Sun Ra

From Philosopedia

Sun Ra (22 May 1914 - 30 May 1993)

Herman Poole Blount was a jazz composer who played piano, organ, and synthesizer, was a bandleader known for his "cosmic philosophy."

Personal

Throughout his life, Sun Ra gave contradictory, sometimes nonsensical, answers to anyone who asked about his early life. His mother liked the popular vaudeville stage magician Black Herman, which could explain his first name. Sun Ra in jest thought he was distantly related to Elijah Poole, who later became known as 'Elijah Muhammed, leader of the Nation of Islam. He had an older sister and a half-brother, was called "Sonny" from childhood, and received his family values mainly from his mother and grandmother.

By the age of 11 or 12, he wrote original songs and could sight-read sheet music.

In Alabama, he attended Birmingham's Industrial High School

Sun Ra's Studio, Variety Recording

When Audiosonic Recording at the northwest corner of 1619 Broadway at 49th Street in the Brill Building became bankrupt in 1961, many of its clients followed Fred Vargas to Variety Recording Studio on 46th Street. He and his partner/companion Warren Allen Smith founded the studio in April 1961.

Sun Ra was one of the few Audiosonic clients that were allowed credit up to $10,000. Unless a company was paying his bill, Sun Ra used Variety Recording Studio exclusively in Manhattan.

In 1968 when the Variety Arts Building on 46th was burned by arsonists, Vargas and Smith within a month set up business just off Broadway, at 130 West 42nd. With over 5,000 square feet of space and allowing for Studio A and Studio B and a sound-proof drum booth as well as other improved facilities, Sun Ra and other previous clients followed.

As on 46th Street, the studio was open 24 hours a day including all religious holidays but excluding New Year's Eve, when the famed ball atop the nearby Times Building signaled the end of one year by descending to the lights announcing that the new year had begun.

Vargas is shown below at the console that allowed mixing of up to 32 channels.

Although the studio had as many as six engineers on call, Vargas was the chief engineer. Others who worked with Sun Ra were Joseph Cyr, Mike Dacek, José Gallegos, Vincent Leary, John Taglieri, and Bill Wittman.

The only one who with a lathe could cut individual acetate dubs from recorded tape while the client waited for a few minutes. He could then make a master tape of their session, whether it was one song for a 45rpm or an entire album for a 33rpm, which he could edit if pressings of 100 to 1,000 or more were ordered. Sun Ra was the only client allowed to order 100, which still required making an individual stamper that made pressings in quantity. Shown below is a Sun Ra metal plate from which pressings were made.

Shown below is stamper 10-3B 6888A, which was made to press up to 1000 33rpm records on Variety invoice 6888.

Sonny was good at securing jobs for the Arkestra - the State Department sent him to Europe and Africa. But he complained to Vargas and Smith that so many people and companies had not paid him. "You're the only two I trust," he once said eye-to-eye. Smith then drew up a draft of a letter upon which he voluntarily would write anyone who owed Sun Ra money. Sonny approved the following letterhead with a red top line, and Smith sent up to 50 duns. A few paid.

Monthly statements were sent to Sonny's Philadelphia address. The one below shows that Smith was able to cash an Italian check ("one with lots of zeroes," Sonny quipped) for $3,200.

Sonny received rock-bottom charges for everything he did, was never charged for late payment, and paid only 57¢ each for pressings and 20¢ for plain white jackets - for less than $1., he took the un-sealed LP and sold it for whatever he could obtain.

Since Variety Recording Studio was sold in 1990 (its new owner went bankrupt in one year), Smith has unsuccessfully tried to sell the numerous stampers and other Sun Ra mementoes. Asked by his Executor in 2008 whether they could be sold on eBay, Smith said it was an ultimate solution. However, he hoped to find a donor to purchase the entire collection and give it to a library or suitable site rather than dispose of the items to individuals for probable resale.

