Sun Ra at the Showcase Live in Chicago 1976-1977 - from Zev Feldman the Jazz Detective

 Copyright ® Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Stan Kenton was not the only 1950s big band leader who attempted to remake modern jazz in his own iconoclastic image. Sun Ra drew on an equally eclectic mixture of forward-looking jazz styles in the various recordings made with his large ensemble, the Arkestra — a band invariably described by the leader with one or more impressive descriptives attached (e.g., the Myth Science Arkestra or the Astro Infinity Arkestra). A certain extravagance permeated almost everything having to do with this artist.  Many jazz players are guilty of distorting or exaggerating the facts of their early years, but only Sun Ra went so far as to trace his origins back to the planet Saturn and claim descent from a race of angels. In truth, Sun Ra was apparently born with the more pedestrian name of Herman Blount in Alabama in 1914. He made his first forays as a pianist and composer during the Swing Era and worked for a time in the late 1940s in the Fletcher Henderson band. His visionary music, however, did not come into its own until the mid-1950s, when he

began recording extensively with his large band, first in Chicago and later in New York, Philadelphia, and other environs. The term "Afrofuturism" didn't exist back then, but with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that this unconventional bandleader was laying down its foundations back at the dawn of the Space Age.

Sun Ra's coterie of fans came to expect the unexpected, and were seldom disappointed. The Arkestra’s lineup might include, on a given night, as few as ten musicians or as many as thirty. Dancers, costumes, slide shows, and other ‘extras' were frequently included with the price of admission. The Arkestra's music could be equally changeable. Elements of bebop, hard bop, and swing loom large on the band's mid-1950s recordings. But over the next decade, the Arkestra would embrace an even broader palette: swirling layers of percussion, spooky electronic effects, disjointed echoes of rhythm and blues, hints of Asian and African music, dissonance, atonality, at times aural anarchy. Sun Ra's jargon-laden talk of the cosmos and interplanetary music may have sounded like a half-baked script from a Cold War sci-fi movie, but his appetite for the new and anomalous truly spanned a universe, or at least several galaxies, of sounds.”

- Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz, 3rd Edition [2021]

Sun Ra

KEYBOARDS, BANDLEADER

born 22 May 1914; died 30 May 1993

“He was born Herman Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, although as every schoolboy knows, he was really from the planet Saturn. He learned to play piano by watching his sister, and subsequently toured with a Chicago band, around 1933, although he later returned to college in Alabama. For the next ten years he played in undistinguished groups in the Midwest, interrupted only by a brief and miserable spell in the armed forces. He then played in Fletcher Henderson's band in 1946. worked as a pianist in Chicago clubs, and bossed an occasional big band in the area, before forming a small group with saxophonist Pat Patrick in 1950 which eventually grew into a large ensemble. Blount had become fascinated by Egyptian studies, and he changed his name to Le Sony'r Ra, his legal name, although it would be shortened to Sun Ra for stage purposes. He called his group the Arkeslra and insisted that he was a communicator from another race, sent here to help a people in darkness. From this point, the Arkestra began enlisting musicians who would, in some cases, stay for decades: besides Patrick, these would include John Gilmore, Marshall Allen and Ronnie Boykins. Dressed in suitably elaborate robes, Sun Ra and his men began formulating stage shows which might have seemed vaudevillian but which would sustain their reputation as genuine mystics. A record label, Saturn, was established in 1956: its chaotic discography was, by the time of the leader's death, so large and convoluted that it ran to hundreds of pages and possibly thousands of recordings. The 50s music was largely in thrall to hard-bop conventions, but as time went on it took on more percussive devices, brought in Latin influences, started to take on free-form elements, and eventually involved electric keyboards. Sun Ra shifted the operation to New York in 1961, and this initiated his most radical period, with such records as The Magic City (1965) as confrontational and powerful in their way as anything made by Shepp or Ayler. The Arkestra had relatively little regular work, but they rehearsed almost all the time, and Sun Ra's men were extraordinarily loyal - 'They're in the Ra jail, the best in the world.'

