still in high school. As trumpeter Phil Cohran explains, "He had a lot of trouble with the so-called good musicians. He became successful when he started training young guys."
John Gilmore, the band's tenor saxophone mainstay for the next four decades, joined Le Sony'r Ra, as he was known then, in 1953 after a stint in the Army. Pat Patrick and Marshall Allen, sax players who would work with Sun Ra for decades, also joined up during this early period.
By the mid-'50s, he had dubbed himself Sun Ra, and the band, which had grown to a dozen players, was known as his 'Arkestra.' In 1956, he established Saturn Records to produce and distribute his records.
This was an extremely creative period for Ra, who would write new material constantly and sleep very little. His band practiced, recorded, and played virtually every day. After a few years, Ra had whipped the outfit into a tight, focused, swingin' machine. It was an eccentric ensemble that could swing or play exotic mood pieces.
By the late '50s, Ra was incorporating odd instruments into the Arkestra's sound, like zithers, timbales, chimes, claves, all kinds of bells and gongs, and things with names like "solar drum," "space lute," and "boom bam." He also had the Arkestra wearing space costumes, like helmets with flashing lights and propellers. Some of the early costumes were hand-me-downs from a Chicago opera company.
The Arkestra's sound was becoming increasingly abstract. Ra was experimenting with pieces that dealt more with sound coloring and texture than structure. He was also utilizing African rhythms with multiple percussionists, which was unusual for the late '50s.
In 1961, the Arkestra moved to Montreal briefly and, following a series of aborted gigs, then to New York. By that time, only Gilmore, Allen, and bassist Ronnie Boykins remained with the Arkestra.
Within a few years, Ra built the ensemble back up to full strength with New York musicians and began to attract attention. He was part of the "free jazz" revolution taking place in Greenwich Village in the '60s along with John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and others.
"As we started adding New York musicians, we started moving to the avant-garde," said John Gilmore. "That was right in our bag, and we were ready for it because Sun Ra had trained us in Chicago, playing half tones and quarter tones, stuff like that."
By the mid-'60s, Sun Ra and the Arkestra weren't just visiting deep space; it was their permanent residence. The music had become an otherworldly mix of atonal, aberrant, sounds and effects. Sun Ra had transformed his eccentric big band of hard bop soloists into a experimental open-improvisation ensemble. Ra was becoming "the philosopher-king of Afro-psychedelia," as writer Michael Shore put it.
Ra's music of this period was typified by counter melodies, off-key horn barrages, polyrhythms, titanic organ and synthesizer solos, and dissonant note clusters. The works were getting longer and the solos more stretched-out. A piece might be in several different keys, in no key at all, or in Ra's so-called "space key." When he was charged with being too eccentric, Ra pushed himself even further into the void.
Despite the pioneering far-outness, Sun Ra objected to the term "free" jazz. His pieces weren't free. They were carefully crafted, structured works.
The Arkestra was known by a variety of names including the Solar Myth Arkestra, Cosmo Jet Set Arkestra, Myth-Science Arkestra, Intergalactic Research Arkestra, and Astro-Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra. The pay was usually so low that many of the musicians played outside gigs with other bands.
In late 1968, Ra moved the Arkestra to Philadelphia. "To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth," he later explained, "and that was Philadelphia, which is death's headquarters."
Actually, the Arkestra was faced with eviction from the house it rented in the Lower East Side, so the band relocated when Marshall Allen's mother offered them a rowhouse in the Germantown section of the city. "We didn't have anywhere else to go," Gilmore said.
In the late '60s, vocalist and dancer June Tyson joined the arkestra. Ra had decided to spread his message through lyrics as well as music, and Tyson fit the Arkestra perfectly in spirit and style. She eventually became Sun Ra's foil, confidently espousing Ra's puzzling ideology. She said that when she was on stage singing Sun Ra's lyrics, she thought of herself as a celestial being.
During the next few years, Ra and the Arkestra traveled several times to California. In 1971, Ra taught a course at Berkeley called "The Black Man in the Cosmos." Few students took the course, although large numbers of Oakland residents attended. The reading list included the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, and books on hieroglyphics. Ra also spent part of each class playing the keyboards. He responded to the puzzled students' questions with a riddle or a knowing smile. He was never paid for the course.
Impulse, a division of ABC, released a handful of Sun Ra LPs in the '70s. These releases gave him wide distribution and international exposure for the first time.
As Sun Ra's reputation grew, he and the Arkestra, which at times grew to thirty members, toured extensively especially in Europe. They even visited Egypt for a spiritual vacation and concert. Gilmore calls the visit to the pyramids, "The most beautiful experience I had on this earth. It made everything worthwhile."
Like many jazz musicians, Ra received much more acclaim in Europe than in the U.S. Unfortunately, the European tours usually generated no more income than was necessary for expenses.
Gilmore remembered the Arkestra returning from a European tour with nothing more than pocket change. "It was rough at pay time with all those guys in the band," he said, "but that's what Sun Ra always wanted, that big sound."
Hundreds of musicians came through the Arkestra over the years, some lasting only a few gigs and some, like saxophonist John Gilmore, lasting decades. But being in the Arkestra was a difficult way of life. The band members never made much money, and Ra demanded discipline and hard work. He banned drugs, alcohol, and women, and band members had to be available for practice around-the-clock.
Despite these inconveniences and Ra's many idiosyncrasies, virtually all of the musicians who came through Sun Ra's Arkestra attest to how much they learned from him.
When asked why he stayed with Sun Ra for forty years, John Gilmore remarked, "He was the first one to introduce me to the higher forms of music, past what Bird and Monk were doing. It's unbelievable that anyone could write meaner intervals than those guys, but he did. When I realized that, I said, 'Well, I guess I'll make this the stop.'"
Gilmore almost left Sun Ra in the '50s but changed his mind. "I learned more from Sun Ra in my first nine months with him than I had my whole life, not only in music but in philosophy and life in general. He elevated my whole scene. He changed my life."
During his 40-year recording career, Sun Ra released well over 100 self-produced records on Saturn and distributed them at his gigs and a few choice record stores. They were usually packaged in white sleeves with wild homemade cover art.
The Saturn records were full of discrepancies that Ra seemed to enjoy. "Some of the records he had recorded in 1956, '57, or '58, and didn't come out until, say, 1965," says Gordon, who sold Sun Ra's records at Third Street Jazz & Rock in Philadelphia. "Stuff from three different years and three different sessions would appear on a record. Almost always the records listed the wrong personnel. Some had no titles, no dates, no documentation. Everything to do with his label was confused, and I believe it was intentionally confused. He'd bring in a Saturn record, I'd sell out of it, but I could never get it back because he'd pressed a different album already. Some of them had no title, just a psychedelic design on the cover."
Outer space is a pleasant place
A place where you can be free
There's no limit to the things you can do
Your thought is free and your life is worthwhile
Space is the place
By far, the oddest element to Sun Ra's career was his eccentric philosophy. He always appeared in an outer space costume and never relinquished his odd ideology, going space-bound whenever it suited his purpose.
"I'm a spirit master," he said. "I've been to a zone where there is no air, no light, no sound, no life, no death, nothing. There's five billion people on this planet, all out of tune. I've got to raise their consciousness, tell them about the wonderful potential to bypass death."
He claimed that cars and rocket ships would one day run on music, presumably his music. He refused to reveal much about his past. "That's his-story," he'd say. "My story is a my-stery." With his soft monotone voice, he gave the impression of a musical Buddha, speaking in riddles and contradictions at every opportunity.
"People loved to question Sun Ra about being born on Saturn, but these things were said to bring people out of their normal, humdrum, everyday reality," says Gordon. "It's not about whether he's telling the truth. He tried to express his vision and get people out of the shadow world with his music. He was an educator and philosopher who tried to enlighten people."