Philosophical Views

Szwed, in his biography, details how Sun Ra's views changed. At first, he identified with the broad struggles for black power, black political influence, and black identity, using his music to express his support for liberating fellow blacks. By the 1960s, however, he had become disillusioned with such aims, even to the point of denying that race as a category was unimportant. In 1970, Sun Ra he said,

I couldn't approach black people with the truth because they like lies. They live lies. . . . At one time I felt that white people were to blame for everything, but then I found out that they were just puppets and pawns of some greater force, which has been using them. . . . Some force is having a good time [manipulating black and white people] and looking, enjoying itself up in a reserved seat, wondering, "I wonder when they're going to wake up.

When ten years old, Sun Ra joined the Knights of Pythias. Although his parents were deeply religious, he was not formally associated with any Christian church or sect. He, according to Szwed, was favorably impressed by Freemasonry's esoteric concepts.

El Ra Records, Biographical Information

Marshall Allen, an octogenarian who joined the Arkestra in 1958, has created a website about Sun Ra and the group of musicians that continues to perform as "The Sun Ra Arkestra." Allen has played on over 200 Sun Ra releases. The site includes material from a 1989 press it by A&M Records, such as the following:

Eclectic, outrageous, sometimes mystifying but always imbued with a powerful jazz consciousness, the music of Sun Ra has withstood its skeptics and detractors for nearly three generations. And well it should, since Sun Ra has been both apart of and ahead of the jazz tradition during that time. Like Duke Ellington and swing-era pioneer Fletcher Henderson, Sun Ra learned early on to write music in an arranged form that showcased the specific talents of his individual Arkestra members, and he has retained the services of some of these musicians to this day: John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, and Julian Priester for example since they first joined in the 1950's. On the other hand, Sun Ra was the first jazz musician to perform on electronic keyboards (56), the first to pursue full-scale collective improvisation in a big band setting, and his preoccupation with space travel as a compositional subject predated bands like Weather Report by about 15 years.All this from someone who refuses to even cite the earth as his home planet and prefers to have arrived from Saturn. As Sun Ra once explained it, "I never wanted to be a part of planet Earth, but I am compelled to be here, so anything I do for this planet is because the Master-Creator of the Universe is making me do it. I am of another dimension. I am on this planet because people need me".

Equally as mystifying is the fact that Sun Ra has no legal birth certificate. The Library of Congress claims that he arrived in Alabama, U.S.A., and his passport states that his legal name is Le Sony'r Ra, thus making all other names such as Sonny Lee, Sunni Bhlount, Armand Ra, and H. Sonne Bhlount merely pseudonyms.

In the 1940's Sun Ra became the house arranger for stage shows at the famous Chicago night spot, the Club DeLisa and played for the band led by Fletcher Henderson. Henderson was the arranger for the Benny Goodman Orquestra as well as his own and was a great inspiration to Ra who encouraged him to continue writing. In the early 50's, Ra's more radical compositions and arrangements found their way into his own groups which featured exotic costumes and unusual instruments.

By 1955 while in Chicago, Le Sony'r Ra had become "Le Sun Ra" or Sun Ra, leader of the Solar Arkestra which has also been known by many other names such as the Myth-Science Arkestra, the Solar Myth Arkestra, and the Omniverse Arkestra. In addition to saxophonists Gilmore and Allen, the band boasted a number of musicians who have contributed much to jazz, including bassist Richard Davis, trombonist Julian Priester, drummer Clifford Jarvis, and reedman James Spaulding. The Arkestra itself started as what was thought to be a hard-bop big band at the Grand Terrace and Birdland night clubs - a rare enough item - but soon was incorporating free improvisation. As such, it was a major influence on the emerging avant-garde jazz musicians in Chicago, such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

From its inception, the Arkestra's music was infused with Sun Ra's unique philosophy, an unexpected hybrid of space-age science fiction and ancient Egyptian cosmo religious trappings. This philosophy gained a visual manifestation in the colorful robes, mock-metallic capes, and space headgear worn by the band (it's the only jazz orchestra that brings a tailor on tour), and in a stage presentation that usually features several dancers, a number of group chants ("We travel the spaceways/From planet to planet"), and at least one instance of the entire band juking its way, single-file, through the audience.