In 1968 Sun Ra moved base again, this time to Philadelphia. In the 70s,the Arkestra shows became bigger and grander: there were singers, dancers and acrobats involved, and Sun Ra himself added synthesizers and such instruments as the rocksichord to his own stage paraphernalia. Later, he went further by reaching back, playing old Fletcher Henderson arrangements alongside such greatest hits of his own as 'We Travel The Spaceways'. The group travelled the world and was honoured at last, through persistence as much as anything else, although Sun Ra had always attracted an audience outside jazz by dint of his sheer strangeness. He welcomed believers and would expound at length on his other-worldly philosophies. By the late 80s, age was slowing him down and the Arkestra began to lose its zest, but it carried on all the same, and even after his death it still exists, currently under the leadership of Marshall Allen. Although, as a whole, Sun Ra's work was too sprawling and individual to really be any kind of a general influence, much of what he did was routinely ahead of its time and prescient of things which have happened in music since, whether in jazz, rock or wherever. And he is surely still out there, somewhere. 

- Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia 

“The tendency has been to treat all of the Arkestra's music after about the time of Space Is the Place [1973] in a general way, but it's not like it stopped developing. In fact, the advent of this sort of variety show framework, which also harkens to an earlier moment in jazz when elaborate floor shows included dancing and theater and comedy as well as diverse kinds of music, is in fact an important step in the evolution of Sun Ra's vision. And it was different in the mid-70s from what it had been earlier in the decade, when it was often dominated by drums, featuring long hand-drum sections and aggressive horn solos. Those components were still part of the program, but subsumed more fully into what might be best called the Ra Revue, a super entertaining sojourn through all the stages of Arkestra development, which were, in effect, a little primer on jazz, improvisation, and Afro-futurity. These recordings, drawn from two exceptionally wonderful stretches in Chicago separated by a couple of years, provide a loving view of the Ra Revue, waxed for the ages amidst the warmth of a city Sun Ra once called home.”

- John Corbett is a writer, producer, and curator based in Chicago. He is co-owner of Corbett vs. Dempsey, an art gallery and record label.

JAZZ DETECTIVE LAUNCHES PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED

SUN RA AT THE SHOWCASE: LIVE IN CHICAGO (1976-1977)

AS LIMITED TWO-LP RECORD STORE DAY EXCLUSIVE APRIL 20, 2024

Will Also be Released as Two-CD Package on April 26, 2024

I've always thought of Sun Ra's music as the Jazz equivalent of a feast and wow did Zev Feldman ever serve up another banquet with this one. 

Preparing for the concerts with the vast amount of music performed, the large number of musicians that must be contracted and rehearsed and staging the supporting cast, the supplemental audio and lighting enhancements and the other visual accompaniments must have required staggering amounts of work on Sun Ra’s part. 

Sun Ra did not just put on a show, he put on a spectacle. 

Fittingly, Zev Feldman, the Jazz Detective, and his “partners in crime” - project coordinator Irwin Chusid and Executive Producers Jordi Soley and Carlos Agustin Calembert of Elemental Records - have matched Sun Ra’s stunning revues with a sumptuously packaged double CD extravaganza of their own.

According to Ann Braithwaite’s media release, their effort takes the form of storming performances captured live in 1976 and 1977 at the Jazz Showcase, Joe Segal's Storied Windy City Venue, including a lavish collection of Rare Photos, Notes by John Corbett, and Insightful Interviews with Sun Ra's Collaborators and Disciples, including Contemporary Arkestra Leader Marshall Allen.

Co-produced with Michael D. Anderson of the Sun Ra Music Archive, the Showcase album comprises high-energy, freewheeling performances by the 19-piece Arkestra, which features many of the band's notable soloists, including tenor legend John Gilmore, alto/flute master Danny Davis, baritone saxophonist Danny Ray Thompson, and veteran altoist/flutist Marshall Allen, who today leads the group at age 99. June Tyson, the Saturnian Queen of the Arkestra, contributes vocals to the set.

The richly annotated Sun Ra at the Showcase includes an in-depth essay by writer, musician, and label/gallery owner John Corbett; previously unseen photographs shot at the Showcase by Hal Rammel; and insightful interviews with Marshall Allen, Sun Ra collaborators Reggie Workman and Jack DeJohnette, saxophonist David Murray, pianists Matthew Shipp, Dave Burrell, Michael Weiss, Amina Claudine Myers, and guitarist and Sonic Youth co-founder Thurston Moore.