Sun Ra's mysticism was based on faith in a better world elsewhere. "Somewhere in the other side of nowhere is a place in space beyond time where the Gods of mythology dwell," Mr. Ra said. "These gods dwell in their mythocracies as opposed to your theocracies, democracies, and monocracies. They dwell in a magic world. These Gods can even offer you immortality."
Ra confused and confounded the mainstream jazz world, and he found little acceptance or recognition there. Purists ignored him as an eccentric kook, and many jazz critics found his idiosyncrasies annoying. He was the antithesis of slick, smooth, high-profile, commercially-acceptable jazz musician. He simply refused to compromise and preferred to operate as a cult figure outside the jazz establishment.
"A lot of people never got past the costumes and the mysticism," says Gordon, "but Sun Ra was a genius and was not nearly as popular as he should've been. You could put out a college kid doing the music of Sun Ra, and it would probably sell better than Sun Ra."
Near the end of his life, Ra complained about the lack of acceptance and recognition he received in this country. He was especially bitter about Philadelphia. "The city has insulted me," he said in 1988. "I've been in this city long enough to be respected. There's a conspiracy, not by the government, I don't know who, to keep my music down."
In the late '80s and early '90s, Sun Ra did garner national recognition. The alternative rock world embraced him as a major influence. The Arkestra played a gig on Saturday Night Live and jammed in Central Park with Sonic Youth. Robert Mugge made an excellent documentary about him and his space age theology called Sun Ra, A Joyful Noise. He was honored with the Liberty Bowl award from the city of Philadelphia and was voted the top big band in a Downbeat magazine critic's poll. And for the first time, he released two recordings on a major label-A&M.
However, Sun Ra suffered a stroke in October 1992 and returned to his native Birmingham for medical care. (Ever the cosmic jester, when he was admitted to the hospital he listed his address as "Saturn.") On May 30, 1993, the spirit master from outer space left this world. He was 80 years old.
All of Sun Ra's music was steeped in the past but was simultaneously pioneering. He used tradition not to repeat but to take the music somewhere new. Whatever the style, his music always challenged the listener.
"Sun Ra's music didn't need any explanation," says Jerry Gordon. "Once you stopped trying to intellectualize it and just gave yourself to it, the music was self-evident. You can't look for secrets of the universe in it. You understand Sun Ra only by listening to the arkestra and abandoning yourself to the music."
In his music he created a utopian world with its own logic and mysteries. His live shows, like a religious ceremony, invited the audience to take up concerns beyond this world. Part sci-fi shaman, part comic book character, part genius, Sun Ra wanted to lead us to a cosmic paradise through his music. His music was a blessing of mysterious grace from a world only he understood. As he once wrote:
In some far off place
Many light years in space
I'll build a world of abstract dreams
And wait for you
From: http://www.missioncreep.com/mw/sunra.html
MissionCreep.com > Sun Ra:Stranger from Outer Space by Mike Walsh
In tomorrow's world, men will not need artificial instruments such as jets and space ships. In the world of tomorrow, the new man will 'think' the place he wants to go, then his mind will take him there. -- Sun Ra, 1956
Nothing about Sun Ra's six-decade musical career could be called normal. He recorded somewhere around 200 albums, although no one knows for sure. He toured the world, was revered in Europe, and staged at least three 100 piece concerts, one at the pyramids in Egypt. He was the subject of several films, pioneered the use of electronic keyboards like Moog synthesizers, created his own independent record label, and influenced countless jazz and rock musicians. His pronouncements were drenched in his unique cosmic mysticism, and his band members claimed he had telepathic powers. Most importantly, he made music, as he wrote, "rushing forth like a fiery law."
Sun Ra claimed that he was sent to earth from outer space to save humanity and bring harmony to the world. If you were lucky enough to catch Sun Ra's live show before he died in 1993, you probably believed him.
Mr. Ra came from the tradition of vaudeville, swing, and Chicago show clubs. He was also deeply spiritual, and his live shows encompassed all of these elements. They were several hour ritualistic ceremonies featuring a hot orchestra of a dozen or more (referred to as the "Arkestra"), poetry, light shows, dancers, marches through the audience, and squealing sax solos.
Sometimes the band members would take the stage to the chant of "Heigh-ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go." Most shows included a long percussion jam with the horn players switching to persussion instruments, many of them homemade. If he was in the mood, Ra would take a synthesizer solo that inevitably erupted in a volcanic crescendo.
The Arkestra members wore colorful, glistening outfits that were a combination of African tribesman garb and outer space suits. As was appropriate for a high priest, Sun Ra usually wore the most outrageous outfit, with a headdress and flowing cloak.
Jerry Gordon, who co-owns Evidence Music, which has re-issued twenty early Sun Ra albums on CD, remembers being overwhelmed by the first Sun Ra show he saw in the early 70s.
"It was an incredible concert," he says. "It was music like I had never heard before. Ra and the dancers were wearing capes. Fans on the floor blew the capes so they looked like multicolored wings. They had a spiral light on John Gilmore during his solos that created a tunnel effect. Ra was also using lights to make it look like he was sticking his head in a black hole in space. It was just unbelievable. I considered it holy music, music people should hear."
If you didn't get a chance to see Sun Ra perform, you should seek out Space is the Place, an early 70s movie starring the jazz master from Saturn himself. Ra floats about in a rocket ship propelled by his music and does battle with the FBI, NASA, and other supernatural bad guys. The movie has a cosmic humor, and like Sun Ra it is at times fascinating, indecipherable, and absurd.
The Arkestra makes several appearances in the film in full regalia, and the soundtrack, also re-issued by Evidence, is full of ferocious full-orchestra jams. Horn, percussion, and synthesizer freakouts move in and out like waves of turbulence on sixteen tracks of Sun Ra favorites.
Sun Ra's costumes are extravagant, even for him. The film was directed by filmmaker Jim Newman, who has since admitted that even he doesn't understand it. (Space is the Place is currently available on video from Rhapsody Films.)
If you find earth boring
Just the same old same thing
C'mon sign up with
Outer Spaceways, Incorporated
Sun Ra was born Herman P. Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama. His father left the family when he was a child, and he was raised mostly by his aunt and grandmother. 'Sonny,' as he was nicknamed, received a piano for his seventh birthday, and with little musical training, taught himself to read music.
He formed his own band in high school, and an associate from those days recalls that back then Sonny was able "to get different rhythms and peculiar notes."
Sonny went to Alabama A&M on a scholarship, where he led the student band. He would transcribe the popular swing band tunes from the radio and soon have his band playing them.
While in college, an incident took place that transformed his life. He claimed that he had been transported into a spaceship by aliens, who informed him of his higher calling. He dropped out of college and, for several years leading up to World War II, played throughout the South with various Birmingham-based bands. He had to play behind a curtain in certain southern clubs because the white patrons objected to the sight of black musicians.
It was during this time that Blount developed a rehearsal style that he would use the rest of his life: he turned his living quarters into a rehearsal and recording studio and practiced virtually around the clock. He also recruited a cadre of musicians--not quite a 'band' because they performed in public very infrequently--and gave them free music lessons if they were willing to show up at his house on short notice and try out his arrangements.
During World War II, Sonny Blount was jailed for being a conscientious objector. He was so engrossed in music and his research in ancient black cultures and so adverse to violence, that fighting in a war was inconceivable to him. He left Birmingham for good after the war and moved to Chicago, a jazz hotbed.
He was soon hired as the practice pianist at the popular and glamorous Club DeLisa, which had show girls, comedians, singers, and floor shows. At the DeLisa he got to work with his idol, Fletcher Henderson, one of the originators of the swing sound.
