Reviewing Sun Ra (Part 3)

I continue to work away on my review essay on recent work on Sun Ra (and you can read part 1 and part 2 which I posted earlier this week). At this stage, I’m mostly trying to marshal my ideas into something loosely coherent. It lacks a hook or lede and a consistent organization, but has given me a chance to write about jazz music, Afrocentrism, Afrofuturism and the complex legacy of Sun Ra and its place in contemporary society. 

At some point, I’m going to have to pull all these sections and try to coordinate them into a cohesive review, but this will also have to come to terms with both some classic efforts to understand Sun Ra’s intellectual contribution and more recent contributions. 

But for now, here’s more: 

Swirling’s emphasis on the Sun Ra and the Arkestra’s Afrofuturist vision, Lanquidity captures a perspective on Sun Ra’s Afrocentrism. The release of an expanded version of this 1978 classic includes the late Danny Ray Thompson’s reflections on the album. The baritone saxophone player notes that the title track, “Lanquidity” evokes an ancient Egyptian stargazing ceremony, “Where Pathways Meet” is “a funky version of an Egyptian march,” which “when the other army heard this they ran the other way, proclaiming ‘Here comes the Pharaoh Ra and his army of musicians. Time to get outta here!”, and “That’s How I Feel” includes Marshall Allen’s “snake charming oboe.” The final two tracks “Twin Stars of Thence” and “There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)”  return to more cosmic themes.

Egypt 1971 is another recent re-issue that draws attention to Sun Ra’s interest in Egypt and Afrocentric narratives. It constitutes a massive collection of tracks recorded during the Arkestra’s visit to Egypt in 1971 which were previously issued under various names in the early 1970s (including Dark Myth Equation Visitation and Nidhamu/Horizon). John Szwed’s provides an account of Sun Ra’s visit to Egypt which was apparently a spontaneous detour at the conclusion of a European tour. Hartmut Geerken, a German Orientalist and jazz aficionado, and Egyptian musician and military officer, Salah Ragab, helped organize a scrappy series of concerts for the Arkestra in Egypt, which included some recordings made in Geerken’s home and some for Egyptian public television (Szwed 292-294). While the sound quality often reflected the improvised character of the Arkestra’s tour, Sun Ra’s visit to Egypt embodied his long-standing interest in Africa and the Egyptian roots of Black culture. According to Szwed, Sun Ra was disappointed that Egyptians did not appear to be descendants of the Hamitic race. 

Sun Ra’s interest in Africa and Afrocentrism represents a persistent counterweight to his more cosmic musings. Egypt 1971 provides a good window into the repertoire of the Arkestra in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like so much of Sun Ra’s catalogue, the tracks on Egypt 1971 combines new and much older compositions including compositions from his Chicago days (“Space Loneliness” and “Angels and Demons at Play”), his time in New York (“We’ll Wait for You”), and his time in Philadelphia where he and the Arkestra relocated in the late 1960s. A series of tracks titled “Discipline” represented compositions developed during the Arkestra’s European tour in 1971. Intriguingly, the track titled “Nidhamu” is discipline in Swahili.

The twin visions offered by Sun Ra, of Afrocentrism and Afrofuturism, in many ways define his ambivalent engagement with the post-war world. His continuously developing Afrocentric view of history sought to connect Black people’s past with the history of ancient Africa and Egypt in particular. These ideas, refined by such thinkers as the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop and Molefi Kete Asante at Temple University, are part of a longstanding effort to locate the origins of a global Black culture on the continent of Africa. This supposes that African culture has a kind of historical continuity often associated with its origins in Egypt, Nubia, or Ethiopia and capable of sustaining ideas both of African nationalism and of global Blackness. It also provides Black people with a history that predates the experience of enslavement and colonialism and serves as a response to whites who saw Africa as a continent without history. The close association of Afrocentrism and various forms of mystical, theosophist, and esoteric thought reinforced the notion that white European scholars sought to suppress the glorious achievements of African people, preserved especially in the ruins of the Nile Valley, as well as powerful secret wisdom possessed by these societies.

Sun Ra’s interest in Afrofuturism inspired as much by his extraterrestrial encounter as the public fascination with the space race provided a profoundly modern perspective on esoteric Afrocentric knowledge. In many ways, Ra’s Afrocentrism draws on his own experience growing up in the industrial city of Birmingham and his deep (and often explicit) commitment to an almost industrialized discipline among his musicians. The result is a complex utopian vision that is both mystical and modern, esoteric and public, and with eyes to the past and the future. In this way, it echoes his music which often juxtaposed classic jazz compositions and traditional instruments with more futuristic sounds that drew not only on electronic instruments and keyboards but also improvised and free forms of composition.