Sun Ra: The Brother from Another Planet (BBC-TV, 2005)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Following the David Bowie concert video PBS showed last Saturday night, my husband Charles and I watched a 2005 documentary on a musical artist who in his own way was even more transgressive than David Bowie: Sun Ra, the pioneer of avant-garde “free” jazz, electronic jazz and what’s been called “Afro-futrurism,” which as far as I can tell means science fiction written by Black people and drawing on themes of Black culture. I just wrote a good deal about Sun Ra in connection with a concert video we’d seen of him Friday night on YouTube, a 1986 video of a performance he gave in, of all places, East Berlin. East Germany in general, and East Berlin in particular, had the reputation of being a dry, desiccated cultural wasteland, so it was startling as all hell to see Sun Ra got an invitation to perform there at a time when the East German regime still looked like it would go on forever, three years before the Berlin Wall came down and four years before the two Germanies reunited in what amounted to a friendly takeover of the East by the West. The documentary was directed by Don Letts and called Sun Ra: The Brother from Another Planet (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1HcBqCdh8) – a pun on the title of John Sayles’ marvelous 1984 science-fiction comedy about an alien from outer space who comes to earth as an African-American.

Letts’ film tells a lot of the ins and outs of the Sun Ra story I either hadn’t heard before or hadn’t heard with quite this “spin.” According to official records, Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama on May 22, 1914, but through most of his adult life he claimed to have been an alien from the planet Saturn. In her review of a boxed set of Pharoah Sanders’ early recordings from the mid-1960’s on Bernard Stollman’s ESP-Disk label, including two albums’ worth of material on which Sanders played in Ra’s band, the Arkestra (more on that name later), Fanfare critic Lynn René Bayley rather snippily dismissed Ra’s pretensions about having come from Saturn: “Two things really puzzled me about Sun Ra: [1] since he was considered a flake and an outsider, how did he raise the money to start and maintain his Arkestra? And [2] once he learned the scientific fact that no life of any sort can exist, let alone come from, Saturn, why didn’t he change his place of origin to a planet no one could reach or see?”

The answers are [1], according to John Litweiler’s chapter on Sun Ra in his book The Freedom Principle: Jazz Since 1958, Sun Ra kept his band together by living communally with them and farming them out for studio work with other leaders and pooling the money they made for more Sun Ra Arkestra albums. And [2], Sun Ra was deadly serious about his claim to have come from Saturn. According to this documentary, he was even able to persuade the U.S. Passport Office to issue him a passport stating that his birthplace was Saturn. Sun Ra also claimed to have been abducted by aliens, taken into their spaceship and studied and probed by alien scientists – 20 years before these sorts of accounts of alien abductions briefly had a surprising vogue. As I noted on the moviemagg blog reviewing a 1959 movie Sun Ra made in Chicago called The Cry of Jazz, Sun Ra’s experience with the record industry made him a pioneer in the D.I.Y. (“Do It Yourself”) marketing strategy that ini the late 1970’s became a staple of punk rock bands. Sun

Ra made his first LP as a leader, Jazz by Sun Ra, for a short-lived label called Transition that was also the first company to record Cecil Taylor and made some of John Coltrane’s earliest records. When Transition went out of business before it could release Sun Ra’s second album for them, Sound of Joy, Sun Ra got the message loud and clear. He couldn’t trust either the major labels or the mainstream jazz companies like Blue Note, Prestige or Riverside to release his music, so he started his own record label, almost inevitably calling it Saturn Records. One of his former associates interviewed for Letts’ film recalled that in addition to selling Sun Ra’s albums at his concerts, he maintained a post office box in Chicago where you could write and send a check. “Eventually you’d get your album in six years or so,” he recalled, “but we’d already cashed your check.” Sun Ra’s albums came in plain white covers with designs either hand-painted or silkscreened on them – and if you got one of the hand-painted ones you essentially had an edition of one.

Sun Ra always called his band the “Arkestra” – a pun on Noah’s Ark and the word “orchestra” – but he would almost always add modifiers to the basic name: “Astro-Infinity Arkestra,” “Intergalactic Research Arkestra,” or the name he performed under in East Berlin, “Cosmo Discipline Arkestra.” When I saw the name on the East Berlin film I wondered whether it was Sun Ra’s ironic reflection on East Germany’s political history,and in particular its experience of living under both the Right-wing dictatorship of Adolf Hitler and the Left-wing dictatorship of Walter Ulbricht that succeeded the Third Reich, but according to Letts’ film “discipline” was a key priority of Sun Ra’s. He would not only have his musicians live under the same roof with him, he would have them rehearse constantly to the point where just about every waking moment of your life would be spent either rehearsing or performing. (This is a dramatic contrast to Duke Ellington and his attitude towards rehearsing, which was basically that he called his band in for rehearsals only when he wanted to teach them new material; otherwise, he said, “We rehearse on the job.”)