In 1960, Sun Ra moved his earthbound base of operations to New York, then in 1968 settled in Philadelphia. In both cities, as in Chicago, the band lived and worked as a sort of collective, with the hard-core nucleus sharing living quarters with the leader and assuming the role of cosmo-friends to the master. Throughout the 60's Sun Ra continued to record for his own deliberately poorly distributed Saturn Records label, and also on various European labels, while touring widely and continuing to spread the fame of his live performances. In recent years Sun Ra has steadily returned to the music of the near past - the standards and jazz classics he grew up with - although it is all filtered through his delighfully off center perspective.

In an interview with Jazziz magazine, Sun Ra recalled, "They really thought I was some kind of kook with all my talk about outer space and the planets. I'm still talking about it, but governments are spending billions of dollars to go to Venus, Mars, and other planets, so it's no longer kooky to talk about space". For Sun Ra, though, it has never been a matter of mere oddness. When he talks of his Saturnian origins, of observing the planets and travelling the spaceways, and of "going into space", it is really a lavishly elaborated metaphor, or so it seems to those who are not aware of the spiritual side of things. Sun Ra's music transcends earthbound limitations by riding the flights of imagination, and his message is that all of us are free to ride those flights with him if we have the precision and discipline to do so.

John F. Szwed, Biographical Information

The major biography is by a Yale scholar, John F. Szwed: Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Da Capo Press, 1998). Following are excerpts from Szwed's book when he was Musser Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, Music, and American Studies at Yale University:

p. 202

Early in the 1960s Sun Ra was in Audiosonic, an independent recording studio in the Brill Building near Times Square, when he ran into one of their engineers, Fred Vargas. Vargas was a Costa Rican who had worked his way up from the garment district to a job in the REL labs with General Edwin Howard Armstrong, the inventor of FM radio, and then on to becoming a recording engineer. Shortly after, Audiosonic was turned into Variety Recording Studio on 225 West 46th Street when it was bought out by Vargas and Warren Smith, an English teacher in Connecticut. Vargas and Smith were intrigued by Sun Ra's music, and they began to record his small groups, and when the studio burned in 1968 and they had to move to West 42nd Street, their new studios were large enough to record Sun Ra's whole band (sometimes with as many as thirty musicians). They extended him long-term credit, living with occasional bounced checks, and helped him cut costs (Sonny often saved fifty dollars by sticking his own blank labels on the records, keeping his cost for a 12-inch LP to ninety-nine cents). Vargas and Smith allowed Sonny to press as few as 100 copies of a record at a time, when most recording companies had a minimum of 500. By handprinting the covers, they could avoid printing costs altogether. Often the covers carried only a simple title, or only the location of the recording in black ink; but at times they became more elaborate, with multicolored grids, rainbows, or astral scenes; or there might be photos of Sun Ra pasted on, hand-tinted, the whole cover laminated with a piece of textured plastic shower curtain. Sometimes every cover of a single record was different.

For the next thirty years Vargas recorded much of Sonny's music, editing the tapes with him, mastering them, and helping him get his records pressed. He introduced Sonny to people in show business, like Gershon Kingsley, an early synthesizer enthusiast, who later helped Sonny program his first Moog. The Arkestra was usually recorded in stereo with two overhead microphones, but occasionally by laying down tracks, then later overdubbing whatever parts Sonny decided to add. The whole recording process was open to discovery. Smith tells the story of when Vargas and Sonny were editing at three in the morning, and Fred accidentally played a tape backwards. "Galactic!" cried Sonny, and insisted that the sound be dubbed into the final version just as it was.

Warren Smith took care of business matters at Variety and had long conversations with Sonny about philosophical, personal, and financial matters when he was in the studio. Sonny began to have disagreements with Alton Abraham and feared that he was being cheated by other producers. So Smith created a fictive corporation by having "Enterplanetary Koncepts" stationery printed up, and he sent out inquiries to producers and record companies requesting accountings of money owed to Le Son'y Ra, Sun Ra and His Arkestra, and El Saturn Records. No money was ever collected, but Sonny treated Vargas and Smith as his colleagues: Arkestra members often slept overnight at the studio after recording sessions; they mailed press clips from their tours back to Smith, who stored them for them; and Sonny frequently sent them cheery postcards from his travels, which typically read "Having a wonderful time. Ciao, Sun Ra."

