When I was writing my first book Place-Discipline and seeking a foothold in the transhistoric pathways of Chicago (where I was living and working as a SoCal Xicano transplant), I listened to a lot of Sun Ra’s music to help me divine the “song lines” that stretched across Chicago’s centrifuge, its flower bud radiating out from the lakeshore into western streets. The Aztec in me migrated from south to north in search of a new land, and it was listening to Sun Ra that helped me conceive of this migration as a type of heliocentric border-crossing; so that wherever Sun came out, I went and planted myself.
Here are fifteen compositions/performances that influenced me but also, more significantly, touch upon the Black Arts Movement in vital, world-generating, historic ways. (Note: I’m by no means a Ra archaeologist or archivist, so I have to give a shout-out to the remarkable and deeply generous archival work done by Irwin Chusid and Michael D. Anderson at Sun Ra LLC’s Bandcamp page, which hosts and makes available 100 albums by Sun Ra and the Arkestra. I draw some of my dates and notes from them.)
1. “We Travel the Spaceways,” from We Travel the Spaceways, El Saturn Records LP 409 (1967).
Amiri Baraka delightfully sing-quotes the titular mantra in a 2013 lecture on Sun Ra and Charles Olson, and the song’s cadence seems to herald an eternal longing, as well as a permanent-revolutionary discipline, that would typify some aspects of the Black Arts Movement. Although “We Travel the Spaceways” is a few years earlier than the beginnings of the Black Arts Movement, this particular composition seems to mark multiple transitions in Ra’s trajectory: the spatial transition from Chicago to New York that would occur after the recording, and the formal transition from traditional bop jazz to radical space phenomenology. The song ends with haunting whirring blips which, according to discographer Robert Campbell, come from “a toy robot with flashing lights” that Ra and the Arkestra would let run amok in the recording studio and at performances.
2. “And Otherness,” from Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, Saturn Research SR-408 (1967).
This composition was recorded at the Choreographer’s Workshop in New York in 1963, and it feels representative of the experimentality that was undertaken during those years. Irwin Chusid theorizes that the title of the album, Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, might refer to an actual incident in which Sun Ra’s manager arranged for a performance at a psychiatric facility in Chicago. John Szwed, Sun Ra’s biographer, writes that while Sonny played, “a woman who it was said had not moved or spoken for years got up from the floor, walked directly to the piano, and cried out, ‘Do you call that music?,’” a response which “delighted” Sonny and seemed to bear out his belief that music can “wake people up” from spiritual and intellectual slumber (Szwed 1998: 92-93). I imagine that the performance in the clinic in Chicago might have sounded along these lines, a song which invites Otherness to sit comfortably at the table of harmony and wake minds up with a clatter.
3. “Calling Planet Earth,” from When Sun Comes Out, Saturn Research LP2066 (1963).
This was the first composition I listened to that awakened me to the possibility that there are other earths, other “shadow worlds,” which are being called to this one, which lie within and without the normal modes of seeing. A visibility within visibility (or with invisibility). In 1986, the Arkestra would collaborate with media artist Bill Sebastian on a video of the same title.
4. “The Shadow World,” from The Magic City, Saturn Research LPB-711 (1966).
The Magic City is considered by some as Sun Ra’s magnum opus, and it is an album that emerged the same year as the foundation of the Black Arts Movement in 1965. “The Magic City” is the promotional epithet describing Birmingham, AL, Herman “Sonny” Blount’s birthplace, and the epic title track feels like a return to, as well as a metamorphosis of, Sun Ra’s earthly past in Birmingham, site of historical struggles and transhistorical visions. “The Shadow World” is a composition whose percussion feels like a cascade of shadow beneath the immense sun of Ra’s gaze looking out on multiple planes of existence: Birmingham in the political present of 1965, but also Birmingham in the magical future-anterior of a universalized metropolis. Ra’s accompanying poem, “The Magic City,” reimagines the metropole as the primum mobile of the cosmic magister:
“This city is the Magi’s thought
This city is the magic of the Magi’s thought.”
(Szwed 1998: 213)
5. “Heliocentric,” from The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 1, ESP Disk 1014 (1965).
Out of the shadow world, toward the sun, teasingly—
6. “Mu,” from Atlantis, Saturn Research ESR507 (1969).
