Sun Ra And His Myth-science Arkestra

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Outer Spaceways Incorporated!

The stage is set with what seems like thousands of strange instruments-weird saxophones and reeds, an infinity of various drums, space implements which appear capable of making any sound ever heard or dreamed of - and it's even stranger when the musicians walk out to take their places. There's almost twenty of them, often more, to begin with, and they are dressed out in costumes and contrivances which might possibly be comical if they didn't look so at home wrapped up in all that sparkling cloth, gliding through the winking light to pick up their instruments for the beginning of the trip.

At the center of the spectacle, even though he may be off a little to one side, rising over his piano or whatever other magic organ he may have pieced together for the occasion, and at the center of everyone's attention at least, his physical self draped in the brightest of the sparkle cloth, the master orchestrator and space-captain SUN RA turns slowly from side to side, a massive sun-disk glinting rays of light in every direction as he completes his spaced-out benediction and begins to get down to the business at hand - taking the people who are fortunate enough to be present on an extended trip through their own many levels of consciousness, and creating some of the most beautiful music in the universe in the process.

"You come down to the point where you've got to have a better world. Now my contribution is in the music. In the first place, I feel that people have got to know - they got to know what happens as is. Now, they've never really been happy on this planet because they didn't ever have anything to be happy about. So then I show them in the music and give a feeling of happiness so they'II know when they're happy and when they're sad . . . To some people it seems like the music doesn't have anything to do with what l'm talking about, but it does. Because music is a language and l'm speaking things over in it. So in order to understand the music people will have to know some of the thoughts l'm thinking ..."

Sun Ra has been thinking these thoughts for a great many years now - no one really knows how many, because Ra won't admit to having ever been born ("if you're born you've got to die, and I just don't think that's fair") - and his music has grown to galactic proportions during the course of his protracted struggle to make himself understood. From filling the piano chair and slipping in a few "modern" arrangements with the Fletcher Henderson swing orchestra in the forties, to gigging around Chicago as a piano soloist and occasional bandleader, to putting together his first experimental band in the early early fifties, through more than thirty record albums in the past twenty years, to his present stature poised on the brink of popular exposure and enthusiastic acclaim, Sun Ra created an ever-growing body of work which is all of a piece with itself and perfectly reflective of Ra's cosmic concerns.

"Because I do have something to offer people other than music, and they have to face it, because I have to face it, you see. They're going to have to really consider it. And that goes for preachers too. I feel sorry for them. I don't know of anybody I feel more sorry for, unless it's the president of the United States or the people who are ruling. Because they got a job on their hands. Because they're changing ages - one age moves into another one, and the rulers - they're in trouble. You've got not only a change of age, but a change of laws - the law that has been the law of this planet has moved over to no longer be the law. Now when that happens, and since this planet for thousands of years has been up under the law of death and destruction, it's moving over into something else which I choose to call MYTH, a MYTH-SCIENCE, because it's something that people don 't know anything about.

That's why I'm using the name MYTH-SCIENCE ARKESTRA, because I'm interested in happiness for people, which is just a myth, because they're not happy. I would say that the synonym for myth is happiness - because that's why they go to the show, to the movies, they be sitting up there under these myths trying to get themselves some happiness. And if the actors can indulge in myth, why can't the musicians?"

Back on stage the actors/musicians are chanting in unison: "Sun Ra and his band - from outer space - will entertain you now - Sun Ra and his band - from outer space - will entertain you now." They are not joking or making cynical fun of their audience - it's just the opposite, you can see in their faces and hear in their voices and instruments the undeniable need they feel to turn people on to what they've come somehow to understand, and it is clear that they will do anything they have to do to get their message across, whether it means wearing outlandish space garb and dancing around chanting or whether it means applying their desire and energy to their instruments to put it straight to people's brains without any verbal or visual interference.

The music is precise to its purposes - it works, just as Ra would have it - and its purposes are as heavy as can be. Sun Ra and the Arkestra mean to turn people on to their own possibilities for happiness and harmony, and they set their music out as a prime example of what they're talking about in the songs. But it's not just the music, it's the way they're organized too, that would propose itself as a model for future people: the band has been living together as long as it's worked together, which goes back to 1952 or so in Chicago, and the commitment of several of the musicians in the Arkestra - John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, Pat Patrick for three - goes back twenty full years by now. That's twenty hard starving years, sustaining each other all that time through the music and its indigenous social principles, playing anywhere people will let them in with their instruments to bring light and purpose to people's lives, the supreme example of dedication and commitment to a common purpose that can be found in the whole music world.

"Because you can go all the way back and see that the musicians used to be minstrels - troubadours - they were not selfish - they were out there playing for people. Now a lot of people are getting to say that some musicians are trying to be politicians or trying to be religious and all that, but that's not necessarily true. They are only doing what their brother musicians have done, through the ages. They give what they have to give because they are interested in people and they come out and bring something people need. . . "

Sun Ra and the Arkestra will be appearing in the opening program on Friday night , their third consecutive annual appearance at the Blues and Jazz Festivals. Before that, the band last played in this area in 1969, when they were featured at the Detroit Rock and Roll Revival, at the Grande Ballroom with the MC5, and in various settings around Ann Arbor. Prior to that round of concerts the Arkestra had made the trip to Detroit in June of 1967 for a truly historic gathering at Community Arts Auditorium on the Wayne State University campus, where the MC5 and the Magic Veil Light Show joined forces with Ra to turn everybody in the place completely around.

It's five years later now, and one year, since the Arkestra was last in the area but what Ra and his band of master musicians will do Friday night may just erase time altogether, at least for as long as they're on stage, and that's always something worth waiting for. Not many people can do it - not very many ever could - but Sun Ra and the Arkestra can take you right out into space if you're ready to go, and even if you aren't they might just move you a little closer to it, and you won't mind at all.

-- John Sinclair