Even in the '40s other musicians spoke of the strangeness of the music he played. Erskine Hawkins said of Blount in the '40s, "Sun Ra would go into chords that nowadays are pretty common but back then were in another world." He was nicknamed "Moon Man" for his spacey lingo and far-out music, although he went by the stage name of Sonny Lee.
In the early '50s, he formed small groups that played mostly be-bop and standards. He slowly increased the number of musicians in his combo. Some of them were still in high school. As trumpeter Phil Cohran explains, "He had a lot of trouble with the so-called good musicians. He became successful when he started training young guys."
John Gilmore, the band's tenor saxophone mainstay for the next four decades, joined Le Sony'r Ra, as he was known then, in 1953 after a stint in the Army. Pat Patrick and Marshall Allen, sax players who would work with Sun Ra for decades, also joined up during this early period.
By the mid-'50s, he had dubbed himself Sun Ra, and the band, which had grown to a dozen players, was known as his 'Arkestra.' In 1956, he established Saturn Records to produce and distribute his records.
This was an extremely creative period for Ra, who would write new material constantly and sleep very little. His band practiced, recorded, and played virtually every day. After a few years, Ra had whipped the outfit into a tight, focused, swingin' machine. It was an eccentric ensemble that could swing or play exotic mood pieces.
By the late '50s, Ra was incorporating odd instruments into the Arkestra's sound, like zithers, timbales, chimes, claves, all kinds of bells and gongs, and things with names like "solar drum," "space lute," and "boom bam." He also had the Arkestra wearing space costumes, like helmets with flashing lights and propellers. Some of the early costumes were hand-me-downs from a Chicago opera company.
The Arkestra's sound was becoming increasingly abstract. Ra was experimenting with pieces that dealt more with sound coloring and texture than structure. He was also utilizing African rhythms with multiple percussionists, which was unusual for the late '50s.
In 1961, the Arkestra moved to Montreal briefly and, following a series of aborted gigs, then to New York. By that time, only Gilmore, Allen, and bassist Ronnie Boykins remained with the Arkestra.
Within a few years, Ra built the ensemble back up to full strength with New York musicians and began to attract attention. He was part of the "free jazz" revolution taking place in Greenwich Village in the '60s along with John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and others.
"As we started adding New York musicians, we started moving to the avant-garde," said John Gilmore. "That was right in our bag, and we were ready for it because Sun Ra had trained us in Chicago, playing half tones and quarter tones, stuff like that."
By the mid-'60s, Sun Ra and the Arkestra weren't just visiting deep space; it was their permanent residence. The music had become an otherworldly mix of atonal, aberrant, sounds and effects. Sun Ra had transformed his eccentric big band of hard bop soloists into a experimental open-improvisation ensemble. Ra was becoming "the philosopher-king of Afro-psychedelia," as writer Michael Shore put it.
Ra's music of this period was typified by counter melodies, off-key horn barrages, polyrhythms, titanic organ and synthesizer solos, and dissonant note clusters. The works were getting longer and the solos more stretched-out. A piece might be in several different keys, in no key at all, or in Ra's so-called "space key." When he was charged with being too eccentric, Ra pushed himself even further into the void.
Despite the pioneering far-outness, Sun Ra objected to the term "free" jazz. His pieces weren't free. They were carefully crafted, structured works.
The Arkestra was known by a variety of names including the Solar Myth Arkestra, Cosmo Jet Set Arkestra, Myth-Science Arkestra, Intergalactic Research Arkestra, and Astro-Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra. The pay was usually so low that many of the musicians played outside gigs with other bands.
In late 1968, Ra moved the Arkestra to Philadelphia. "To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth," he later explained, "and that was Philadelphia, which is death's headquarters."
Actually, the Arkestra was faced with eviction from the house it rented in the Lower East Side, so the band relocated when Marshall Allen's mother offered them a rowhouse in the Germantown section of the city. "We didn't have anywhere else to go," Gilmore said.
In the late '60s, vocalist and dancer June Tyson joined the arkestra. Ra had decided to spread his message through lyrics as well as music, and Tyson fit the Arkestra perfectly in spirit and style. She eventually became Sun Ra's foil, confidently espousing Ra's puzzling ideology. She said that when she was on stage singing Sun Ra's lyrics, she thought of herself as a celestial being.
During the next few years, Ra and the Arkestra traveled several times to California. In 1971, Ra taught a course at Berkeley called "The Black Man in the Cosmos." Few students took the course, although large numbers of Oakland residents attended. The reading list included the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, and books on hieroglyphics. Ra also spent part of each class playing the keyboards. He responded to the puzzled students' questions with a riddle or a knowing smile. He was never paid for the course.
Impulse, a division of ABC, released a handful of Sun Ra LPs in the '70s. These releases gave him wide distribution and international exposure for the first time.
As Sun Ra's reputation grew, he and the Arkestra, which at times grew to thirty members, toured extensively especially in Europe. They even visited Egypt for a spiritual vacation and concert. Gilmore calls the visit to the pyramids, "The most beautiful experience I had on this earth. It made everything worthwhile."
Like many jazz musicians, Ra received much more acclaim in Europe than in the U.S. Unfortunately, the European tours usually generated no more income than was necessary for expenses.
Gilmore remembered the Arkestra returning from a European tour with nothing more than pocket change. "It was rough at pay time with all those guys in the band," he said, "but that's what Sun Ra always wanted, that big sound."
Hundreds of musicians came through the Arkestra over the years, some lasting only a few gigs and some, like saxophonist John Gilmore, lasting decades. But being in the Arkestra was a difficult way of life. The band members never made much money, and Ra demanded discipline and hard work. He banned drugs, alcohol, and women, and band members had to be available for practice around-the-clock.
Despite these inconveniences and Ra's many idiosyncrasies, virtually all of the musicians who came through Sun Ra's Arkestra attest to how much they learned from him.
When asked why he stayed with Sun Ra for forty years, John Gilmore remarked, "He was the first one to introduce me to the higher forms of music, past what Bird and Monk were doing. It's unbelievable that anyone could write meaner intervals than those guys, but he did. When I realized that, I said, 'Well, I guess I'll make this the stop.'"
Gilmore almost left Sun Ra in the '50s but changed his mind. "I learned more from Sun Ra in my first nine months with him than I had my whole life, not only in music but in philosophy and life in general. He elevated my whole scene. He changed my life."
During his 40-year recording career, Sun Ra released well over 100 self-produced records on Saturn and distributed them at his gigs and a few choice record stores. They were usually packaged in white sleeves with wild homemade cover art.
The Saturn records were full of discrepancies that Ra seemed to enjoy. "Some of the records he had recorded in 1956, '57, or '58, and didn't come out until, say, 1965," says Gordon, who sold Sun Ra's records at Third Street Jazz & Rock in Philadelphia. "Stuff from three different years and three different sessions would appear on a record. Almost always the records listed the wrong personnel. Some had no titles, no dates, no documentation. Everything to do with his label was confused, and I believe it was intentionally confused. He'd bring in a Saturn record, I'd sell out of it, but I could never get it back because he'd pressed a different album already. Some of them had no title, just a psychedelic design on the cover."
Outer space is a pleasant place
A place where you can be free
There's no limit to the things you can do
Your thought is free and your life is worthwhile
Space is the place
By far, the oddest element to Sun Ra's career was his eccentric philosophy. He always appeared in an outer space costume and never relinquished his odd ideology, going space-bound whenever it suited his purpose.
"I'm a spirit master," he said. "I've been to a zone where there is no air, no light, no sound, no life, no death, nothing. There's five billion people on this planet, all out of tune. I've got to raise their consciousness, tell them about the wonderful potential to bypass death."
