The Sun Ra Arkestra's Maestro Hits One Hundred

[G_j]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/01/the-sun-ra-arkestras-maestro-hits-one-hundred

The Sun Ra Arkestra’s Maestro Hits One Hundred
Marshall Allen, the musical collective’s sax-playing leader, is celebrating with a deep-spacey video installation during the Venice Biennale.

By Robert Sullivan
June 24, 2024

The Sun Ra Arkestra, the musical collective founded in Chicago in the mid-fifties, moved out of the Lower East Side in 1968, and wound up in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, on a very green side street along the edge of a hill that feels a million miles from anywhere. An old row house became the Sun Ra Arkestral Institute, a place to practice at all hours, in order to be ready. “One day it will happen,” Sun Ra said at the time. “It could be happening now—that a voice from another dimension will speak to earth. You might as well practice and be prepared for it.” The Arkestra practiced and eventually toured the world, the row house filling with gig posters, its plaster walls soaking up decades of music from a band that, under Sun Ra’s leadership, had set out on a course of inter-dimensional travel, using chords and time signatures and equations rather than rocket fuel. Sun Ra died in 1993, and his saxophone players replaced him as director—first John Gilmore, and then Marshall Allen, who last month turned a hundred.

Allen bounded down the stairs to greet a visitor the other day, in between birthday celebrations near and far—near being Philadelphia, where a public performance of the Arkestra was followed by a party for family and friends at a club called Solar Myth, named for a Sun Ra-ism. Across the Atlantic Ocean, during the Venice Biennale, a celebration occurred in the form of a site-specific video installation in an abandoned sixteenth-century church and hospital; it is directed by Ari Benjamin Meyers, a Berlin-based composer, who met Allen in person in 2022, in Philadelphia, and was, like a lot of people, “blown away.”

“Let’s sit here,” Allen said, finding a chair in the Arkestral Institute’s kitchen. A second seat was borrowed from the rehearsal room, where a bust of a pharaoh watched an old drum kit and an upright piano. Allen is lithe and sinewy and, in a Sun Ra T-shirt and cap, didn’t seem much changed from the guy on sax in the seventies or eighties, blowing and chanting and dancing. He reminisced about growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, where, in the nineteen-thirties, at a state institution for Black children, he was given an oboe. “I wanted the clarinet, but they’d run out,” he said.

During the Second World War, he served in the Army’s 92nd Infantry Division, known as the Buffalo Soldiers, and he remembered playing sax in a victory parade in Reims, France, after which, on a general’s recommendation, he studied music at a Paris conservatory. “I saw everybody in Paris,” he said. “Eartha Kitt, James Moody, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker.” Other Arkestra members were knocking around the row house as he talked, and Knoel Scott came into the kitchen. Scott, who has played sax and sung and danced with the Arkestra since 1979, nodded toward Allen when he mentioned Parker. “He played drums for Charlie Parker,” Scott said.

..lots more..

[MichMan]

1. Saw them play in a very small venue in the late 70's while I was in college

It was quite surreal with the dancers, chants and improvisation

[HarryM]

2. Thanks for this

When I lived in NYC years ago, I saw Sun Ra and the Arkestra many times. It was an inspiring experience every time. The dancers and the music. Costumes were awesome. And they sold records at the shows. None of the covers of these records produced by Sun Ra ever the same. Nor were the vinyl disks.
Glad to hear that they are still making music, considering the fact that most of what folks call music today is auto-tuned and processed.
Folks my age and older got to hear REAL music.