Friday, May 29, 2009

Pathways to Unknown Worlds [icaphila.org]



















































































http://www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/sunra.php

Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968 April 24 - August 2, 2009

Jazz pioneer, bandleader, mystic, philosopher, and consummate Afro-Futurist, Sun Ra, (born Herman Poole Blount 1914, Birmingham, Alabama, died 1993) and his personal mythology have grown increasingly relevant to a broad range of artists and communities. "Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968" presents a collection of paintings, drawings, prints, manuscripts, ephemera, and video produced by and about Ra and his associates—much of it previously unseen. This exhibition examines how Ra and his dynamic, continually-evolving ensemble, the Philadelphia-based Arkestra, crafted both their otherworldly image and fiercely independent approach to self-production.

Highlights of the exhibition include original drawings for their 1960's albums Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow and Other Planes of There, and five newly discovered typed and annotated broadsheets. Until recently, only one such broadsheet was known to exist—the one that Ra gave saxophonist John Coltrane in 1956. The show will also include the unpublished manuscript, The Magic Lie, a book of Ra's poetry, which has become influential in the nascent Black Islamic movement. In addition to these documents, the film Spaceways, by Edward English, will be on view. The film documents Ra and his Arkestra (a deliberate re-spelling of "orchestra"), in 1968, as they prepare to perform at Carnegie Hall.

Early in his career, Sun Ra spent virtually all of his time and energy on Chicago's south side, identifying with broader struggles for black power and identity, and saw his music as a key element in that struggle. As well as Sun Ra's connection to the incipient grass-roots Afro-Futurist movement in Chicago, he also has a connection to Philadelphia. In 1968, Sun Ra brought the Arkestra to Philadelphia, where his band mate Marshall Allen inherited a house on Morton Street in Germantown. The house served as band headquarters until Sun Ra's death in 1993. The Arkestra continues to perform under the leadership of Marshall Allen, who still resides at the Germantown house.

Long admired among fans of progressive jazz, Ra and his personal mythology have grown increasingly relevant and influential to a broad range of artists and communities. His music touched on the entire history of jazz, but he was also a pioneer of electronic and space music, and free improvisation.

Sun Ra developed a complicated persona of cosmic philosophies and lyrical poetry that made him a pioneer of Afro-futurism (a term coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future.")

"Pathways to Unknown Worlds" is curated by John Corbett, Anthony Elms and Terri Kapsalis for the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago and is coordinated at the ICA by Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow Stamatina Gregory. This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, $25. Institute of Contemporary Art | University of Pennsylvania 118 S. 36th St. Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289 T 215.898.7108 | F 215.898.5050 | contact us

Copyright © 2004-2009, Institute of Contemporary Art. All rights reserved. Website developed by Zero Defect Design LLC.

Greetings from the 21st Century! Year One

Another trip around the sun and time again to honor Sun Ra and Marshall Allen's Arrival Days. The Sun Ra Arkive blog is now a year old and looking forward to another year full of Sun Ra Arkestra news. Please stay in touch and let us know of any Sun Ra Arkestra related activity -- I'd love to see some more comments and community. Space Is The Place!

www.the-temple.net/astroblack/sunraarkive/dl.html








































































http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/arts/design/01path.html?scp=1&sq=Sun%20Ra&st=cse

Beamed From Tomorrow


By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: April 30, 2009


PHILADELPHIA — The jazz musician Sun Ra, ambassador from the Airy Kingdom World Tomorrow, creator of Enterplanetary Solar Exploding Music, and founder of the Astro Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra, is a hero of mine.

To my ears he was not only a genius composer, keyboardist and bandleader, but also constantly surprising. One minute he’s playing elevator schmaltz; then he’s making you float on air; then he’s making you deaf. I love that he was a sharp dresser, sort of kingly, sort of queenly, in faux leopard-skin capes and miner’s hats with lights.

I also admire him for transcending existential categories. He insisted he hadn’t been born, but always existed, coming to Earth from outer space, specifically the planet Saturn. Like many immigrants, he was self-invented, but radically so. He rejected being black or white or American or even human. He opted for extraterrestrial and wore his otherness like a crown.

You’ll find evidence for all of this in “Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68,” a small, piquant exhibition of art, writing and ephemera related to his life at the Institute of Contemporary Art here.

Although he kept the precise facts of his early life under wraps, documents show that he was beamed down to Birmingham, Ala., in 1914 as Herman Poole Blount, affectionately known as Sonny. In 1952 he changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra, Ra being the ancient Egyptian solar god. And as a performer he became Sun Ra.