He claimed that cars and rocket ships would one day run on music, presumably his music. He refused to reveal much about his past. "That's his-story," he'd say. "My story is a my-stery." With his soft monotone voice, he gave the impression of a musical Buddha, speaking in riddles and contradictions at every opportunity.
"People loved to question Sun Ra about being born on Saturn, but these things were said to bring people out of their normal, humdrum, everyday reality," says Gordon. "It's not about whether he's telling the truth. He tried to express his vision and get people out of the shadow world with his music. He was an educator and philosopher who tried to enlighten people."
Sun Ra's mysticism was based on faith in a better world elsewhere. "Somewhere in the other side of nowhere is a place in space beyond time where the Gods of mythology dwell," Mr. Ra said. "These gods dwell in their mythocracies as opposed to your theocracies, democracies, and monocracies. They dwell in a magic world. These Gods can even offer you immortality."
Ra confused and confounded the mainstream jazz world, and he found little acceptance or recognition there. Purists ignored him as an eccentric kook, and many jazz critics found his idiosyncrasies annoying. He was the antithesis of slick, smooth, high-profile, commercially-acceptable jazz musician. He simply refused to compromise and preferred to operate as a cult figure outside the jazz establishment.
"A lot of people never got past the costumes and the mysticism," says Gordon, "but Sun Ra was a genius and was not nearly as popular as he should've been. You could put out a college kid doing the music of Sun Ra, and it would probably sell better than Sun Ra."
Near the end of his life, Ra complained about the lack of acceptance and recognition he received in this country. He was especially bitter about Philadelphia. "The city has insulted me," he said in 1988. "I've been in this city long enough to be respected. There's a conspiracy, not by the government, I don't know who, to keep my music down."
In the late '80s and early '90s, Sun Ra did garner national recognition. The alternative rock world embraced him as a major influence. The Arkestra played a gig on Saturday Night Live and jammed in Central Park with Sonic Youth. Robert Mugge made an excellent documentary about him and his space age theology called Sun Ra, A Joyful Noise. He was honored with the Liberty Bowl award from the city of Philadelphia and was voted the top big band in a Downbeat magazine critic's poll. And for the first time, he released two recordings on a major label-A&M.
However, Sun Ra suffered a stroke in October 1992 and returned to his native Birmingham for medical care. (Ever the cosmic jester, when he was admitted to the hospital he listed his address as "Saturn.") On May 30, 1993, the spirit master from outer space left this world. He was 80 years old.
All of Sun Ra's music was steeped in the past but was simultaneously pioneering. He used tradition not to repeat but to take the music somewhere new. Whatever the style, his music always challenged the listener.
"Sun Ra's music didn't need any explanation," says Jerry Gordon. "Once you stopped trying to intellectualize it and just gave yourself to it, the music was self-evident. You can't look for secrets of the universe in it. You understand Sun Ra only by listening to the arkestra and abandoning yourself to the music."
In his music he created a utopian world with its own logic and mysteries. His live shows, like a religious ceremony, invited the audience to take up concerns beyond this world. Part sci-fi shaman, part comic book character, part genius, Sun Ra wanted to lead us to a cosmic paradise through his music. His music was a blessing of mysterious grace from a world only he understood. As he once wrote:
In some far off place
Many light years in space
I'll build a world of abstract dreams
And wait for you
From: http://www.missioncreep.com/mw/sunra.html
Nothing about Sun Ra's six-decade musical career could be called normal. He recorded somewhere around 200 albums, although no one knows for sure. He toured the world, was revered in Europe, and staged at least three 100 piece concerts, one at the pyramids in Egypt. He was the subject of several films, pioneered the use of electronic keyboards like Moog synthesizers, created his own independent record label, and influenced countless jazz and rock musicians. His pronouncements were drenched in his unique cosmic mysticism, and his band members claimed he had telepathic powers. Most importantly, he made music, as he wrote, "rushing forth like a fiery law."
Sun Ra claimed that he was sent to earth from outer space to save humanity and bring harmony to the world. If you were lucky enough to catch Sun Ra's live show before he died in 1993, you probably believed him.
Mr. Ra came from the tradition of vaudeville, swing, and Chicago show clubs. He was also deeply spiritual, and his live shows encompassed all of these elements. They were several hour ritualistic ceremonies featuring a hot orchestra of a dozen or more (referred to as the "Arkestra"), poetry, light shows, dancers, marches through the audience, and squealing sax solos.
Sometimes the band members would take the stage to the chant of "Heigh-ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go." Most shows included a long percussion jam with the horn players switching to persussion instruments, many of them homemade. If he was in the mood, Ra would take a synthesizer solo that inevitably erupted in a volcanic crescendo.
The Arkestra members wore colorful, glistening outfits that were a combination of African tribesman garb and outer space suits. As was appropriate for a high priest, Sun Ra usually wore the most outrageous outfit, with a headdress and flowing cloak.
Jerry Gordon, who co-owns Evidence Music, which has re-issued twenty early Sun Ra albums on CD, remembers being overwhelmed by the first Sun Ra show he saw in the early 70s.
"It was an incredible concert," he says. "It was music like I had never heard before. Ra and the dancers were wearing capes. Fans on the floor blew the capes so they looked like multicolored wings. They had a spiral light on John Gilmore during his solos that created a tunnel effect. Ra was also using lights to make it look like he was sticking his head in a black hole in space. It was just unbelievable. I considered it holy music, music people should hear."
If you didn't get a chance to see Sun Ra perform, you should seek out Space is the Place, an early 70s movie starring the jazz master from Saturn himself. Ra floats about in a rocket ship propelled by his music and does battle with the FBI, NASA, and other supernatural bad guys. The movie has a cosmic humor, and like Sun Ra it is at times fascinating, indecipherable, and absurd.
The Arkestra makes several appearances in the film in full regalia, and the soundtrack, also re-issued by Evidence, is full of ferocious full-orchestra jams. Horn, percussion, and synthesizer freakouts move in and out like waves of turbulence on sixteen tracks of Sun Ra favorites.
Sun Ra's costumes are extravagant, even for him. The film was directed by filmmaker Jim Newman, who has since admitted that even he doesn't understand it. (Space is the Place is currently available on video from Rhapsody Films.)
If you find earth boring
Just the same old same thing
C'mon sign up with
Outer Spaceways, Incorporated
Sun Ra was born Herman P. Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama. His father left the family when he was a child, and he was raised mostly by his aunt and grandmother. 'Sonny,' as he was nicknamed, received a piano for his seventh birthday, and with little musical training, taught himself to read music.
He formed his own band in high school, and an associate from those days recalls that back then Sonny was able "to get different rhythms and peculiar notes."
Sonny went to Alabama A&M on a scholarship, where he led the student band. He would transcribe the popular swing band tunes from the radio and soon have his band playing them.
While in college, an incident took place that transformed his life. He claimed that he had been transported into a spaceship by aliens, who informed him of his higher calling. He dropped out of college and, for several years leading up to World War II, played throughout the South with various Birmingham-based bands. He had to play behind a curtain in certain southern clubs because the white patrons objected to the sight of black musicians.
It was during this time that Blount developed a rehearsal style that he would use the rest of his life: he turned his living quarters into a rehearsal and recording studio and practiced virtually around the clock. He also recruited a cadre of musicians--not quite a 'band' because they performed in public very infrequently--and gave them free music lessons if they were willing to show up at his house on short notice and try out his arrangements.
During World War II, Sonny Blount was jailed for being a conscientious objector. He was so engrossed in music and his research in ancient black cultures and so adverse to violence, that fighting in a war was inconceivable to him. He left Birmingham for good after the war and moved to Chicago, a jazz hotbed.
He was soon hired as the practice pianist at the popular and glamorous Club DeLisa, which had show girls, comedians, singers, and floor shows. At the DeLisa he got to work with his idol, Fletcher Henderson, one of the originators of the swing sound.
