Tuesday, April 12, 2011

An evening with Sun Ra: Weird, then weirder


This image of Sun Ra is a photocopy of a press-kit picture sent around 1990 to the newspaper where I worked in Springfield, Missouri. Why would a publicist send Sun Ra promotional materials to Springfield, Mo.? I asked the entertainment reporter if I could keep the photo. Of course he had no use for it. I made a bunch of copies of it in case I lost the original. Turns out, that was a good decision.

Sun Ra died in 1993. His music lives on, thanks to the dedication of saxophonist Marshall Allen, a longtime member of his band, who continues to lead the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Two decades before the discovery of the photo, I saw Sun Ra at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago, as part of a double bill with Alice Coltrane. Quite a memorable evening of spacey music. Sun Ra, who worked regularly in Chicago in the 40s and 50s, performed with his band and two tiny women dressed in one-piece, aluminum-colored, glittering body suits with scalp-clutching hoods, antennae thrusting diagonally from either side of their heads. These interplanetary pixies occasionally pranced around the stage while the band played a jaunty vamp and Sun Ra ran his palms up and down multiple keyboards, creating deafening crushes that vibrated through the building and within my head. It was liberating — a defining moment.

With Sun Ra, I often wondered whether he was serious or joking. From what I saw, I decided he must have been serious because he never cracked up, and neither did anyone in his band. I could be entirely wrong, though.

The evening ended on two dismaying notes. From my seat in the first balcony, I saw, from the corner of my eye, a man approach the railing and throw disc-shaped pieces of glass or metal toward the stage. I couldn’t tell if any of his projectiles reached the stage, or if they hit anyone in the audience. None of the musicians seemed to take notice, but a few patrons’ heads turned. The man threw three or four of these objects then ran away.

A couple of minutes later, Sun Ra interrupted the music and went into a rant, denouncing the audience and Chicago in general. He chanted:

We have transcended Chicago!
We have transcended Chicago!
We have transcended Chicago!
We have transcended Chicago!

For many years, I thought the attack from the balcony motivated Ra’s tirade, but now I see that the two events may not have been related, even though it looked that way from my perspective.

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