He had at least as many talents as monikers. In addition to being a musician, he was a poet, philosopher, painter, graphic designer, street lecturer, activist and entrepreneur, as well as a numerologist and mystic. He worked out the fate of the universe through interpretive readings of the Bible, the Koran and Flash Gordon comic books, concluding that “the only way this world can be saved from being completely destroyed is through music.”

With that in mind, he composed and played without cease for 60 years, first in Birmingham, then in Chicago and New York, and finally in Philadelphia, where he lived until just before his death in 1993.

He also recorded, packaged and tried to sell his music, which, because it was unconventional, wasn’t easy to do. It is the practical side of his career that this exhibition of album jacket designs, posters, news releases and socio-spiritual manifestos, most of them from his formative years in Chicago, focuses on.

Organized self-promotion was not one of his skills. He was too reserved and too much an outsider. Shy and studious as a youth, he got by on his prodigious keyboard talent. But a visionary experience he claimed to have had gives an idea of his sense of apartness.

“My whole body changed into something else,” he reported many years after. “I could see through myself, I wasn’t in human form.” He said he was taken on an intergalactic trip by creatures with “one little antenna on each ear,” who told him to leave school because “the world was going into complete chaos.”

It’s always a little hard to tell if Sun Ra was being serious or not, but a sense of alienation seemed to be part of his makeup. In Chicago, where he went to find work after World War II, he met the ideal business partner in Alton Abraham, a teenager with spiritual interests similar to his own — both were members of an occult, utopian black separatist secret society — but with the organizational and promotional abilities he lacked.

Partly because both men were proponents of black self-sufficiency, do-it-yourself was their business style. This meant they could entirely monitor their product. Gradually they shaped the image of the musician who would become Sun Ra, and of the band he would lead, first called 8 Rays of Jazz, then the Arkestra. (The respelling may be based on the way “orchestra” was pronounced in Alabama; it also incorporates the name Ra written forward and backward.)

It was at this point, in the early 1950s, that a Sun Ra “look” for the band started to come into focus: a mystical-historical-comical blend of science fiction, Egyptology, Southern mummery, Freemasonry, nightclub theatrics (costumed acts were big at the time) and African masquerade, with rakishly flipped-brim Robin Hood caps — later beanies with propellers — thrown in.

To maintain complete control over the increasingly experimental music, Sun Ra and Mr. Abraham created their own label. They called it El Saturn Records and, using local black-owned businesses as a resource, they oversaw every aspect of album production, from recording, to pressing disks, to packaging and sales.

They paid close attention to the appearance of the product, ensuring that it looked handmade and offbeat. Sun Ra created some of the early record jackets himself. His specialty was fancy lettering with abstract flourishes, as seen in the colored pencil drawing of his name, as large as a Turkish emperor’s tugra, on the cover of “Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow.”

A few other artists — LeRoy Butler, James Bryant and one who signed himself Aye — later contributed more graphically dynamic images. But most of the designs were by Claude Dangerfield, a self-taught painter and a high school friend of several Arkestra musicians.

He was responsible for the art on many of the albums made in Chicago and later in New York — “Super-Sonic Jazz,” “We Travel the Spaceways,” “Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra Visits Planet Earth.” And it was his work that most consistently embodied the Arkestra’s signature space-age theme.

The theme had wide currency in cold war America, from doomsday Hollywood films to pop songs like “The Purple People Eater.” But the fantasy of traveling into outer-space blackness to find other, friendlier future worlds, had a specific pertinence to black nationalist thinking at the time. (When Sun Ra said, “Space is the place,” certain people knew where that place was.) In the 1990s this trend was retrospectively given the name Afro-Futurism, and Mr. Dangerfield’s art, like Sun Ra’s persona, embodies it.

There’s quite a bit of Mr. Dangerfield in the exhibition, which was originally organized by John Corbett, Anthony Elms and Terri Kapsalis for the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. The work encompasses not only his original jacket designs, but also hand-painted color separations and some of the plates used for the first printings. Seen in the light of the digital present, they are time-worn artifacts, but together they give a vivid sense of the grass-roots, cottage-industry enterprise that El Saturn Records was.

Sun Ra was pretty grass roots too. In the Chicago years he was still a local phenomenon, performing mostly in black clubs on the South Side. Even when he moved to New York City in 1965, his audience didn’t change much at first. His mercurial shifts, from bebop to improvisation to Disney film tunes, with Latino and African riffs folded in, left earthlings confused. And when the Arkestra stood on a stage and instrumentally screamed at listeners, people headed for the door.

Nor was Sun Ra himself always easy to take. Although a certain adorableness eventually accrued to him, he could be heroically furious in the pre-Black Power Chicago years, and speak with a prophet’s wrathful, rebuking voice. It comes through loud and clear in five typed broadsheets on view in the show.

