Sun Ra's East Berlin Concert, 1986: Great Music, and a Real Surprise Given East Germany's Reputation for Artistic Conservatism

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing YouTube post of a concert given by free-jazz musician Sun Ra in a hall in East Berlin in 1986 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQYSHhZVh3o). I had expected this to be a documentary about the curious and fascinating career of this still little-known jazz master whose music really doesn’t sound like anybody else’s, but instead it turned out to be an hour-long concert film originally shown on East German television in 1988, two years after the concert took place and two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the eventual friendly takeover of East Germany by the former West Germany, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (“Federal Republic of Germany”). As at least one commentator on YouTube pointed out, the existence of this film belies the reputation of East Germany (or, to use its full legal name, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik – “German Demoicratic Republic”) for aesthetic conservatism and sterility: “I knew people on the other side of the wall didn‘t live in paradise, but they never held back when something extraordinary like this took place.”

I’ve written about Sun Ra,s career before (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/10/cry-of-jazz-khtb-productions-1959.html) in an entry on the 1959 TV-film The Cry of Jazz, in which his band appeared, but just to recap, Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama on May 20, 1914. (He claimed he was related on his mother’s side to Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, whose birth last name was Poole.) He was a professional musician since 1934 and declared himself a conscientious objector during World War II. He made his first record backing blues singer Wynonie Harris in 1946, using the name “Sonny Blount,” and eventually legally changed his name to “Le Sony’r Ra” while using “Sun Ra” as his professional name. Sun Ra ether claimed to be an alien from the planet Saturn or put that out as a form of self-promotion, and he made his first album as a bandleader, Jazz by Sun Ra, in 1956 for the short-lived Transition label. When Transition went out of business before releasing the second album Sun Ra had recorded for it, Sound of Joy (which was finally released in the 1960’s by Delmark, a Chicago-based label that mostly recorded blues bot had a jazz line as well), Sun Ra started his own record company, appropriately named Saturn Records, and his musicians pooled their resources and worked as session men for other acts to raise enough money to keep Sun Ra’s enterprise going. (Every band who run a “merch table” and sell CD’s at their concerts is following a trail blazed by Sun Ra.)

Sun Ra formed his own band, the Arkestra (sometimes lengthening the name with modifiers – Astral-Infinity Arkestra, Intergalactic Research Arkestra, or as in this East Berlin performance, Cosmo Discipline Arkestra, but always keeping “Arkestra,” with its double pun on Noah’s Ark and the word “orchestra”). As I wrote before about Sun Ra in my post about The Cry of Jazz on October 23, 2011, “At first Sun Ra’s music sounded pretty much like you’d expect a young African-American pianist/arranger/composer/bandleader’s music to sound in the 1950’s, with obvious influences from Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus, but he later developed a unique style rooted in his obsession with outer space, writing song lyrics with science-fictional themes, dressing his band members in flamboyant costumes designed to make them look extraterrestrial (at a time when most mainstream jazz musicians performed in Brooks Brothers suits and ties!) and putting on a heavy-duty show that ultimately got him rediscovered in the early 1970’s and won him a cult following among rock fans. The fact that Sun Ra had been the first major jazz musician to play synthesizers and electric keyboards also helped his cred with the rock crowd.” (Actually, Earl “Fatha” Hines had made two experimental records on an early electric piano in 1940, “Body and Soul” and “Child of a Disordered Brain,” but they didn’t sound all that different from his records using a normal piano.)