Even in the '40s other musicians spoke of the strangeness of the music he played. Erskine Hawkins said of Blount in the '40s, "Sun Ra would go into chords that nowadays are pretty common but back then were in another world." He was nicknamed "Moon Man" for his spacey lingo and far-out music, although he went by the stage name of Sonny Lee.
In the early '50s, he formed small groups that played mostly be-bop and standards. He slowly increased the number of musicians in his combo. Some of them were still in high school. As trumpeter Phil Cohran explains, "He had a lot of trouble with the so-called good musicians. He became successful when he started training young guys."
John Gilmore, the band's tenor saxophone mainstay for the next four decades, joined Le Sony'r Ra, as he was known then, in 1953 after a stint in the Army. Pat Patrick and Marshall Allen, sax players who would work with Sun Ra for decades, also joined up during this early period.
By the mid-'50s, he had dubbed himself Sun Ra, and the band, which had grown to a dozen players, was known as his 'Arkestra.' In 1956, he established Saturn Records to produce and distribute his records.
This was an extremely creative period for Ra, who would write new material constantly and sleep very little. His band practiced, recorded, and played virtually every day. After a few years, Ra had whipped the outfit into a tight, focused, swingin' machine. It was an eccentric ensemble that could swing or play exotic mood pieces.
By the late '50s, Ra was incorporating odd instruments into the Arkestra's sound, like zithers, timbales, chimes, claves, all kinds of bells and gongs, and things with names like "solar drum," "space lute," and "boom bam." He also had the Arkestra wearing space costumes, like helmets with flashing lights and propellers. Some of the early costumes were hand-me-downs from a Chicago opera company.
The Arkestra's sound was becoming increasingly abstract. Ra was experimenting with pieces that dealt more with sound coloring and texture than structure. He was also utilizing African rhythms with multiple percussionists, which was unusual for the late '50s.
In 1961, the Arkestra moved to Montreal briefly and, following a series of aborted gigs, then to New York. By that time, only Gilmore, Allen, and bassist Ronnie Boykins remained with the Arkestra.
Within a few years, Ra built the ensemble back up to full strength with New York musicians and began to attract attention. He was part of the "free jazz" revolution taking place in Greenwich Village in the '60s along with John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and others.
"As we started adding New York musicians, we started moving to the avant-garde," said John Gilmore. "That was right in our bag, and we were ready for it because Sun Ra had trained us in Chicago, playing half tones and quarter tones, stuff like that."
By the mid-'60s, Sun Ra and the Arkestra weren't just visiting deep space; it was their permanent residence. The music had become an otherworldly mix of atonal, aberrant, sounds and effects. Sun Ra had transformed his eccentric big band of hard bop soloists into a experimental open-improvisation ensemble. Ra was becoming "the philosopher-king of Afro-psychedelia," as writer Michael Shore put it.
Ra's music of this period was typified by counter melodies, off-key horn barrages, polyrhythms, titanic organ and synthesizer solos, and dissonant note clusters. The works were getting longer and the solos more stretched-out. A piece might be in several different keys, in no key at all, or in Ra's so-called "space key." When he was charged with being too eccentric, Ra pushed himself even further into the void.
Despite the pioneering far-outness, Sun Ra objected to the term "free" jazz. His pieces weren't free. They were carefully crafted, structured works.
The Arkestra was known by a variety of names including the Solar Myth Arkestra, Cosmo Jet Set Arkestra, Myth-Science Arkestra, Intergalactic Research Arkestra, and Astro-Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra. The pay was usually so low that many of the musicians played outside gigs with other bands.
In late 1968, Ra moved the Arkestra to Philadelphia. "To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth," he later explained, "and that was Philadelphia, which is death's headquarters."
Actually, the Arkestra was faced with eviction from the house it rented in the Lower East Side, so the band relocated when Marshall Allen's mother offered them a rowhouse in the Germantown section of the city. "We didn't have anywhere else to go," Gilmore said.
In the late '60s, vocalist and dancer June Tyson joined the arkestra. Ra had decided to spread his message through lyrics as well as music, and Tyson fit the Arkestra perfectly in spirit and style. She eventually became Sun Ra's foil, confidently espousing Ra's puzzling ideology. She said that when she was on stage singing Sun Ra's lyrics, she thought of herself as a celestial being.
During the next few years, Ra and the Arkestra traveled several times to California. In 1971, Ra taught a course at Berkeley called "The Black Man in the Cosmos." Few students took the course, although large numbers of Oakland residents attended. The reading list included the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, and books on hieroglyphics. Ra also spent part of each class playing the keyboards. He responded to the puzzled students' questions with a riddle or a knowing smile. He was never paid for the course.
Impulse, a division of ABC, released a handful of Sun Ra LPs in the '70s. These releases gave him wide distribution and international exposure for the first time.
As Sun Ra's reputation grew, he and the Arkestra, which at times grew to thirty members, toured extensively especially in Europe. They even visited Egypt for a spiritual vacation and concert. Gilmore calls the visit to the pyramids, "The most beautiful experience I had on this earth. It made everything worthwhile."
Like many jazz musicians, Ra received much more acclaim in Europe than in the U.S. Unfortunately, the European tours usually generated no more income than was necessary for expenses.
Gilmore remembered the Arkestra returning from a European tour with nothing more than pocket change. "It was rough at pay time with all those guys in the band," he said, "but that's what Sun Ra always wanted, that big sound."
Hundreds of musicians came through the Arkestra over the years, some lasting only a few gigs and some, like saxophonist John Gilmore, lasting decades. But being in the Arkestra was a difficult way of life. The band members never made much money, and Ra demanded discipline and hard work. He banned drugs, alcohol, and women, and band members had to be available for practice around-the-clock.
Despite these inconveniences and Ra's many idiosyncrasies, virtually all of the musicians who came through Sun Ra's Arkestra attest to how much they learned from him.
When asked why he stayed with Sun Ra for forty years, John Gilmore remarked, "He was the first one to introduce me to the higher forms of music, past what Bird and Monk were doing. It's unbelievable that anyone could write meaner intervals than those guys, but he did. When I realized that, I said, 'Well, I guess I'll make this the stop.'"
Gilmore almost left Sun Ra in the '50s but changed his mind. "I learned more from Sun Ra in my first nine months with him than I had my whole life, not only in music but in philosophy and life in general. He elevated my whole scene. He changed my life."
During his 40-year recording career, Sun Ra released well over 100 self-produced records on Saturn and distributed them at his gigs and a few choice record stores. They were usually packaged in white sleeves with wild homemade cover art.
The Saturn records were full of discrepancies that Ra seemed to enjoy. "Some of the records he had recorded in 1956, '57, or '58, and didn't come out until, say, 1965," says Gordon, who sold Sun Ra's records at Third Street Jazz & Rock in Philadelphia. "Stuff from three different years and three different sessions would appear on a record. Almost always the records listed the wrong personnel. Some had no titles, no dates, no documentation. Everything to do with his label was confused, and I believe it was intentionally confused. He'd bring in a Saturn record, I'd sell out of it, but I could never get it back because he'd pressed a different album already. Some of them had no title, just a psychedelic design on the cover."
Outer space is a pleasant place
A place where you can be free
There's no limit to the things you can do
Your thought is free and your life is worthwhile
Space is the place
By far, the oddest element to Sun Ra's career was his eccentric philosophy. He always appeared in an outer space costume and never relinquished his odd ideology, going space-bound whenever it suited his purpose.
"I'm a spirit master," he said. "I've been to a zone where there is no air, no light, no sound, no life, no death, nothing. There's five billion people on this planet, all out of tune. I've got to raise their consciousness, tell them about the wonderful potential to bypass death."