He used them as scripts for street lectures, and in them highly conflicted racial polemics take the form of slicing, aggressive wordplay that spares no one’s feelings, white or black. He was speaking from one step beyond all that. “I never wanted to be part of planet Earth,” he once said, “And I did everything not to be part of it.” This was true.

The one thing he did that kept him here was make transcendent music. You get a taste of it in a short 1968 film by Edward English called “Spaceways,” which plays in one of the galleries. The film fleetingly places Sun Ra in the context of the civil rights and Black Power movements, which is right. But the best, most moving part is a long sequence in which the Arkestra is heard rehearsing for a Carnegie Hall concert.

The band — based in Philadelphia and still active today — is large here, maybe two dozen men; the percussion section is huge. Basically what we hear is a grand chorale of drums, chimes, bells and everything else. The Arkestra has become a celestial biofeedback machine, a thundering angel band, and Sun Ra, crowned, robed and serene on keyboard, is at its center, as majestic as an aging Rembrandt.

As the rhythms build, level out and build again, you feel they could go on forever. And you wish they would until, like a space ship, mountain-huge and transparent as air, they lift off.
“Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68” continues through Aug. 2 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia; (212) 898-7108, icaphila.org.

Sun Ra redux [philly.com May 5, 2009]





http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/44347422.html

Sun Ra redux An exhibit casts new light on the late jazz musician and utopian thinker who lived in Philadelphia for 25 years.

Posted on Tue, May 5, 2009 By David R. Adler For The Inquirer

'I do not come to you as reality; I come to you as the myth. Because that's what black people are: myths."
Baffling as it may seem, this quotation from the 1974 film Space Is the Place is one of Sun Ra's clearer pronouncements. The late pianist and leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra did indeed create his own myth, propagating a mystical, sci-fi worldview that can seem like a put-on, well removed from reality.

In fact, Ra's eccentric visions were a response to one of the harshest realities of all, the oppression of African Americans.

He was hardly the only jazz musician to speak to injustice through his art. But in an avant-garde jazz pantheon full of offbeat characters, Sun Ra truly upped the ante, claiming to be from Saturn. (He was born Herman Poole "Sonny" Blount in Alabama in 1914.)

"Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-68," an exhibit of art and memorabilia on view through Aug. 2 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, offers an extraordinary glimpse at the early career of Sun Ra - composer, entrepreneur, utopian thinker, and black-culture icon, and a Philadelphia resident from 1968 until his death in 1993.

In an April 23 walk-through of the two-room exhibit, curator John Corbett, a journalist and self-described Sun Ra fanatic, was all contagious enthusiasm as he discussed the displays: original album-cover art, sketch books, mimeographed polemics and manifestos, handbills, business cards, invoices, contracts, and other ephemera, as well as video installations and listening stations.

The exhibit was first shown in Chicago in late 2006; images can be found in a companion volume published that year by WhiteWalls. The works include sketches and other art from Sun Ra and his collaborators, including friend and manager Alton Abraham.

In one vitrine is a pink postcard, an ad hoc advertisement for the Arkestra scrawled in blue pen: "Hear the live tones of the space-future knocking at your door. . . . Take a tone adventure into the future. . . . Hear living reality in a prevue form. . . . A gift from the airy sun kingdom. . . ."

Corbett took pains to contextualize Ra's outer-space jargon and "its relevance for African Americans as a concrete metaphor, which all revolved around the idea of self-invention." In a brief essay, multimedia artist Camille Norment arrived at a different insight: "What really struck me once I began to comprehend Sun Ra was the realization that he was a nerd."

In that regard, Ra and his diehard followers have a lot in common. During a reception in the ICA lobby, a DJ spun vintage Sun Ra vinyl and cued up an original 45 r.p.m. pressing of "Enlightenment," which sounds like merry-go-round music from, well, Saturn. Corbett and John Szwed, author of Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, stopped in mid-sentence and leaned in to look at the turntable in awe.

Sun Ra's head may have been in the clouds, but his business practices were earthbound, savvy, and prescient. El Saturn Records, founded in 1957, which he ran with his manager, Abraham, was "one of the very first artist-run labels," says Corbett, adding the examples of Harry Partch's Gate 5 and Max Roach and Charles Mingus' Debut.

The do-it-yourself ethic came to play a huge role in punk and other indie genres. At a time of widespread economic change and dislocation, DIY is now a given in nearly every branch of the arts. Sun Ra's obsession with the future wasn't so wayward after all.

El Saturn's strategy, which entailed making and selling records in very small quantities, also prefigured today's print-on-demand model of self-publishing. But there was a political element as well.

