CHICAGO — Patrons of South Side jazz clubs in the 1950s might have noticed something a bit different about pianist Sun Ra’s big band — slowly at first, then all at once. Their sounds became more far-out, the synthy buzz of claviolines and Wurlitzers replacing Ra’s usual uprights. Bit by bit, their clothes changed, black coats and ties refracting into a spectrum of headdresses and capes.
Then, Ra — born Herman “Sonny” Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, where he lived before moving to Chicago in 1946 — started telling people he was from Saturn.
As the years went on, it was hard not to take Ra at his word. The original compositions and arrangements he played with his Arkestra, as he called that big band founded in Chicago, didn’t sound like anything else. They still don’t.
But just as subtly as they touched down on the South Side, the Arkestra disappeared. In 1961, the band left town to play in Montreal. They never returned to Chicago. The Arkestra settled in New York, then Philadelphia, where they’ve been ever since, in a rowhouse once owned by bandleader Marshall Allen’s father.
“On the way home, a New York taxi hit our car and tore it up. We stopped there waiting for them to pay for it, and next thing you know, we were living in New York,” Allen remembers with a raspy laugh. “Yeah. It was weird.”
But the group is soon visiting Chicago, with two performances on Saturday at Constellation.
Allen, who’s led the Arkestra since 1995, turns a spry 98 in May. After Ra died in 1993, saxophonist John Gilmore succeeded him as Arkestra bandleader until he died in 1995. Now, not only is Allen the Arkestra’s figurehead, he’s the last surviving member to live through the band’s foundational Chicago period.
When we connected over the phone to talk about those years, Allen spoke deliberately, as if tasting every word before he said it. But he’s far from guarded, tossing out quips that spark peals of infectious, sandpapery cackles. After dropping a nugget of wisdom, Allen buttons it with the same refrain, as inevitable as a punctuation mark: “You see?”
One gets the sense Allen doesn’t mean it colloquially, either. Today, the Sun Ra Arkestra’s influence on avant-garde American music and Afrofuturist thought is incontestable. However, while the Arkestra has always drawn a cult following, institutions were slow to recognize their eminence. In the 1990s, Ra’s former business manager Alton Abraham tried to donate his collection of thousands of manuscripts, writings, photos and ephemera belonging to Ra to Chicago-area archives. He had no takers.
“At that time, people weren’t using the word ‘Afrofuturism’ with any regularity. None of them could get their head around the idea of setting aside space for someone as insignificant, to them, as Sun Ra,” says John Corbett. The co-owner of the Corbett vs. Dempsey art gallery near West Town and author of several volumes on Ra, Corbett accompanied Abraham on his failed mission to place the collection.
After Abraham’s death in 1999, that collection would have headed to the landfill had Corbett not taken note and arranged to salvage the material. Since 2007, it’s been held by the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research Center. The Alton Abraham Papers remain the most centralized trove of firsthand information on the Sun Ra Arkestra’s Chicago years — that is, except for Marshall Allen.
“All the original people are gone. They’ve left me by myself,” Allen says, heaving a sigh. “So, I’ve decided to dedicate the rest of my time to promoting the music. Sun Ra was a great musician, and his music needs to be heard. You see?”
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Allen came to Chicago by way of Europe, where he studied music for a few years after World War II. He joined the army as a fresh-faced 18-year-old in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor; a couple of years and a whole lot of life later, Allen was among the troops to liberate concentration camps along the Eastern Front.
“You can’t even imagine those things. It was horrible,” he says.
Allen first heard about the Arkestra at Seymour’s Record Mart, not far from his job grinding lenses and manufacturing polishing pads for the Revere Camera Company. Joe Segal, the future founder of the Jazz Showcase, worked as a clerk at Seymour’s at the time. He handed off an Arkestra demo to Allen, who nearly wore out the record. It was unlike anything he’d ever heard.
“I came back and said, ‘Hey, I like Sun Ra,’ and (Joe) said, ‘Well, he practices every night up on the South Side, and he’s looking for talent.’ So I got myself together and went over there,” Allen says.
It would be some time before Ra trusted him enough to let him in the Arkestra, in 1958. Allen mostly observed the band, attending rehearsals and gigs but was rarely invited to step in for a whole tune. Allen remembers the first number Ra finally invited to play with the group: “Spontaneous Simplicity.” But for a while, that was it.