He claimed that cars and rocket ships would one day run on music, presumably his music. He refused to reveal much about his past. "That's his-story," he'd say. "My story is a my-stery." With his soft monotone voice, he gave the impression of a musical Buddha, speaking in riddles and contradictions at every opportunity.
"People loved to question Sun Ra about being born on Saturn, but these things were said to bring people out of their normal, humdrum, everyday reality," says Gordon. "It's not about whether he's telling the truth. He tried to express his vision and get people out of the shadow world with his music. He was an educator and philosopher who tried to enlighten people."
Sun Ra's mysticism was based on faith in a better world elsewhere. "Somewhere in the other side of nowhere is a place in space beyond time where the Gods of mythology dwell," Mr. Ra said. "These gods dwell in their mythocracies as opposed to your theocracies, democracies, and monocracies. They dwell in a magic world. These Gods can even offer you immortality."
Ra confused and confounded the mainstream jazz world, and he found little acceptance or recognition there. Purists ignored him as an eccentric kook, and many jazz critics found his idiosyncrasies annoying. He was the antithesis of slick, smooth, high-profile, commercially-acceptable jazz musician. He simply refused to compromise and preferred to operate as a cult figure outside the jazz establishment.
"A lot of people never got past the costumes and the mysticism," says Gordon, "but Sun Ra was a genius and was not nearly as popular as he should've been. You could put out a college kid doing the music of Sun Ra, and it would probably sell better than Sun Ra."
Near the end of his life, Ra complained about the lack of acceptance and recognition he received in this country. He was especially bitter about Philadelphia. "The city has insulted me," he said in 1988. "I've been in this city long enough to be respected. There's a conspiracy, not by the government, I don't know who, to keep my music down."
In the late '80s and early '90s, Sun Ra did garner national recognition. The alternative rock world embraced him as a major influence. The Arkestra played a gig on Saturday Night Live and jammed in Central Park with Sonic Youth. Robert Mugge made an excellent documentary about him and his space age theology called Sun Ra, A Joyful Noise. He was honored with the Liberty Bowl award from the city of Philadelphia and was voted the top big band in a Downbeat magazine critic's poll. And for the first time, he released two recordings on a major label-A&M.
However, Sun Ra suffered a stroke in October 1992 and returned to his native Birmingham for medical care. (Ever the cosmic jester, when he was admitted to the hospital he listed his address as "Saturn.") On May 30, 1993, the spirit master from outer space left this world. He was 80 years old.
All of Sun Ra's music was steeped in the past but was simultaneously pioneering. He used tradition not to repeat but to take the music somewhere new. Whatever the style, his music always challenged the listener.
"Sun Ra's music didn't need any explanation," says Jerry Gordon. "Once you stopped trying to intellectualize it and just gave yourself to it, the music was self-evident. You can't look for secrets of the universe in it. You understand Sun Ra only by listening to the arkestra and abandoning yourself to the music."
In his music he created a utopian world with its own logic and mysteries. His live shows, like a religious ceremony, invited the audience to take up concerns beyond this world. Part sci-fi shaman, part comic book character, part genius, Sun Ra wanted to lead us to a cosmic paradise through his music. His music was a blessing of mysterious grace from a world only he understood. As he once wrote:
In some far off place
Many light years in space
I'll build a world of abstract dreams
And wait for you
From: http://www.missioncreep.com/mw/sunra.html
Saturday, August 21, 2004
FresnoBee.Com > Elmer Bernstein, composer of many great film scores, dead at 82
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Film composer Elmer Bernstein, who created a brawny, big-sky theme for "The Magnificent Seven," nerve-jangling jazz for "The Man With The Golden Arm" and heart-rending grace notes for "To Kill a Mockingbird," has died.
Bernstein, whose prolific career spanned seven decades and earned him 14 Academy Award nominations, an Oscar win and an Emmy Award, died in his sleep at his Ojai home Wednesday, said his publicist, Cathy Mouton. He was 82.
Although he won an Oscar only once for the 1967 film "Thoroughly Modern Millie" - considered one of his weaker works - Bernstein was revered for experimenting with various techniques that bolstered the films.
"It's one thing to write music that reinforces a film, underscores it - the traditional sense of stressing, underlining - or gives it added dramatic muscle," director Martin Scorsese once said. "It's entirely another to write music that graces a film. That's what Elmer Bernstein does, and that, for me, is his greatest gift."
Among his more notable efforts were the scores for "Some Came Running," "Birdman of Alcatraz," "The Great Escape," "Hawaii," "The Great Santini," "Cast a Giant Shadow," "My Left Foot," "Devil in a Blue Dress" and "The Age of Innocence." He also composed several works for symphony orchestras.
In addition, he scored such movie classics as "The Ten Commandments," "The Magnificent Seven," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Great Escape" and "True Grit." Other credits included "National Lampoon's Animal House," "Airplane!" "Stripes," "Meatballs," "Ghostbusters," "Trading Places" and "The Rainmaker."
"Film music, properly done, should give the film a kind of emotional rail on which to ride," Bernstein told The Associated Press in a 2001 interview. "Without even realizing that you're listening to music that's doing something to your emotions, you will have an emotional experience."
"To Kill a Mockingbird" presented Bernstein quite a challenge. For six weeks he could find no way to approach the story, which concerned racism and the Depression in a small Southern town.
"Then I realized that the film was about these issues but seen through the eyes of children," he once recalled. "The simple score was played by a small ensemble, at times employing single piano notes, much like a child picking out a tune."
For "The Man with the Golden Arm," in which Frank Sinatra played a heroin-addicted jazz musician, he discarded the studio orchestra for a jazz ensemble. For the landmark western "The Magnificent Seven," Bernstein composed a galloping march that remained famous for years afterward in TV ads for Marlboro cigarettes.
A piano prodigy who studied composing under Aaron Copland in New York, Bernstein moved to Hollywood in 1950 to work on his first movie score, for the football film "Saturday's Hero." After a few more routine assignments he made his mark with the moody music for the Joan Crawford thriller "Sudden Fear."
Although both hailed from New York, he was no relation to the legendary composer Leonard Bernstein.
"That's a common question," Mouton said. "They were friends and fellow New Yorkers, but they were not related in any way."
A supporter of left-wing causes, Bernstein's career was nearly destroyed by the Hollywood Red Hunt of the 1950s when he was summoned before a congressional subcommittee and told to identify communists in the film industry. He refused, saying he'd never attended a Communist party meeting.
"I wasn't important enough to be blacklisted, so I was put on a gray list," he once said.
Still, major studios refused to hire him, and he resorted to turning out music for low-budget films like "Robot Monster" and "Cat Women of the Moon."
Ironically, it was the vocally anti-communist director Cecil B. De Mille who broke the gray list by hiring Bernstein to replace the ailing Victor Young on "The Ten Commandments."
De Mille asked him, "Do you think you can do for Egyptian music what Puccini did for Japanese music in 'Madame Butterfly'?" The young composer accepted the challenge.
Through 200 movies and 80 television shows, Bernstein would prove that he could adapt to any kind of music. He won an Emmy Award in 1964 for "The Making of The President: 1960."
He is survived by his wife, Eve, sons Peter and Gregory, daughters Emilie and Elizabeth, and five grandchildren.
A memorial service is pending.
Monday, August 09, 2004
Portland Tribune > To Bill Summers, it makes perfect sense that African-American musicians would tour the world offering a tutorial on Latin music
All that jazz
Reflecting trends, 23rd annual Gresham festival goes global
By ERIC BARTELS Issue date: Fri, Aug 6, 2004
The Tribune
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Bill Summers, it makes perfect sense that African-American musicians would tour the world offering a tutorial on Latin music. After all, he says, Latin music is from Africa.