"The idea was rooted in a local grassroots, Afrocentric community of black businesses and designers," says Corbett. Ra and Abraham "pulled people into the fold to make fliers and design things for them, coming up with this look that incorporated space, the Bible, apocalypse."

The results, including original hand-drawn cover art for Other Planes of There and We Travel the Spaceways, line the walls of the ICA exhibit.

In addition to a July 8 lecture by Szwed on Sun Ra, the ICA has other events planned, including a double-feature screening of the films The Brother From Another Planet and A Joyful Noise on July 15; a performance by groundbreaking Philly DJ and Sun Ra devotee King Britt on July 22; and a July 1 concert by the Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, a core Arkestra member from the beginning. Ars Nova Workshop also will present the Arkestra at Johnny Brenda's on May 24, ringing in Allen's 85th birthday at midnight.

Sun Ra's musical influence still looms large in Philly. Allen and roughly a half-dozen Arkestra members live on Morton Street in Germantown, in the residence known informally as the Sun Ra house, which is used as a rehearsal space and continuing focal point for the band.

Corbett, who bought and salvaged the Chicago "Pathways" materials after Alton Abraham's death in 1999, recognizes the poignancy of bringing the show here.

"There's no place more logical for it to be than Philadelphia," he said. "This is the place where Sun Ra finally felt comfortable enough to stay."

Greg Drusdow, the Arkestra's publicist and a font of Sun Ra lore, offers more on the thinking behind Ra's move to Philly, which the pianist once referred to as "death's headquarters":

"He realized that if the Arkestra was going to make the impact it needed to make on Earth, it had to go to the most dangerous and problem-ridden place on the planet, the place that needed the awakening only the Arkestra could bring."

If You Go

"Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-1968" continues through Aug. 2 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St.

Hours: Wednesdays through Fridays, noon to 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Admission: Free.

Information: 215-898-7108 or www.icaphila.org.

Art: Lending art to Darwin's science [philly.com May 10, 2009]



















http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20090510_Art__Lending_art_to_Darwin_s_science.html

Art: Lending art to Darwin's science It adds an almost-plausible if fictional dimension to the great man's observations.

Posted on Sun, May 10, 2009 By Edward Sozanski Contributing Art Critic

One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Darwin propounded one of the most momentous ideas in human history - that living species evolve over time through natural selection. Despite mountains of subsequent evidence affirming his profound insight, many people still reject what today seems self-evident to many others.
What more appropriate way, then, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the great man's birth and the sesquicentennial of the publication of On the Origin of Species than to organize a "dialogue" with Darwin that exposes laypeople to priceless historical material and encourages them to consider and respond to it.

The American Philosophical Society has done exactly that. Historical documents in "Dialogues With Darwin" enable visitors to follow the heated scientific debate instigated by the publication of his landmark book. But it also includes an unexpected, provocative and delightful dialogue - with art.

What connected Charles Darwin to art? Nothing at all, aside from his relationship, through his mother and wife, to pottery entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood. Yet the art that Eve Andrée Laramée has contributed to this archival display adds an almost-plausible, but fictional, aesthetic dimension to Darwin's empirical observations.

Laramée, who has exhibited widely through the United States and Europe, including at the Venice Biennale, says she is "interested in the ways that art and science are used to create belief systems about the natural world."

"I try to draw attention to areas of overlap and interconnection between artistic exploration and scientific investigation, and to the slippery human subjectivity underlying both processes."

Laramée's projects subtly challenge the authority of science to provide ironclad explanations of how nature works. Her contribution to "Dialogues" does something else - it also challenges one's ability to distinguish solid science from imagination or artistic invention.

To engage her work, which mostly takes the form of sculpture, one must accept that science and art can sometimes overlap. This is easily achieved; just think back to early maps of the Earth, full of implausible guesses and even sea monsters. It took centuries for the rational science developed in the ancient world to fully shake off corrupting myths and wishful thinking.

Laramée's segment of the show, called "Luminous Darwin," is arguably the most engaging dialogue of all, perhaps because, while it's entirely fictional, it's so deftly composed as to be almost plausible. Anyone totally ignorant of basic science could be bamboozled.

At the corners of a stellar display of illustrated books, maps and manuscripts, including original pages from Origin, she has installed a parallel narrative.

It proceeds from three "lost Darwin notebooks" created by her to look authentically antique, even down to the handwriting. In them, the eminent scientist supposedly reflects on the dreams of plants, the memories of stones, and the awareness of (animal) cells.

