The Mysteries Of Mr Ra
- Issue #78 (August '90) | Interviews
- By: Graham Lock | Featuring: Sun Ra/arkestra
- Printable version
Who are the robed figures in pixie caps who travel the globe singing space-songs? Does their leader really come from planet Saturn? And were ancient Egyptian sun priests the first jazzmen? Graham Lock sets the controls for the heart of the Sun Ra cosmos
"I've been sent here to help people. My mission is to try and save this planet. Mission impossible"
Sun Ra
Talk about moving in mysterious ways.
The wisdom of the universe has been stuffed into a white plastic shopping bag and is now lying slumped against a backstage wall at the University of London Students' Union. I watch intently as an ancient black man with an ornate head-dress and a bright orange beard pulls a wad of papers from the bag and begins leafing through them.
"I got some copies made but the pages all mixed up," he mutters. "I gotta be careful I don't give you no pages I ain't got copies of."
He thrusts a sheaf of papers towards me and I take them with trembling fingers. Am I dreaming? What I am now clutching could be the journalistic coup of the century, the most sensational news story of all time: except for one small snag. What I have in my hands are pages from a book transmitted to Earth by beings from outer space.
You see the snag. I'm not even sure I believe it myself. My companion has no doubts. "You can't get off this planet but two ways," he tells me. "You have to die off it or somebody rescue you. I can easy be rescued by spaceships. If I request rescuing, I can get it. If humanity won't help me, some other type of beings will land and take me away. I keep that exit open." He shoots me a momentary grin, but I'm starting to feel way out of my depth. Right now, I wish a spaceship would land and rescue me. "I don't think this planet has treated me right," Sun Ra continues balefully. "They think I'm a joke, but I know what I know. They think they just dealin' with an old man - but I'm not a man, I'm a spirit being."
That I can believe.
"I'm not really from this planet. I did something wrong on my planet and they sent me here to pay my dues"
Johnny Griffin
It's five years since Sun Ra and his Cosmo Love Arkestra last touched ground in the UK. They're here now, in early June, for a brief, three-gig visit - Liverpool on Friday, London on Sunday and Monday - courtesy of leftfield rock label Blast First, who last year released the subtly mind-scrambling Out There A Minute, a compilation of rare, late-60s Arkestra recordings.
Offered the chance to travel with the group, talk to Sun Ra, and attend the concerts, I rocket into seventh heaven. Not only are Arkestra sets among the most spectacular and joyous of all music events - the group in their shiny, outer-space costumes dancing, chanting and blowing the entire spectrum of creative music from Jelly Roll Morton to (new Ra favourite) Walt Disney - but I'm fascinated by the 'Astro Black Mythology' Ra has created as a context for both his music and his life. To say that my one previous meeting with him - in 1983 (see The Wire 6) - had changed my life would be a shade melodramatic, but he certainly set off several new trains of thought for me (some of which I'm still running to catch). Besides which, and all enigma aside, the man is special, his achievements nothing less than astounding and his story possibly the most extraordinary saga in all of jazz. As onetime Arkestra drummer Roger Blank has observed: "Musically, Sun Ra is one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
So who is he? The mystery begins here. In various interviews Ra has claimed that he comes from the planet Saturn, that he arrived on Earth on a date that can't be revealed because of its astrological significance, and that his name is a secret - though he has admitted to using the names Sonny Blount and Sonny Lee and has stated that his parents' name was Arman, which, he says, "comes from ancient Egypt". Certainly the name Sun Ra derives from Ra, sun god of ancient Egypt, one of the poles of the Ra cosmology: although, with typically sly humour, Ra has also announced, "Sun Ra is not a person, it's a business name". Whatever the truth about his name, two independent researchers, Franco Fayenz (in his sleevenotes to an Italian issue of the Savoy LP The Futuristic Sounds Of Sun Ra) and Gary Carner (in his forthcoming book Jazz Performers: An Annotated Bibliography Of Biographical Material), both cite 22 May 1914 as Ra's birthdate; and it's widely accepted that Birmingham, Alabama, was at least his terrestrial birthplace. The facts he has revealed of his early years confirm 1914 as a plausible year of birth: he's spoken of his folks taking him to shows by the great classic blues stars - Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, Ethel Waters - and of listening avidly as a child to records by Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra and other early swing bands. Ra formed his own group in high school, toured the Midwest in the early 30s, but then seems to have dropped into obscurity until the late 40s, when he turned up as house pianist/arranger in Chicago's Club DeLisa, where he performed for a time with his first idol, Fletcher Henderson, and also played with many other artists who were passing through.
By the early 1950s he was leading his own ensembles and establishing a reputation on Chicago's South Side as a bit of an oddball. A keen student of Egyptology, Hebrew, philosophy and science, Ra issued his own pamphlets reinterpreting facets of the Bible and prophesying the coming of the Space Age - electronic horns, men walking on the moon, etc. (It seems these insights were greeted with scepticism: tenorist John Gilmore, who's been playing with Ra since 1953, remembers people calling him "on the moon man".) By 1956 Ra had assembled his first Arkestra and that year they made their recording debut for the tiny Transition label. When the label folded before a second session could be released, Ra set up his own record company, Saturn - one of the first artist-owned, independent jazz labels and certainly the longest-running. For the last 35 years he has released the bulk of his music - probably 150-plus LPs - on this label, still a shoestring organisation run from the group's communal HQ and still issuing records in the plain white sleeves with (sometimes) hand-drawn pictures and titles that are now valued collectors' items.
