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.