To give these musings concrete form, Laramée has constructed a suite of faux-scientific instruments, all but one fabricated in glistening copper, that mimic the appearance of Victorian laboratory apparatus. Three of these are "magic lanterns" with huge lenses that serve as viewing portholes to videos inside. One resembles a primitive typewriter or calculator.

The most piquant of her machines is Device to Extract Memories From Stones, a bit of fossil ammonite pinioned within a ring of copper knife points. Delicate copper wiring implies that these devices are electrical.

Laramée's imposture is thoroughly persuasive, at least as it applies to Darwin's time, when creative hoaxes such as Piltdown Man were initially accepted as science. It is less so for today, when science is more technologically precise and intellectually rigorous.

Still, her involvement adds zest to "Dialogues" by forcing visitors to think more critically about what they're willing to accept as verifiable truth.

Sun Ra Thinks Visually. Sun Ra (birth name Herman Poole Blount) is remembered as an influential jazz musician, bandleader, and self-proclaimed mystic and philosopher, especially in Philadelphia, where the Birmingham native lived from 1968 to his death in 1993.

Sun Ra, who claimed to come from Saturn and named himself after the Egyptian sun god, built up a mythology around himself and his Arkestra (his intentional spelling) that was grounded in a cultural movement called Afro-Futurism. Though primarily a musician, he also expressed himself visually and through poetry and philosophical writings.

It's mainly the visual part of his career that's featured in "Pathways to Unknown Worlds" at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Developed at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, where Ra spent his formative years as an artist from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, the show samples, but never adequately explains, his multifaceted personality and career.

It consists of a selection of small paintings, prints, drawings, manuscripts, videos and ephemera, and - most important - recordings of his music that provide the most satisfying justification for visiting the exhibition.

Jazz music is what Sun Ra did best and most innovatively; this is one art-museum show in which listening is far more rewarding than looking.

That's because "Pathways to Unknown Worlds" is primarily a cultural stew designed to illuminate a distinctive African American personality and a worldview tied to African roots. The visual material is mainly designs for record-album covers, and sometimes the actual sleeves.

The covers are offered as examples of how Sun Ra and his associates controlled all aspects of their music through an independent label called El Saturns Records, down to designing and sometimes even fabricating their own albums.

That fact is usually more interesting than the individual designs themselves, many of which look like student graphic-design projects. They do not inspire one to linger; except for the 1972 cover design for Discipline by LeRoy Butler, Sun Ra would have served himself better by hiring out this work.

His visual efforts are far outstripped by his progressive-style jazz - dissonant and strongly rhythmic, dominated by sax, piano (Ra's instrument), and percussion.

The bits I heard were instantly captivating. Spend your time on the "listening bench," where you can sample 19 songs. If you're not overwhelmed by the graphic work, which is more interesting as archive than as art, the bench will make you a fan.

Art: Evolutionary Art

"Dialogues With Darwin" continues at the American Philosophical Society Museum, 104 S. Fifth St. (next to Independence Hall), through Oct. 17, 2010. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays and 5 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays, through Labor Day; then 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays through Sundays. Donation $1. Information: 215-440-3440 or www.apsmuseum.org.

"Pathways to Unknown Worlds" continues at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 36th and Sansom Streets, through Aug. 2. Hours are noon to 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Free admission. Information: 215-898-7108 or www.icaphila.org.

Contact contributing art critic Edward J. Sozanski at 215-854-5595 or esozanski@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/edwardsozanski

A proper birthday for Sun Ra's successor [philly.com May 26, 2009]

















http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/46061992.html

A proper birthday for Sun Ra's successor

Posted on Tue, May 26, 2009 By A.D. Amorosi For The Inquirer

Sun Ra's cosmic philosophy and joyful noise long have been influential to all alternative music. But since 2000, the work of the late avant-garde jazz swing composer/keyboardist - often ignored by the mainstream - has experienced a renaissance.

Celebrating the Germantown transplant, who died in 1993 at age 79, has become a preoccupation of labels like Atavistic and Evidence, which are bringing out previously unreleased recordings from Ra's own Saturn imprint. While Ra and his merry men, the Arkestra, played themselves in the 1974 film Space Is the Place, recent documentaries like Brother From Another Planet and local director Ephraim Asili's new Points on a Space Age flourish. Philly's ICA even has a Sun Ra Arkestra exhibit running until August.

Yet for all this acclaim, little has been allocated to Ra's eventual successor and Arkestra leader, saxophonist Marshall Allen.

Sunday's sold-out Ars Nova Arkestra concert and 85th birthday party for Allen at Johnny Brenda's helped rectify that.