“I was an altar boy in the ’50s and ’60s,” says Summers, the percussionist and driving force behind Los Hombres Calientes. “I know what Latin is.
“All of these instruments — guitars, woodwinds, horns — they all originated in Africa. Every last one of them. It puzzles me. Why don’t they call it African music?”
Summers, who brings his open-ended musical question to the Mt. Hood Jazz Festival this weekend, says Los Hombres’ visit represents a shift in the promotion of jazz music.
“The jazz festivals nowadays have more than just jazz,” he says. “Most jazz festivals are more like world music festivals. They cover the gamut.”
Festival coordinator Steve Reischman, who says the pool of traditional jazz talent is shrinking, doesn’t disagree.
“There is a trend of world music in the jazz world,” he says. “You try to open people’s senses and eyes to a new kind of music.” Besides, he says, “there’s always been a very heavy Latin component in jazz.”
Summers, 55, says the newest thing in Latin music is the history you don’t know: “It’s not that people don’t want to give credit where credit is due. They don’t know what’s going on. I play black Cuban music because it’s not Cuban, it’s African.
“You can actually trace the history by looking at drums that were created in Central Africa.”
Along with the instruments and styles imported to the New World came terms like bongo, babalu and cha cha cha, he adds.
A city of music
Latin music has a long history in Los Hombres’ New Orleans home base. “New Orleans had 12 Spanish governors,” Summers says. “The archdiocese for New Orleans was in Havana. There’s a great connection between Cuba and music in New Orleans.
“Musicians from New Orleans, they’re very well-schooled. They put the other areas of the country to shame when it comes to education in the arts.”
To be sure, Los Hombres feature an improvisational feel that places them in the jazz neighborhood. But the band is a stylistic kaleidoscope. Trumpets that screech and cry atop driving salsa rhythms turn to silk over a lilting samba backdrop a moment later. Then, without warning, brassy horn salvos conjure the muscular ’70s R & B sound of an Earth, Wind and Fire.
“I’ve played with Ice T, Ice Cube, Tupac,” Summers says. “I’ve played with people in R & B: Barry White, Stevie Wonder. I’ve recorded with Sting. I love hip-hop. I love R & B. I love country. I don’t have this hang-up that jazz is better.
“I don’t consider myself a jazz musician, and I don’t consider Los Hombres Calientes a jazz band. It is the quintessential world music band. We play music from Brazil, Haiti, the Dominican Republic. Our goal is to show the interrelation between the music of the world. Our approach is a worldwide approach.”
Eclectic lineup
The festival’s Reischman has taken a similar tack. Headlining Saturday will be the Heath Brothers, an act Reischman says “preceded the Marsalis family as the first family of jazz.” Also performing at the two-day event are vocalist Abbey Lincoln, guitarist Charlie Hunter, the James Carter organ trio and Madeleine Peyroux, whom Reischman likens to Billie Holiday.
“There’s a little something for everybody,” he says.
Los Hombres Calientes will not be joined by trumpet-playing frontman Irvin Mayfield, who has a scheduling conflict. Motown veteran Marcus Belgrave, like Summers a Detroit native, will replace him.
Summers says he and the 26-year-old Mayfield have formed a productive musical partnership. The duo’s most important discoveries often require a determined sense of adventure: “He and I together, going into the jungles and the rain forests and the backwoods.”
When a trip to Haiti put them in a luxurious Port-au-Prince hotel, they inquired about which of the capital’s poverty-stricken neighborhoods to avoid.
“That’s where we spent the next three or four days,” Summers says.
“This is a cool band doing cool things,” Reischman says. “My hope is that once people go through the gates, they’re gonna go, ‘Wow! I’ve seen something I didn’t anticipate.’
“You’ve got an evolving jazz idiom out there. Maybe it’s not dying.”
Reflecting trends, 23rd annual Gresham festival goes global
By ERIC BARTELS Issue date: Fri, Aug 6, 2004
The Tribune
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Bill Summers, it makes perfect sense that African-American musicians would tour the world offering a tutorial on Latin music. After all, he says, Latin music is from Africa.
“I was an altar boy in the ’50s and ’60s,” says Summers, the percussionist and driving force behind Los Hombres Calientes. “I know what Latin is.
“All of these instruments — guitars, woodwinds, horns — they all originated in Africa. Every last one of them. It puzzles me. Why don’t they call it African music?”
Summers, who brings his open-ended musical question to the Mt. Hood Jazz Festival this weekend, says Los Hombres’ visit represents a shift in the promotion of jazz music.
“The jazz festivals nowadays have more than just jazz,” he says. “Most jazz festivals are more like world music festivals. They cover the gamut.”
Festival coordinator Steve Reischman, who says the pool of traditional jazz talent is shrinking, doesn’t disagree.
“There is a trend of world music in the jazz world,” he says. “You try to open people’s senses and eyes to a new kind of music.” Besides, he says, “there’s always been a very heavy Latin component in jazz.”
Summers, 55, says the newest thing in Latin music is the history you don’t know: “It’s not that people don’t want to give credit where credit is due. They don’t know what’s going on. I play black Cuban music because it’s not Cuban, it’s African.
“You can actually trace the history by looking at drums that were created in Central Africa.”
Along with the instruments and styles imported to the New World came terms like bongo, babalu and cha cha cha, he adds.
A city of music
Latin music has a long history in Los Hombres’ New Orleans home base. “New Orleans had 12 Spanish governors,” Summers says. “The archdiocese for New Orleans was in Havana. There’s a great connection between Cuba and music in New Orleans.
“Musicians from New Orleans, they’re very well-schooled. They put the other areas of the country to shame when it comes to education in the arts.”
To be sure, Los Hombres feature an improvisational feel that places them in the jazz neighborhood. But the band is a stylistic kaleidoscope. Trumpets that screech and cry atop driving salsa rhythms turn to silk over a lilting samba backdrop a moment later. Then, without warning, brassy horn salvos conjure the muscular ’70s R & B sound of an Earth, Wind and Fire.
“I’ve played with Ice T, Ice Cube, Tupac,” Summers says. “I’ve played with people in R & B: Barry White, Stevie Wonder. I’ve recorded with Sting. I love hip-hop. I love R & B. I love country. I don’t have this hang-up that jazz is better.
“I don’t consider myself a jazz musician, and I don’t consider Los Hombres Calientes a jazz band. It is the quintessential world music band. We play music from Brazil, Haiti, the Dominican Republic. Our goal is to show the interrelation between the music of the world. Our approach is a worldwide approach.”
Eclectic lineup
The festival’s Reischman has taken a similar tack. Headlining Saturday will be the Heath Brothers, an act Reischman says “preceded the Marsalis family as the first family of jazz.” Also performing at the two-day event are vocalist Abbey Lincoln, guitarist Charlie Hunter, the James Carter organ trio and Madeleine Peyroux, whom Reischman likens to Billie Holiday.
“There’s a little something for everybody,” he says.
Los Hombres Calientes will not be joined by trumpet-playing frontman Irvin Mayfield, who has a scheduling conflict. Motown veteran Marcus Belgrave, like Summers a Detroit native, will replace him.
Summers says he and the 26-year-old Mayfield have formed a productive musical partnership. The duo’s most important discoveries often require a determined sense of adventure: “He and I together, going into the jungles and the rain forests and the backwoods.”
When a trip to Haiti put them in a luxurious Port-au-Prince hotel, they inquired about which of the capital’s poverty-stricken neighborhoods to avoid.
“That’s where we spent the next three or four days,” Summers says.
“This is a cool band doing cool things,” Reischman says. “My hope is that once people go through the gates, they’re gonna go, ‘Wow! I’ve seen something I didn’t anticipate.’
“You’ve got an evolving jazz idiom out there. Maybe it’s not dying.”
