Brass Trax
It was more than just jazz for Sun Ra. The pianist and band leader created a total, collaborative artwork that comprised his music, his album covers and iconography, his band and its costumes, his record label, and even his public and private persona. In many substantial ways, Sun Ra was the embodiment of what came to be known as Afrofuturism, the mid-century wave of Afrocentric science fiction spectacles. For Sun Ra, it wasn’t a show. Doctor Funkenstein might have gone back to being George Clinton when the Mothership was packed up, but Sun Ra never stopped being Sun Ra.
The totality of Sun Ra’s art was recently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968 showed the breadth of Sun Ra’s iconography and even gave visitors a chance to see his storied band in action—offering a live performance of the surviving Arkestra members last May along with vintage video and photographs. The show, which had been curated by John Corbett, Anthony Elms and Terri Kapsalis for the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, consisted of album covers, stray instruments, videos, audio recording, and even corporate memos, each evincing Sun Ra’s total commitment to his aesthetic.
Sun Ra is not like us, he’s not human, but his music can save the world.
Sun Ra was born Sonny Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, but he wouldn’t let you believe that. He claimed that he came from Saturn, and he took his name from the Egyptian god of the sun. His story, a fusion of the ancient and the otherworldly, would take on a changing array of particulars throughout the years, but the core would remain the same. Sun Ra is not like us, he’s not human, but his music can save the world.
When Sun Ra began elaborating his cosmology, in the 50s, the streets were filled with Afrocentric metaphysical alternatives. And, like Sun Ra’s Saturn mythology, many of these alternative metaphysical systems harbored elements of science fiction. The newly emerging Nation of Islam, for example, taught that white people were the unhappy result of a laboratory experiment conducted by a mad black scientist. But Sun Ra’s cosmology was a species apart, and he would take special care, during his days in Chicago, to debate the finer points of his system with fellow park bench philosophers, honing his ideas and adding bits of Biblical prophecy here and Koranic teachings there.
Sun Ra’s cosmology wasn’t simply the way he passed the time. It was at the core of his music, as Pathways to Unknown Worlds demonstrated. The exhibition, which focused on El Saturn, Sun Ra’s Chicago record label, included such ephemera as promo sheets, typed on El Saturn letterhead, that alternate between plugging R&B singles like Lucy Gibson’s “I’m Gonna Unmask the Batman” and preaching sermons against the mysterious Atonites and in favor of interstellar harmony. For Sun Ra, it was one and the same.
Not even instruments were safe from the cosmological. Sun Ra was a taskmaster of a bandleader, the charismatic head of a free jazz cult. Not only were his band members denied the pleasures of sex, drugs, and booze—the birthright of most jazz players—they also had to play on instruments marked by Sun Ra himself. At the exhibition, Sun Ra’s “space harp,” an electrified mbira, hung next to a cymbal that Sun Ra had covered with symbols. The band’s music was never far away from the mystical.
The bulk of the exhibition dealt with Sun Ra’s cover art. The beauty of releasing your weird music on your own record label was that you could slap whatever you wanted on the record sleeve. Indeed, the earliest album covers were designed by Sun Ra himself, a gifted if unpolished graphic designer. Eventually album art duties would fall to Claude Dangerfield, who shaped the Sun Ra aesthetic. His work combined the fantastic sensibility of science fiction book covers with a taste for the archaic: the perfect visual stew to present Sun Ra’s intellectual trip from Egypt to Saturn and back.
His cover of Super-Sonic Jazz is a case in point. Strikingly two-toned—gold on black—the block print depicts a drummer’s hands, a saxophone, and a bass each emitting both musical notes and cosmological figures. An atom here, the image of Saturn there, all arranged like a talisman.
No exhibition covering Sun Ra’s visual aesthetic would be complete without footage from his live concerts. Sun Ra outfitted his band in a dazzling wardrobe of handmade science fiction haberdashery. From sparkling skullcaps, adorned with rhinestones to flowing, gold lamé robes, the Sun Ra Arkestra was a far cry from the staid jackets and ties that most jazz acts wore on stage. Pathways to Other Worlds included two videos of Sun Ra’s performances, one a transfer of an experimental film by minimalist composer Phil Niblock. Also on view was Space is the Place, Sun Ra’s action movie that expounded his Utopian message in the idiom of a cliffhanger.
Sun Ra’s music was only the most potent part of his aesthetic stew, and a deeper understanding of the totalizing thrust of his art should give any listener a deeper appreciation of the sometimes puzzling tunes that he put on wax.