Toasts were given. Birthday songs were sung. MoonPies were eaten. And during intermission, attendees watched videos - all to celebrate Allen, the man who, since 1995, has led the 15-member ensemble in Ra's image and with his own magnetic arranging and compositions skills.

On stage, Ra's visual image was, as always, portrayed with gilded robes, floppy hats and wide-eyed stares. His sonic image (and that of Allen's, who has been an Arkestra member since the 1950s) was displayed in the band's usual flurry of hyperactive African percussion, woozy reeds and brass, oddball time signatures, chanted vocals and a preoccupation with big band brio, from a down-and-dirty New Orleans to Duke Ellington's Harlem fantasia.

Each tune - from the Disney dearness of "When You Wish Upon a Star" to the psychedelic organ-grinding of "Sometimes I'm Happy" - ended like a drunken shipwreck. While "Angels and Demons at Play" toyed with an Egyptian blues motif and a clunky spastic rhythm, "In-B-Tween" sounded like elephants braying atop a prickly percolating samba.

Though occasionally silly, Allen's Ra-Arkestra was no joke. Longtime Ra trumpeter Michael Ray and alto saxophonist Knoel Scott were as staunchly masterful as they were madly adventurous, riding the precipice of tradition with each lick.

And Allen? He squeaked his way through the rhythm-and-chant of "Millennium" without losing its melodic nuance and improvised on his whistle-sounding synth-sax like Coltrane meeting Ra on the offshoots of Jupiter.

To say the least, nice party.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Sun Ra Arkestra: "Hymn to the Universe" Concert On Demand












http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cod/concerts/20081021sunra

Sun Ra Arkestra: Hymn to the Universe

Recorded: Oct. 21, 2008 Venue: Palais Royale Ballroom, Toronto, ON

The Sun Ra Arkestre was formed by Sun Ra in the 1950's and has been performing ever since. Following Sun Ra's death in 1993 Marshall Allen - who had ben leading the reed section for 40 years - took over the ensemble.

The Arkestre's jazz is avant garde, eclectic and playful and performed by a band full of extremely talented and dedicated musicians whose music is their life.

"Hymn to the Universe" is a celebration of music and dance with the combined forces of the Sun Ra Arkestre under the direction of Marshall Allen and the dance company Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie.

The Music Gallery and Rough Idea presented "Hymn to the Universe" at the Palais Royale during the 2008 X Avant New Music Festival.

Music composed by Sun Ra except where otherwise indicated:

1-Section One: Seeing
Black and Tan Fantasy by Duke Ellington 5:46
Sea of Sounds 7:57
Crystal Spears 4:41
Light From A Hidden Sun 4:07
Yeah Man! by N. Sissie 3:40
The Within of Things by Marshall Allen 5:20

2-Section Two: Omniverse

Body and Soul by Johnny Green
The Conjunction of Science and Religion by Marshall Allen 3:47
3-Section Three: Attunement

Heliocentric 6:17
Cocktails for Two by Sam Coslow and Arthur Johnson 3:42
In-B-Tween & Mr. Mystery by Marshall Allen/Art Jenkins 10:57
We Travel The Spaceways 16:50

Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie are Bill Coleman, Laurence Lemieux, Peter Chin, Robin Poitras, Won Myeong Won, Carol Prieur, Junghm Jo, Jennifer Dahl, Robert Regala. Understudies/additional performers: Nicole Rose Bond/Juliette Coleman.

TRACK LISTING:
1 Section One: Seeing 31:31
2 Section Two: Omniverse 10:04
3 Section Three: Attunement 38:19
Sun Ra Arkestra
Marshall Allen - bandleader, alto sax, EWI (electronic wind instrument)
Fred Adams - trumpet
Art Jenkins - vocals, percussion
Knoell Scott - alto sax
Elson Nascimento - percussion
Dave Davis - trombone
Dave Hotep - guitar
Wayne Anthony Smith Jr. - drums
Reynold Scott - baritone sax
Farid Barron - piano
Danny Ray Thompson - baritone flute
Arthur Edward Booth - bass
Cecil Hiram Brooks - trumpet

PRODUCTION CREDITS
David Jaeger - Producer
Steve Sweeney - Recording Engineer
Wayne Richards - Assistant Recording Engineer

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Ars Nova Workshop presents a special night celebrating Marshall Allen's 85th birthday with The Sun Ra Arkestra Sun, May 24th at 9:00 PM

http://www.johnnybrendas.com

Ars Nova Workshop presents a special night celebrating Marshall Allen's 85th birthday with The Sun Ra Arkestra

Sun, May 24th at 9:00 PM
$10 general admission - door sales at 8pm

In celebration of Maestro Marshall Allen's 85th [which is actually May 25th], and the 95th anniversary of Sun Ra's arrival on Earth [actually May 22nd] at Johnny Brenda's, 12O1 N. Frankford Ave., Philadelphia, 215-739-9684.