p. 372

One November morning in Philadelphia, Sun Ra found himself gasping for breath, his heart beating fast, then dropping away to a slow fade. Again they took him to the emergency room, and when the nurse saw his blood-pressure readings they put him back in the hospital once more. He came back out in a few days, but one morning he woke up unable to walk. The band tells the story that the doctor in the emergency room went through the procedures for establishing the nature of the injury, the degree of the damage: How many fingers do you see? What year is this? Who's the president of the United States? Where were you born? That was it: he called for a specialist. When the neurologist arrived there was a whispered conference at the door to the room, and the second doctor looked in and said, "Oh, it's Sun Ra. He is from Saturn !"

But this time it was serious. Serious enough that his sister came up from Birmingham to see him. The diagnosis was a series of strokes, yet Sun Ra - like Bob Marley a few years before him - denied it was a stroke, and said it was something done to him by his enemies. "There are forces trying to hold me back. And other forces trying to help me onward. And I'm the battleground!"

One side was affected, his legs, his left hand hardly functioned. He asked to be released from the hospital so the band wouldn't miss any work. But they kept him there and later moved him to a rehabilitation center. While in rehabilitation he asked to have a keyboard beside his bed and continued to play with one hand. He made calls to friends to reassure them and made plans for his return. One of the calls was to Warren Smith at Variety Recording Studio to say that he had heard that Smith's partner Vargas had died, and he was touched to find out that Smith had played part of the John Cage/Sun Ra recording at Vargas's funeral:

A vinyl record 1987 by Variety Recording Studio

• To his metaphysical surprise, I informed him that Fred was still at the studio. "Still at the studio? What do you mean?" he asked. "Well," I explained, "I took most of his cremains along with my luggage to Costa Rica, having them buried next to his parents and other family members. But I saved a little tube for my apartment and I saved another tube for the studio." "You did what?" Sun Ra asked is disbelief. "Yes," I explained, "when the workers were constructing the new Studio A control booth and no one was looking I slipped the cremains into a part of one of the walls. So Fred is still in his studio!" Sun Ra thought that was just the most beautifully metaphysical thing I had ever told him about, and before he hung up he said, "I love you both." The emphasis was on both. "I love you, too," was all I could respond, and the fact that he called just before his death adds to my indelible memories of the guy who once denied to me the London Times's report about his real birthplace and his real name . . . but we both knew otherwise, and he knew I knew. One newspaper, he laughed, even wrote that he had green blood in his veins.

A benefit was held for Sun Ra at the Village Gate at the end of November where Charles Davis, Junior Cook, Michael Weiss, Dewey Redman, and others led their own groups. In January there was another benefit at Sweetwater's with John Gilmore leading the Arkestra. And there was even talk of a tribute to Sun Ra at Lincoln Center's new jazz department, but nothing came of it.

Sun Ra's Grave Site in Elmwood Cemetery, Birmingham, Jefferson County, Alabama

p. 380

On May 30, 1993, a Sunday, towards whatever destiny, he left the planet. The man who had attempted to define death out of existence, to undo it with the force of words, to rescue all of the dead of history, was now himself being tested.

Other

• See a film about and with Sun Ra and his Arkestra.

• Jennifer Rycenga interviewed Sun Ra and included examples of his extemporaneous mystical declarations.

• Books About:

• Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68 John Corbett, Anthony Elms, and Terri Kapsalis, eds., An article by Preston Park Cooper from African American Review (22 June 2008) - (U of Chicago Press, 2007)

• Anthony Elms, Ra, Sun (August 1, 2006). Elms, Anthony; Corbett, John. ed. The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets. Chicago, Illinois: WhiteWalls

• Hartmut Geerken, Sun Ra: Collected Poetry and Prose - The Immeasurable Equation (BoD, 2006, hardcover)

• Sun Ra: Collected Works, Vol. 1 - Immeasurable Equation (Phaelos Books and Mediawerks (2005, paperback) - edited by Adam, Everett Abraham; (Introduction) Hartmut Geerken, and James L. Wolfe (Foreword).