Sunday, August 08, 2004
Macon Daily > Jazz at Newport Turns 50 Amid Worries for Future
By: Justin Kenny
Sat Aug 7, 2004 07:12 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - George Wein, the 78-year-old founder of the now legendary Newport Jazz Festival, can boast a half century of success in drawing big audiences to hear jazz, but he worries about the future of the quintessentially American musical genre.
The event, now called JVC Jazz Festival Newport, turns 50 years old next week and has long been a magnet for jazz's top talent including Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck.
This year's festival, which opens on Wednesday for a five-day run, is seeing the strongest ticket sales in five years and is attracting some of the biggest names in jazz today.
Despite his feelings of pride and nostalgia, Wein is worried about what will happen to the festival after he's gone.
"The problem with jazz is that the legends are gone .... We have many, many wonderful young musicians but they haven't the following that say a Miles Davis had," said Wein.
This year's festival line-up includes Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Harry Connick Jr., Ornette Coleman and the man who has played more Newport festivals than any other artist, 83-year-old Dave Brubeck.
But Wein said he has an uphill battle when he's selling jazz. Most years at Newport, Wein supplements a jazz lineup with rhythm and blues and world music artists to appeal to a wider audience.
"I am very unhappy in what is happening, in not just jazz, but in show business in general because the only thing people are interested in is celebrity nowadays. That's the only thing that really sells tickets," said Wein.
"The concept of creating a great cultural event -- it doesn't have the meaning it had before. This is a world of celebrity. You put one name on there that has what you call celebrity and it sells more tickets in one hour than you can sell in 6 months to a great festival," said Wein.
"I worry about that because there's not that much celebrity involved in jazz at the moment. It's just great music."
FIRST OUTDOOR POP FESTIVAL
Wein is arguably one of the most influential men in American jazz. In 1954, the short Jewish kid from the Boston suburbs made musical history when he launched the first major outdoor popular music festival in the United States at Newport.
Wein used the event as a springboard and created and produced hundreds of festivals (not just jazz) around the world including the Newport Folk Festival and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Wein still has the ability to draw crowds. Tens of thousands flock to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival to hear a blend of rock, funk, jazz, blues, cajun, zydeco and world music every spring.
The lessons of marketing to today's celebrity-oriented audience has been a difficult one for the jazz ambassador who has seen his festival propel and reignite some of the great giants of jazz.
"A number of musicians became influential and successful through appearances at Newport," according to columnist and jazz historian Stanley Crouch.
"Miles Davis made his comeback at Newport so did Duke Ellington. Duke Ellington was kind of at the bottom of the business and then he played a concert there in 1956 and this blonde got carried away and started dancing in front of the band, then the whole audience started dancing and they went crazy. So, Duke Ellington went all they way up from the bottom right back up to the top," said Crouch.
While much of the festival's glory lies in the past, Wein is hoping to create a few legendary moments at this year's birthday celebration. Some of the planned highlights include a tribute to John Coltrane featuring the late musician's son Ravi and Michael Brecker on saxophone, bassist Christian McBride and Coltrane contemporaries pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Roy Haynes.
Sat Aug 7, 2004 07:12 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - George Wein, the 78-year-old founder of the now legendary Newport Jazz Festival, can boast a half century of success in drawing big audiences to hear jazz, but he worries about the future of the quintessentially American musical genre.
The event, now called JVC Jazz Festival Newport, turns 50 years old next week and has long been a magnet for jazz's top talent including Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck.
This year's festival, which opens on Wednesday for a five-day run, is seeing the strongest ticket sales in five years and is attracting some of the biggest names in jazz today.
Despite his feelings of pride and nostalgia, Wein is worried about what will happen to the festival after he's gone.
"The problem with jazz is that the legends are gone .... We have many, many wonderful young musicians but they haven't the following that say a Miles Davis had," said Wein.
This year's festival line-up includes Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Harry Connick Jr., Ornette Coleman and the man who has played more Newport festivals than any other artist, 83-year-old Dave Brubeck.
But Wein said he has an uphill battle when he's selling jazz. Most years at Newport, Wein supplements a jazz lineup with rhythm and blues and world music artists to appeal to a wider audience.
"I am very unhappy in what is happening, in not just jazz, but in show business in general because the only thing people are interested in is celebrity nowadays. That's the only thing that really sells tickets," said Wein.
"The concept of creating a great cultural event -- it doesn't have the meaning it had before. This is a world of celebrity. You put one name on there that has what you call celebrity and it sells more tickets in one hour than you can sell in 6 months to a great festival," said Wein.
"I worry about that because there's not that much celebrity involved in jazz at the moment. It's just great music."
FIRST OUTDOOR POP FESTIVAL
Wein is arguably one of the most influential men in American jazz. In 1954, the short Jewish kid from the Boston suburbs made musical history when he launched the first major outdoor popular music festival in the United States at Newport.
Wein used the event as a springboard and created and produced hundreds of festivals (not just jazz) around the world including the Newport Folk Festival and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Wein still has the ability to draw crowds. Tens of thousands flock to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival to hear a blend of rock, funk, jazz, blues, cajun, zydeco and world music every spring.
The lessons of marketing to today's celebrity-oriented audience has been a difficult one for the jazz ambassador who has seen his festival propel and reignite some of the great giants of jazz.
"A number of musicians became influential and successful through appearances at Newport," according to columnist and jazz historian Stanley Crouch.
"Miles Davis made his comeback at Newport so did Duke Ellington. Duke Ellington was kind of at the bottom of the business and then he played a concert there in 1956 and this blonde got carried away and started dancing in front of the band, then the whole audience started dancing and they went crazy. So, Duke Ellington went all they way up from the bottom right back up to the top," said Crouch.
While much of the festival's glory lies in the past, Wein is hoping to create a few legendary moments at this year's birthday celebration. Some of the planned highlights include a tribute to John Coltrane featuring the late musician's son Ravi and Michael Brecker on saxophone, bassist Christian McBride and Coltrane contemporaries pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Roy Haynes.
Friday, August 06, 2004
NPR > Trumpeter Masekela Reflects on Career in New Book
Morning Edition audio
Aug. 5, 2004
South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela, now 65, tells his life story in a new book, Still Grazing. The trumpter reflects on a life of performances, parties, and political protest. Ashley Kahn reports.
Aug. 5, 2004
South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela, now 65, tells his life story in a new book, Still Grazing. The trumpter reflects on a life of performances, parties, and political protest. Ashley Kahn reports.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Canadian Press - Pioneer of the Latin jazz 'Pachuco' sound dead at 81
August 3, 2004
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. (AP) - Don Tosti, a musician and composer who blended elements of jazz, boogie and blues to create the Latin 'Pachuco' sound of the 1940s-era Zoot Suit culture, has died. He was 81.
Tosti died Monday in his home. Doctors diagnosed him with advanced prostate cancer in May, according to his sister, Marylin Martinez Wood. Tosti began playing music as a boy and forged a career spanning several decades and styles, from classical to jazz to rhythm and blues. He was best remembered for his Pachuco-style compositions like the hit Pachuco Boogie. Recorded in 1948, it was the first million-selling Latin song.
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. (AP) - Don Tosti, a musician and composer who blended elements of jazz, boogie and blues to create the Latin 'Pachuco' sound of the 1940s-era Zoot Suit culture, has died. He was 81.
Tosti died Monday in his home. Doctors diagnosed him with advanced prostate cancer in May, according to his sister, Marylin Martinez Wood. Tosti began playing music as a boy and forged a career spanning several decades and styles, from classical to jazz to rhythm and blues. He was best remembered for his Pachuco-style compositions like the hit Pachuco Boogie. Recorded in 1948, it was the first million-selling Latin song.
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