Ars Nova Workshop presents a very special performance of the Sun Ra Arkestra in celebration of the 85th birthday of Marshall Allen. Join us for complimentary Moon Pies, a special midnight toast and DJ hi-res spinning classic jazz and breaks. Archival films featuring the Arkestra and Sun Ra will be projected on two large screens throughout the evening. You don't want to miss this!

As a young musician, Marshall Belford Allen (b. May 25, 1924) performed with pianist Art Simmons, Don Byas and James Moody before enrolling in the Paris Conservatory of Music. After relocating to Chicago, Allen became a pupil of Sun Ra, subsequently joining the Arkestra in 1958 and leading Sun Ra's formidable reed section for the next 40 years. Marshall, along with John Gilmore, June Tyson and James Jacson, lived, rehearsed, toured and recorded with Sun Ra almost exclusively for much of Sun Ra's musical career. As a member of the Arkestra, Allen pioneered the Free Jazz movement of the early sixties, having remarkable influence on the leading voices in the avant-garde. He is featured on over 200 Sun Ra recordings in addition to collaborations with Phish, Sonic Youth, Digable Planets and Medeski, Martin & Wood. Marshall assumed the position of maestro in 1995, following the ascension of Sun Ra in 1993 and John Gilmore in 1995. Marshall continues to be committed to the study, research and development of Sun Ra's musical precepts and has launched the Sun Ra Arkestra into a dimension beyond that of mere "ghost" band by writing fresh arrangements of Sun Ra's music, as well as composing new music and arrangement for the Arkestra. He works inceasingly to keep the big-band tradition alive.

"Beamed From Tomorrow" by Holland Coulter New York Times



















http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/arts/design/01path.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

ART REVIEW | 'PATHWAYS TO UNKNOWN WORLDS' Beamed From Tomorrow
By HOLLAND COTTER Published: April 30, 2009

PHILADELPHIA — The jazz musician Sun Ra, ambassador from the Airy Kingdom World Tomorrow, creator of Enterplanetary Solar Exploding Music, and founder of the Astro Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra, is a hero of mine.

To my ears he was not only a genius composer, keyboardist and bandleader, but also constantly surprising. One minute he’s playing elevator schmaltz; then he’s making you float on air; then he’s making you deaf. I love that he was a sharp dresser, sort of kingly, sort of queenly, in faux leopard-skin capes and miner’s hats with lights.

I also admire him for transcending existential categories. He insisted he hadn’t been born, but always existed, coming to Earth from outer space, specifically the planet Saturn. Like many immigrants, he was self-invented, but radically so. He rejected being black or white or American or even human. He opted for extraterrestrial and wore his otherness like a crown.

You’ll find evidence for all of this in “Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68,” a small, piquant exhibition of art, writing and ephemera related to his life at the Institute of Contemporary Art here.

Although he kept the precise facts of his early life under wraps, documents show that he was beamed down to Birmingham, Ala., in 1914 as Herman Poole Blount, affectionately known as Sonny. In 1952 he changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra, Ra being the ancient Egyptian solar god. And as a performer he became Sun Ra.

He had at least as many talents as monikers. In addition to being a musician, he was a poet, philosopher, painter, graphic designer, street lecturer, activist and entrepreneur, as well as a numerologist and mystic. He worked out the fate of the universe through interpretive readings of the Bible, the Koran and Flash Gordon comic books, concluding that “the only way this world can be saved from being completely destroyed is through music.”

With that in mind, he composed and played without cease for 60 years, first in Birmingham, then in Chicago and New York, and finally in Philadelphia, where he lived until just before his death in 1993.

He also recorded, packaged and tried to sell his music, which, because it was unconventional, wasn’t easy to do. It is the practical side of his career that this exhibition of album jacket designs, posters, news releases and socio-spiritual manifestos, most of them from his formative years in Chicago, focuses on.

Organized self-promotion was not one of his skills. He was too reserved and too much an outsider. Shy and studious as a youth, he got by on his prodigious keyboard talent. But a visionary experience he claimed to have had gives an idea of his sense of apartness.

“My whole body changed into something else,” he reported many years after. “I could see through myself, I wasn’t in human form.” He said he was taken on an intergalactic trip by creatures with “one little antenna on each ear,” who told him to leave school because “the world was going into complete chaos.”

It’s always a little hard to tell if Sun Ra was being serious or not, but a sense of alienation seemed to be part of his makeup. In Chicago, where he went to find work after World War II, he met the ideal business partner in Alton Abraham, a teenager with spiritual interests similar to his own — both were members of an occult, utopian black separatist secret society — but with the organizational and promotional abilities he lacked.