“I’d come out of conservatory, I was up on my reading, my eyes were good, my tone was good — I was a polished musician. Then, I get with Sun Ra, and he turns everything around,” Allen says. “Suddenly, I don’t know nothing — and I didn’t! I had to break all those years of training to do something different. It’s like life: You might know, but it don’t always work.”
But Allen was patient. He listened to Ra and studied his philosophies about not just the cosmos but world religions, Ancient Egypt and the African American experience — all of which Ra proselytized through polemical speeches delivered in Washington Park. Allen’s determination to join the Arkestra cost him plenty of sleep — and, eventually, his camera manufacturing job.
“I was coming into work kind of late, so when they laid everybody off, I was one of the first ones out,” he remembers with a snort. “So, I said, ‘That’s it,’ and went all the way with Sun Ra.”
The Arkestra held extended engagements at the South Side’s premier ballrooms, all now long gone: Vincennes Lounge (1954-1955), Budland (1956-1959), Casino Moderne (1957-1958), Queen’s Mansion (1958-1959) and Wonder Inn (1960-1961). Listeners took note of the far-out sounds. “Sun Ra and sidemen have a new concept of music with many progressive ideas and degrees of jazz that is basic and swinging, yet new in sounds,” wrote the Chicago Defender in 1959.
At the time the Arkestra made a name for themselves in 1950s Chicago, the state of the world wasn’t too far off from our own present moment. An escalating Cold War loomed abroad while racial justice movements fomented at home. The space race fueling the former was, to some African American commentators, a distraction from the latter. But to others, it was a lodestar. Pop-cultural visions of gleaming, stainless-steel metropolises became backdrops for a future in which Black people were not just equal but thriving.
Chicago was no exception. Multiple Defender issues from the era document the cosmological craze du jour, from a “Space Capers”-themed Mardi Gras celebration in 1958 to “Mrs. Astronaut” pageants. Ra’s Arkestra, of course, was part of the mix.
“Sun Ra and his Outer Space Arkestra (were) featured at Budland Sunday,” read a notice in a 1957 Defender issue. “Of course, the affair featured Outer Space dancing.”
In his 2020 book “Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City,” urban sociologist and University of Chicago professor William Sites connects those local phenomena with Ra’s own philosophies while highlighting what set his cosmology apart.
“This was the period after the Sputnik launch and the ramping up of a ‘new frontier’ ideology. But for Sun Ra, outer space was a utopian place for full development and emancipated communal life, specifically for African diasporic peoples — not a place for conquest,” Sites says. “It’s a notion that’s increasingly echoed in the decades that follow: We find this kind of Afrofuturism in Africa, we find it in the Caribbean, we find it in many different places. Sun Ra was very much at the center of launching that.”
According to an undated form Abraham saved, Ra applied to the NASA Art Program, which solicited applications for projects intended for a future space station. In his application, Ra petitioned the visual- and plastic-arts-oriented program to give his music a shot in space. “You know it is said ‘Music soothes the savage beast,’ and what is called man is very anarchy-minded at present,” he wrote.
If Ra received a reply, it’s lost to time. Luckily, Ra’s music has resounded mightily on Earth in the decades since. In the past year alone, the once-outre Arkestra has enjoyed institutional recognition that would even boggle the mind of its prescient founder. The Arkestra headlined an Afrofuturism festival at Carnegie Hall in February and was recently nominated for its first-ever Grammy, for 2020′s “Swirling.” The riotous, ebullient album became a bittersweet time capsule: Between when it was recorded and released, on Strut Records, conguero Atakatune and sax player/former Arkestra manager Danny Ray Thompson both died.
I asked Allen if he frequents old Chicago haunts whenever he’s in town, or if it calls up too many painful memories of departed Arkestra colleagues. He answers quickly and decisively.
“That’s yesterday. The thing we did yesterday is obsolete because it’s a new day and a new vibration,” he says. “It depends on the spirit of the city, you see. Sometimes I arrive a day ahead to see people and sit in the vibrations. I can’t tell you what we’re going to play, but I’ve got enough music in the book to do whatever I feel that day.”
“I’m not playing for no fame or money — I don’t care. I’m playing music for people who need something,” Allen says. “I want to create a better world, no matter how small.”
“You see?”
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