Both Charles and I noted the resemblance between Sun Ra’s Arkestra and a religious cult: the band members lived together in an isolated space under the control of a charismatic leader who forbade them drugs, alcohol and sex. When John Sinclair, the 1960’s white radical who set up something called the “White Panther Party” and ultimately got set up by an undercover police officer and received a 20-year prison sentence for holding two marijuana cigarettes, was working with Sun Ra and trying to introduce his music to the psychedelic rock audience, he recalled that some of Ra’s musicians would sneak out of the Ra house and over to the White Panther house so they could find drugs and sex partners. Letts’ film briefly discusses Ra’s own sexuality – or lack thereof; Ra himself claimed to be asexual, and most of the musicians who worked with him agreed with that, though there were persistent rumors that he was actually Gay. While I was writing my blog post on the 1986 Sun Ra East Berlin concert film, I played through a number of Sun Ra CD’s, mostly ones I’d dubbed from LP’s. One was a recent Saturn Records reissue I got at FeelIt! Records downtown called Universe in Blue that featured Sun Ra’s female vocalist, June Tyson, doing a quite haunting song called “Blackman” (all one word) about racial pride and surviving oppression. Tyson had a quite powerful soul voice and probably could have had an independent career (as could a lot of Sun Ra’s musicians, notably his amazing tenor saxophonist, John Gilmore,m whom Coltrane said had influenced him) if she had broken out of the Ra orbit, but she stayed with Ra and a lot of people watching them together assumed they were a couple – which they weren’t.

My husband Charles read the moviemagg blog post about the Sun Ra concert film from East Germany in 1986 (13 years before he died, though in his later years he had to use a wheelchair and needed help to get on stage) and noted the reference I’d made to Sun Ra’s music becoming more artistically conservative as he got older. He said maybe Sun Ra realized that by opening with a jazz repertory standard like Duke Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss” he might soften the audience up enough that they’d be more accepting of the all-out free-jazz jams he offered later in the program. And contrary to common belief, the louder,more cacophonous parts of Sun Ra’s performances were not improvised: they were carefully written out in advance and played the way Sun Ra had written them. This reminded me of the story Alan Lomax told in his biography of pioneering New Orleans pianist, bandleader and composer Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton. Though for years people assumed that the collective passages in Morton’s pieces were improvised, Morton’s widow told Lomax that she’d been to his rehearsals in which Morton told his bandmembers, “It would please me if you would just play the little black dots – just the little black dots that i have put there.” When alternate takes of Morton’s records began to be released in the 1950’s, sure enough, the supposedly “collectively improvised” ensemble passages were actually played the same way on every take, subject only to the slight variations inevitable in a band of human beings, and even the solos followed pretty much the same routine from take to take.

I suspect if more of Sun Ra’s records existed in multiple takes, this would be what we’d hear on them – though according to one of Ra’s musicians, he would rarely call for more than one take of anything. He said that they went into one recording session with enough material for one album – and ended up making seven. He also said that Ra’s musicians were expected to help raise money for the collective enterprise by selling his albums on the streets, which Charles compared to people selling The Daily Worker or Muhammad Speaks or the Hare Krishna magazine Back to Godhead. In the clips of him from this documentary, Sun Ra emerges as a quiet, soft-spoken man but one with an incredible ability to bend other people to his will, and like Jimi Hendrix he spoke in enigmatic riddles and kept his image going even when being interviewed. Sun Ra’s music has had a surprisingly extensive influence over much of what we hear in music today; not only through his extensive use of electronic instruments (even before synthesizers were invented, Ra was using early versions like the clavoline, mellotron and instruments of his own devising called the “Solar Sound Organ” and “Solar Sound Instrument”) but his elaborate stage shows and the ways they mixed avant-garde jazz with spoken-word sections (among other things, one could make a case for Sun Ra as one of the founding fathers of rap) and elaborate dance routines in which Ra and his musicians would march around the stage chanting things like, “We travel the spaceways!” and “Next stop, Jupiter!” Sun Ra was at once a unique figure and one whose music and art hold up surprisingly well.