Reviewing Sun Ra (Part 1)

I’m taking a partial holiday today and working on a kind of odd ball side project. I have decided to start a review of recent work on and by Sun Ra. I don’t have a very clear idea how this review will go, but I know I’d like to include the most recent album by the Sun Ra Arkestra, Swirling, as well as the two most prominent re-releases Egypt 1971 and Languidity. I’d also like to note the Corbett vs. Dempsey republication of a four of Sun Ra’s poetry volumes. 

William Sites’s Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (Chicago 2020) and some recent treatments of Sun Ra’s output in scholarly literature (e.g. in Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures (NYU 2019), Alex Zamalin’sBlack Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (Columbia 2019) and Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias: Speculative Life and Music of Other Worlds (Duke 2021). 

That all said, I want to start with Swirling, I think. Here goes:

Sun Ra’s music looked forward and backward. Swirling is the most recent release from his eponymous Arkestra, under the direction of Marshall Allen, Sun Ra’s longtime alto saxophone player and is no exception. It not only featured many of the long-time members of the Arkestra —  including the late Danny Ray Thompson and Atakatune along side Michael Ray, Vincent Chancey, Knoel Scott, and other Arkestra stalwarts — but also dug deep into the Arkestra’s vast repertoire. The result was an album that embraces the expansive Arkestra catalogue and projects it into the future though its polished production quality, disciplined performances, and new arrangements.

For connoisseurs of the seemingly infinite discography of Sun Ra’s Earthly work, Swirling requires a trip through Robert Campbell and Christopher Trent 800-page effort to document Sun Ra’s recordings. This is more than simply a forensic exercise. The works performed on Swirling connects the 21st century Arkestra to traditions of performance that stretch back to Sun Ra’s days in Chicago when he blended jazz made standard by the great swing bands of the interwar period with new forms of music that drew inspiration from the emerging space age.  

The opening track “Satellites are Spinning” flashes back to 1968, and the very end of Arkestra’s tenure in New York City. The earliest recordings of the next track, “Seductive Fantasy,” dates to 1979 during a time when the Arkestra had a modicum of popular success including an appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1978. “Swirling,” the third track, is a new piece composed by Marshall Allen, but the fourth and sixth tracks dates to Sun Ra’s days in Chicago. The fifth track is apparently a piece discovered by Allen in Sun Ra’s archive. “Astro Black” was first released on one of Sun Ra’s dates for the Impulse! lable in 1973, whereas the very next track “I’ll Wait for You” harkens back to the Arkestra’s most experimental period as part of the Choreographer’s Workshop soon after their arrival in New York in 1962. “Unmask the Batman” is a pastiche of the Batman theme by the Ventures from the mid-1960s with the Arkestra original “I’m Gonna Unmask the Batman” from the early 1970s. This piece served as playful reminder of when Sun Ra and some members of the Arkestra recorded a novelty album of music from the Batman television series in 1966 at the same time that they held down a regular gig at the infamous Slug’s Saloon. “Sunology” and “Space Loneliness” date to Sun Ra’s Chicago days with the former appearing on the very first album released by Sun Ra and Alton Abraham’s Saturn Records. “Queer Notions” evokes an even earlier time in Sun Ra’s musical career as the earliest recordings of this piece were by the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra (featuring the great Coleman Hawkins) in the 1930s. When Sun Ra first came to Chicago in the 1950s, he found work arranging music for Fletcher Henderson and when Henderson decamped for California, Ra took over his band. He continued to perform pieces from this era even at such bastions of free and improvised music as Slug’s in New York (Szwed, 224). The final track, “Door of the Cosmos/Say” returns to the late-1970s. 

The point of this long and perhaps tedious tedious archaeology of the Swirling track listing is not to finally make full use of my copy of Campbell and Trent’s The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra (2nd Edition), but instead to demonstrate how Swirling provides a distinctive introduction to Sun Ra’s rich catalogue, the Arkestra’s diverse repertoire, and most importantly, the approach to music taken by Sun Ra during his nearly half-century of performing and recording. The Arkestra’s ability to juxtapose songs made famous by the interwar big bands with music set on the bleeding edge of contemporary jazz in the 1960s and 1970s spoke to Sun Ra’s tendency to blend the past and the future in his view of the contemporary society as well as his disarming practice of combining recordings made over the course of a decade in the same album.