Sun Ra
Talk about moving in mysterious ways.
The wisdom of the universe has been stuffed into a white plastic shopping bag and is now lying slumped against a backstage wall at the University of London Students' Union. I watch intently as an ancient black man with an ornate head-dress and a bright orange beard pulls a wad of papers from the bag and begins leafing through them.
"I got some copies made but the pages all mixed up," he mutters. "I gotta be careful I don't give you no pages I ain't got copies of."
He thrusts a sheaf of papers towards me and I take them with trembling fingers. Am I dreaming? What I am now clutching could be the journalistic coup of the century, the most sensational news story of all time: except for one small snag. What I have in my hands are pages from a book transmitted to Earth by beings from outer space.
You see the snag. I'm not even sure I believe it myself. My companion has no doubts. "You can't get off this planet but two ways," he tells me. "You have to die off it or somebody rescue you. I can easy be rescued by spaceships. If I request rescuing, I can get it. If humanity won't help me, some other type of beings will land and take me away. I keep that exit open." He shoots me a momentary grin, but I'm starting to feel way out of my depth. Right now, I wish a spaceship would land and rescue me. "I don't think this planet has treated me right," Sun Ra continues balefully. "They think I'm a joke, but I know what I know. They think they just dealin' with an old man - but I'm not a man, I'm a spirit being."
That I can believe.
"I'm not really from this planet. I did something wrong on my planet and they sent me here to pay my dues"
Johnny Griffin
It's five years since Sun Ra and his Cosmo Love Arkestra last touched ground in the UK. They're here now, in early June, for a brief, three-gig visit - Liverpool on Friday, London on Sunday and Monday - courtesy of leftfield rock label Blast First, who last year released the subtly mind-scrambling Out There A Minute, a compilation of rare, late-60s Arkestra recordings.
Offered the chance to travel with the group, talk to Sun Ra, and attend the concerts, I rocket into seventh heaven. Not only are Arkestra sets among the most spectacular and joyous of all music events - the group in their shiny, outer-space costumes dancing, chanting and blowing the entire spectrum of creative music from Jelly Roll Morton to (new Ra favourite) Walt Disney - but I'm fascinated by the 'Astro Black Mythology' Ra has created as a context for both his music and his life. To say that my one previous meeting with him - in 1983 (see The Wire 6) - had changed my life would be a shade melodramatic, but he certainly set off several new trains of thought for me (some of which I'm still running to catch). Besides which, and all enigma aside, the man is special, his achievements nothing less than astounding and his story possibly the most extraordinary saga in all of jazz. As onetime Arkestra drummer Roger Blank has observed: "Musically, Sun Ra is one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
So who is he? The mystery begins here. In various interviews Ra has claimed that he comes from the planet Saturn, that he arrived on Earth on a date that can't be revealed because of its astrological significance, and that his name is a secret - though he has admitted to using the names Sonny Blount and Sonny Lee and has stated that his parents' name was Arman, which, he says, "comes from ancient Egypt". Certainly the name Sun Ra derives from Ra, sun god of ancient Egypt, one of the poles of the Ra cosmology: although, with typically sly humour, Ra has also announced, "Sun Ra is not a person, it's a business name". Whatever the truth about his name, two independent researchers, Franco Fayenz (in his sleevenotes to an Italian issue of the Savoy LP The Futuristic Sounds Of Sun Ra) and Gary Carner (in his forthcoming book Jazz Performers: An Annotated Bibliography Of Biographical Material), both cite 22 May 1914 as Ra's birthdate; and it's widely accepted that Birmingham, Alabama, was at least his terrestrial birthplace. The facts he has revealed of his early years confirm 1914 as a plausible year of birth: he's spoken of his folks taking him to shows by the great classic blues stars - Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, Ethel Waters - and of listening avidly as a child to records by Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra and other early swing bands. Ra formed his own group in high school, toured the Midwest in the early 30s, but then seems to have dropped into obscurity until the late 40s, when he turned up as house pianist/arranger in Chicago's Club DeLisa, where he performed for a time with his first idol, Fletcher Henderson, and also played with many other artists who were passing through.
By the early 1950s he was leading his own ensembles and establishing a reputation on Chicago's South Side as a bit of an oddball. A keen student of Egyptology, Hebrew, philosophy and science, Ra issued his own pamphlets reinterpreting facets of the Bible and prophesying the coming of the Space Age - electronic horns, men walking on the moon, etc. (It seems these insights were greeted with scepticism: tenorist John Gilmore, who's been playing with Ra since 1953, remembers people calling him "on the moon man".) By 1956 Ra had assembled his first Arkestra and that year they made their recording debut for the tiny Transition label. When the label folded before a second session could be released, Ra set up his own record company, Saturn - one of the first artist-owned, independent jazz labels and certainly the longest-running. For the last 35 years he has released the bulk of his music - probably 150-plus LPs - on this label, still a shoestring organisation run from the group's communal HQ and still issuing records in the plain white sleeves with (sometimes) hand-drawn pictures and titles that are now valued collectors' items.