"Jazz Detective," says of this new archival release, "It is an enormous pleasure to bring to you my first collaboration with the Sun Ra estate celebrating the long-lasting legacy of the great Sun Ra. I've been listening to Ra's music for decades and find enormous inspiration and creativity in it. The road to this release began in 2022 when I reached out to my longtime friend Garrett Shelton, who in 2014 had worked with Irwin Chusid of the Sun Ra estate and archivist Michael D. Anderson on a Sun Ra centennial project. For a number of months, Michael and I worked together to find a meaningful recording that we could pair up on to release together. These recordings are an extraordinary find."

Corbett's introduction places the '70s dates in the context of the music's Windy City origins: "Sun Ra had a storied history with Chicago. It was, without hyperbole, the place where Ra was conceived. Herman Poole Blount was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, but Sun Ra came into existence in Chicago in the 1950s. In a city teeming with great musical talent and suitable venues for almost any venture, Ra had ample opportunities to hone his craft as an arranger and composer, to test his skills as a bandleader, to further his esoteric readings, to develop his unique performance persona, and to write a whole songbook's worth of original (in every sense) material. At the same time, he was free to experiment broadly and intensely. Chicago was where Ra imagined, assembled, and incubated his Arkestra."

Photographer Rammel, who witnessed the Jazz Showcase performances up close, recalls, "The mystery of how this richly orchestrated Arkestral music — its suite of songs, solos, clearly defined passages composed or improvised — unfolded was continually fascinating. Watching musicians listen to each other so intensely and react so effortlessly made traveling the space ways with the Arkestra a unique experience in all my years as a fellow traveler."

Marshall Allen, whose involvement with Ra's music has encompassed 65 uninterrupted years, says. "Sun Ra was a genius. He had the music inside his mind and his own way of playing it. of attacking every note. He was a good teacher and wrote beautiful music. Being in his band was like a dream. Once there. I found a place to stay. He wasn't just a musician. He was above all an innovator who could imagine the future."

Some of the jazz greats who played with Ra or witnessed him in live orbit speak about him with awe.

Bassist Workman says, "It's really hard to find words big enough to explain who Sun Ra was, because we are speaking about a very unique character, a learned man, and a very unusual mind. I had the chance to play with Sun Ra a couple of times. Either it was a session or it was some rehearsal or something like that. I was always very busy in those years, but tried to make time to see him. because being in his company was an important thing. It was quite an experience for me."

Drummer DeJohnette says, "Playing with Sun Ra was challenging. He never laid down any rules about how one should play. He'd just write the music and leave everybody else to use their own creative imagination to interpret the music."

Speaking of his first exposure to Ra's music at a 1973 date in Berkeley, saxophonist Murray remembers, "The band must've finished the gig at about 12:30 a.m. and we sat there talking to Sun Ra until about 3 in the morning. He spoke about many, many things. He was so mystical, and we were mesmerized. I hardly got a word in. I just couldn't believe this man could go on from one topic to another and connect all of them to mystical things, to the universe, to God. I had never heard anybody speak like that before. I love Sun Ra. his music and what he did."

Ra left his mark on later generations of pianists. Burrell says of an Arkestra live show he witnessed. 'They were playing with high energy, and I never heard such intense energy as when they walked up and down the aisle. From that time on, I knew that the Sun Ra phenomenon was intense and beautiful, and it inspired me to practice and be more serious about my own destiny." Weiss notes. "The writing is so interesting. It really comes from this big band language, but with all those exotic percussion and bells, and his interest in all these diverse keyboards was way before anybody else used that stuff." Myers says, "Sun Ra was one of the greatest creators, with his ensembles, because of his techniques on the piano, and also due to his compositions. Sun Ra was definitely an inspiration to me."

Shipp — who included Ra in his grouping of jazz keyboard originals in a 2020 essay. "Black Mystery School Pianists" — says, "I relate Sun Ra's imagination to what I call a cosmic musician, and that's what I get out of him. It's not even really jazz. He's trying to tap into the pure music of the cosmos."

Thurston Moore, whose adventurous music boasts a deep familiarity with Sun Ra's pioneering work and spirit, reflects on its meaning today: "'Greetings from the 21st Century' is Ra singing to the future a good two decades plus from where we live together now. Oh if only Ra could be here to butter our burning hearts with all the current crop of false idols running rampant in riots of war and desecration. What the world needs now...is Ra sweet Ra. Peace on Earth...and beyond the beyond -thank you for the music, Mister Ra."

If you are into Sun Ra’s music or looking for a way into it, you won’t want to miss this intriguing concert by the bandleader-composer-keyboardist-Afrofuturist.