Partly because both men were proponents of black self-sufficiency, do-it-yourself was their business style. This meant they could entirely monitor their product. Gradually they shaped the image of the musician who would become Sun Ra, and of the band he would lead, first called 8 Rays of Jazz, then the Arkestra. (The respelling may be based on the way “orchestra” was pronounced in Alabama; it also incorporates the name Ra written forward and backward.)

It was at this point, in the early 1950s, that a Sun Ra “look” for the band started to come into focus: a mystical-historical-comical blend of science fiction, Egyptology, Southern mummery, Freemasonry, nightclub theatrics (costumed acts were big at the time) and African masquerade, with rakishly flipped-brim Robin Hood caps — later beanies with propellers — thrown in.

To maintain complete control over the increasingly experimental music, Sun Ra and Mr. Abraham created their own label. They called it El Saturn Records and, using local black-owned businesses as a resource, they oversaw every aspect of album production, from recording, to pressing disks, to packaging and sales.

They paid close attention to the appearance of the product, ensuring that it looked handmade and offbeat. Sun Ra created some of the early record jackets himself. His specialty was fancy lettering with abstract flourishes, as seen in the colored pencil drawing of his name, as large as a Turkish emperor’s tugra, on the cover of “Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow.”

A few other artists — LeRoy Butler, James Bryant and one who signed himself Aye — later contributed more graphically dynamic images. But most of the designs were by Claude Dangerfield, a self-taught painter and a high school friend of several Arkestra musicians.

He was responsible for the art on many of the albums made in Chicago and later in New York — “Super-Sonic Jazz,” “We Travel the Spaceways,” “Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra Visits Planet Earth.” And it was his work that most consistently embodied the Arkestra’s signature space-age theme.

The theme had wide currency in cold war America, from doomsday Hollywood films to pop songs like “The Purple People Eater.” But the fantasy of traveling into outer-space blackness to find other, friendlier future worlds, had a specific pertinence to black nationalist thinking at the time. (When Sun Ra said, “Space is the place,” certain people knew where that place was.) In the 1990s this trend was retrospectively given the name Afro-Futurism, and Mr. Dangerfield’s art, like Sun Ra’s persona, embodies it.

There’s quite a bit of Mr. Dangerfield in the exhibition, which was originally organized by John Corbett, Anthony Elms and Terri Kapsalis for the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. The work encompasses not only his original jacket designs, but also hand-painted color separations and some of the plates used for the first printings. Seen in the light of the digital present, they are time-worn artifacts, but together they give a vivid sense of the grass-roots, cottage-industry enterprise that El Saturn Records was.

Sun Ra was pretty grass roots too. In the Chicago years he was still a local phenomenon, performing mostly in black clubs on the South Side. Even when he moved to New York City in 1965, his audience didn’t change much at first. His mercurial shifts, from bebop to improvisation to Disney film tunes, with Latino and African riffs folded in, left earthlings confused. And when the Arkestra stood on a stage and instrumentally screamed at listeners, people headed for the door.

Nor was Sun Ra himself always easy to take. Although a certain adorableness eventually accrued to him, he could be heroically furious in the pre-Black Power Chicago years, and speak with a prophet’s wrathful, rebuking voice. It comes through loud and clear in five typed broadsheets on view in the show.

He used them as scripts for street lectures, and in them highly conflicted racial polemics take the form of slicing, aggressive wordplay that spares no one’s feelings, white or black. He was speaking from one step beyond all that. “I never wanted to be part of planet Earth,” he once said, “And I did everything not to be part of it.” This was true.

The one thing he did that kept him here was make transcendent music. You get a taste of it in a short 1968 film by Edward English called “Spaceways,” which plays in one of the galleries. The film fleetingly places Sun Ra in the context of the civil rights and Black Power movements, which is right. But the best, most moving part is a long sequence in which the Arkestra is heard rehearsing for a Carnegie Hall concert.

The band — based in Philadelphia and still active today — is large here, maybe two dozen men; the percussion section is huge. Basically what we hear is a grand chorale of drums, chimes, bells and everything else. The Arkestra has become a celestial biofeedback machine, a thundering angel band, and Sun Ra, crowned, robed and serene on keyboard, is at its center, as majestic as an aging Rembrandt.

As the rhythms build, level out and build again, you feel they could go on forever. And you wish they would until, like a space ship, mountain-huge and transparent as air, they lift off.

“Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68” continues through Aug. 2 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia; (212) 898-7108, icaphila.org.