“Mu” in the Zen Buddhist tradition (“mu” in Japanese; “wu” in Chinese) relates to Joshu’s (Zhaozhu Congshen) storied response to a disciple’s question: “Can a dog have Buddha-nature?”; to which the master responded, “mu,” conventionally translated as “not” or “without”. Here Ra’s response is also non-negative (neither positive nor negative), and it signals what the master composer would proverbalize regarding the cyclic nature of death and life: If death is the end of life, then is not the death of death, life?
7. “A Black Mass,” with Amiri Bakara, Jihad Productions (1968).
This recording of Amiri Baraka’s play “A Black Mass” was performed with musical accompaniment by Sun Ra and the Arkestra, and it epitomizes the Black Arts Movement at its most vibrant, revolutionary, and transcendent. The cosmic epicenter of BAM is fully glimpsed here.
8. “Space Is the Place,” from Space Is the Place, Blue Thumb Records BTS 41 (1973).
The Sun Ra gateway track, with the immortal singing of June Tyson and Ruth Wright, Cheryl Banks and Judith Holton as choral driving force, this landmark recording is instantly recognizable, permanently revolutionary, radically swing and big band and freedom jazz and yet none of those things all at once, an entirely new thing, a joyous thing—the fullness of the Arkestra, and all the metaphysics of the ankh, seem to radiate from here. The titular 1972 film continues to be a cinematic monument to afrofuturism and the social realism of a charged time. As John Szwed notes, “Throughout 1973 and 1974 many of Sun Ra’s performances were called ‘Space Is the Place,’ a program in which much of the music heard in abbreviated versions on the film soundtrack was played at full length, while portions of the film were shown behind the band” (Szwed 1998: 336).
9. “Discipline 27-II,” from Discipline 27-II, El Saturn Records ES538 (1973).
It was around this period that Sun Ra began recording a series of compositions titled Discipline, numbered seemingly out of order but intended to reach up to “99.” These compositions originated in Ra’s radical revision of what is normally meant by “discipline,” both in the musical but also in the spiritual, ascetic sense. John Szwed writes that these compositions “would be built on hocketed horn lines, with each horn playing within a two- to three-note range, a cyclical melody developing out of the fragments, each person playing his parts scrupulously with no deviation whatsoever.” In such a series, “‘the slightest variation would destroy the thing’” (Szwed 1998: 285). Discipline 27-II might represent the earthly-political bifold to the spatial-cosmic imaginary of Space Is the Place; here, the voice of the commons, the visceral realism of the everyday, ring out in a collective declamation, in a melancholy permeating the boundary zones, voices in the metropole gazing up at what the stars constellate in patterns.
10. “Discipline ’99’,” from Astro Black, Impulse! AS-9255 (1973).
Another in the “Discipline” series, but here boiled down to a melancholic and bluesy work that exhibits the warm tonality of Ra’s singular style.
11. “Take the A Train,” from Live at Montreux, Saturn Research MS 87976 (1976).
A great demonstration of the Arkestra in their prime, during a legendary European tour performance that gives full evidence of John Gilmore’s genius and offers a masterful solo by Clifford Jarvis on the drums. Ahmed Abdullah’s memories of the event are worth reading.
12. “Moonshine Journey,” from Cosmos, Inner City Records IC 1020 (1976)
More cosmic glee and incantation in a single mantra, in what has become a Sun Ra compositional trait: the expression of joy at its purest temperature. A sunny sweltering day on the landscapes of the moon—
13. “Disco 3000,” from Disco 3000, El Saturn Records CMIJ 78 (1978).
How else to describe this record as anything other than Sun Ra’s interpretative engagement with the disco scene of the late 1970s? I get the sense that the Arkestra traveled the time-ways to the year 3000 and brought back its sound to us, and it might sound something like this!
14. “There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of),” from Lanquidity, Philly Jazz PJ666 (1978).
We return to the theme of waking up from slumber, of being stirred awake at midday and realizing that there are other universes we’ve been deprived of. Languid, liquid, hypnotic. The waltzy synthy brujeria of the composition suggests to me (quite literally, in my ear) that alternate realities are being folded like blankets into the sociopolitical malaise of everyday life: better worlds, sharper realities, brighter stars—which only the right psychic coordination or “discipline” would open us toward—pure and utter Future Music—