By 1986 Sun Ra had been leading the Arkestra and traversing the cosmic spaceways of his imagination for over 30 years, and when he gave this concert in East Berlin he’d already started to retreat from the more radical aspects of his style. As jazz historian John Litweiler pointed out, by the early 1980’s Sun Ra had begun to incorporate compositions by Fletcher Henderson (an early mentor of his) and Duke Ellington into his repertoire, and this band includes a terrific version of Elliogton’s “Prelude to a Kiss” that stays faithful to Duke’;s original but also subtly extends it. Marshall Allen, Sun Ra’s main alto sax soloist, takes the role Johnny Hodges played in Duke’s record and keeps mostly to the same style, though he punctuates his solo with a few falsetto screeches the impeccably tasteful Hodges (whom Charlie Parker called “the Lily Pons of the alto sax) would have never dared. Sun Ra himself wears a spangled see-through top and matching headdress that looks like something Bessie Smith might have worn on stage in the 1920’s – he definitely presents as male but that top gives him an oddly androgynous air, as the fact that he has no facial hair even though most of his musicians did.

The band features Marshall Allen and Elo Omoe on alto saxes (though Allen takes the solos), John Gilmore (an unusually compelling player whom John Coltrane named as an influence) on tenor sax, Danny Ray Thompson on baritone sax (replacing Ra’s previous “regular,” Pat Patrick; according to Litweiler, Ra so loved the dark sound of the baritone sax that he sometimes used two of them, Patrick and Thompson), James Jacson on bassoon (played with an oboe mouthpiece to turn it into a single-reed instrument; he doesn’t solo, but to my knowledge the 1920’s musician Frank Trumbauer is the only player who ever recorded jazz solos on bassoon), Tyrone Hill on trombone, Bruce Edwards on electric guitar, Rollo Radford on a double-necked electric bass guitar (he takes a spectacular, almost heavy-metal solo on the first song, “Mystic Prophecy”) and Marvin “Bugalu” Smith on drums. The performances represent the increasing conservatism of Sun Ra’s music as he aged – in addition to his cover of Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss,” the concert featured a piece called “Interstellar Lo-Ways” that had strains reminiscent of George and Ira Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” and Walter Gross’s and Lack Lawrence’s “Tenderly.”

At first Sun Ra’s fabled showmanship was in evidence here mostly by the costumes the band members wore, including the red sequined fezzes that led Charles to joke they looked like “a Shriners’ convention on Venus.” Later, however, after an opening song called “Mystic Prophecy” in which Sun Ran banged out Black church licks on piano, the Ellington cover and the piece that evoked “I Got Rhythm” and “Tenderly,” the band really went to town. Sun Ra himself got up from the piano bench and waved a string of something or other that at first made him look like the censer spreading incense in a church; only later, when he held up this string of objects to a microphone and started shaking it, was it revealed as a set of bells. The performers started attacking their own instruments as well as one of the chairs the band members had been using – though I noticed that, not having the income levels of rock stars like Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend, they were careful not to inflict any lasting damage on their instruments. Through all of this the band members, led by Ra himself, started marching around the stage chanting slogans like “Space is the place,” “We travel the spaceways,” and “This stop, Venus! Next stop, Jupiter!”

It was amazing that the notoriously staid East German government actually allowed this spectacle on stage – it reminded me that the official Communist “line” on jazz sometimes denounced it as “bourgeois social decadence” that would be eliminated come the revolution, and at other times called it a folk art through which African-Americans expressed their anger at being racially oppressed. (This was why a surprising number of politically progressive people fell into the so-called “moldy fig” camp of people who exalted New Orleans jazz as the one truly artistic form and everything else as commercialized garbage; to the Communists’ mind, the music industry had taken over a true Black folk art and commoditized and commercialized it beyond legitimacy or recognition.) This film made me sorry that I never got to see Sun Ra live (he died in 1993; John Gilmore took over the Arkestra after Ra’s death, and Marshall Allen took it over after Gilmore passed and is still alive and in charge, at least according to the Sun Ra Arkestra’s official Web site, https://www.sunraarkestra.com/1-main.html); it must have been quite a show! Even now, a surprising amount of music by Sun Ra is available; the Arkestra is keeping most of the Saturn Records material in print, and there are the albums he made for other labels as well, including an upcoming reissue of his Savoy LP The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra.