Adventures in Cool Music: FREE-JAZZ & SUN RA

Welcome, musical iconoclasts ! .....

This is a slightly different music column that will generally avoid the usual pop, rock & jazz fare. Instead, our focus will be upon seminal but little-heard music in all genres that remains in need of fresh rediscovery. Adventures in Cool Music will become a compendium of records & artists with the mark of singular greatness upon them but which – for one reason or another– slipped through the net of public perception to land in commercial oblivion. Such musical excavations are not only about outing obscurities for the sake of their rarity but serve as arguments against the soul-sapping reductionism of the corporate music industry which continues to stagnate around an ever-decreasing crop of "radio-friendly" artists and arena-filling acts. Predictably, many of the musical pioneers that will appear on this site languished in poverty and never experienced mass success. But does that mean they were failures? ...Only if achievement is measured with a calculator. The thrill and joy of musical creativity lives on within these rare grooves.


FREE JAZZ & SUN RA

Avant-garde jazz, or "free-jazz" as commonly known, could well be the most difficult and theoretical music in the Western canon. Developed mostly on acoustic instruments (sax, trumpet, piano, upright bass, trap drums, et al.) primarily by black American virtuoso musicians, it is hard to think of a more superficially austere yet spiritually dense and ultimately rewarding listening experience. Originally stemming from the angular, fast-moving Be-Bop jazz of the mid-40's and the driving, soulful hard-bop of the 1950s, avant-garde jazz came into full flower during the counter-cultural flux of the 1960's when the music seemed to bespeak the raw emotions – the violence, sadness, passion & love – emerging from the civil rights/anti-war experience. Although the movement eventually petered out with the inevitable conservative backlash of the mid-1970's, the music still remains as testament to a legion of brave, forward-thinking artists who placed creativity and expression above the lure of the almighty dollar.

By turns chaotic and lyrical, free jazz resists easy tropes. The traditional musical cornerstones of melody, rhythm and harmonic progression are mostly abandoned in avant-jazz replaced by a radical approach "free" of the shackles of Western (read: white) musical rules but yet tangentially indebted to the experimental music of Europeans like Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, and Erik Satie. Some conservatory-trained musicians who plumbed their deepest psyches for inspiration during this period concluded that the new jazz music called for a fresh, explosive instrumental language based on shaping slabs of pure sound instead of merely regurgitating sets of chords and notes. Basic academic precepts like smooth intonation, well-tempered harmony and predictable meter were to be eschewed in this free style, evidenced by saxophonist Archie Shepp’s incandescent quote, "Where my own life and art suffice, I disregard Western musical thought altogether." Composers like Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler created solos and improvisations that could evoke devastating pain or ethereal beauty sometimes within the same free-flowing piece. The movement was savagely pounded by many establishment critics at the time as "anti-jazz" played by militant charlatans and it generally sold poorly in the stores. Even the Be-Bop era's innovators like Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis found the "New Thing" to be musically untenable and loudly voiced their disdain despite having suffered similar slings & arrows during their own heyday. Indeed, it is this very same provocative volatility that has ensured avant-garde jazz remains outside the scope of facile appraisal or mass co-option by the marketplace and also explains why it's one of the few Western sounds able to withstand the overwhelming homogenizing pressure of pop culture. It is probably safe to presume most listeners are baffled by a music seemingly without rules and corporations can’t effectively sell products to the strains of what is sheer cacophony to many ears. Hell, you can’t even dance to it! But this forbidding, noisy aura shrouds a forceful musical essence that places unfettered, visceral creativity – or "the ugly beauty" as pianist Thelonious Monk called it – on transparent display, creating a true, primal soundtrack of unchained sonic revolution amidst societal upheaval.

Certainly the greatest name in avant-garde jazz is saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-1967) who began his career in the late 1940's as a huge-toned disciple of tenor titans like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins and R&B-based jazz honkers such as Illinois Jacquet and Ike Quebec. Coltrane first gained international superstar status in the highly-acclaimed Miles Davis groups of the 1950's for his lengthy solos and unique "sheets-of-sound" modal hard-bop style before eventually forming his own band and recording dozens of modern jazz masterworks including Blue Train, My Favorite Things, Giant Steps, and A Love Supreme. But around late 1963, Coltrane turned his back on the mainstream and embarked upon an epic journey of musical exploration driven by a restless spiritual need, coupled with a mental stamina unequaled by any musician in the 20th century. Coltrane sold millions of records worldwide during and after his career and is rightfully credited with being the spearhead of the avant-garde jazz movement. But it’s the little-known composer and pianist Sun Ra (1914-1993) who is perhaps the true father of avant-garde jazz and who served as a direct influence on Coltrane’s quest for an expanded musical consciousness.

Sun Ra, who was renown for wearing resplendent regalia and claiming he was from Saturn as far back as the 1930's, led a big-band called The Interstellar Solar Myth-Science Arkestra for nearly 40 years with many of the key musicians remaining in the band the entire time (!). It was Sun Ra’s two fiery saxophonists, John Gilmore and Marshall Allen, who both often played in a free style similar to what Coltrane would later develop as far back as 1956. On record and in live performance, Sun Ra’s music veered wildly from vaguely straight-ahead Be-Bop to Latin-tinged exotica to berserk free-form meltdowns accompanied by eerie chants about the solar system and historical Africa. On peak mid-period 1960's albums like The Nubians of Plutonia, Pathways to Unknown Worlds, The Magic City, Angels & Demons At Play, Crystal Spears and The Bad And Beautiful, Sun Ra and The Arkestra spin tangled sonic webs of intense improvisational genius– dark, kinetic and bursting with searing piano / keyboard lines and collective horn freak-outs that would probably send any modern punk-rocker screaming from the room. Simply stated, this music is not for the faint-hearted and it easily rivals any rock band in both sheer power and unbridled intensity. And all this ruckus with largely acoustic instruments from musicians dressed in robes no less!

Interestingly, Sun Ra is credited with being one of the very first composers to employ analog electronics in a jazz recording when he used an early electric keyboard prototype in "Advice to Medics" on 1954's Supersonic Sounds LP. He was also one of the first to use a Moog synthesizer on record during the My Brother, The Wind sessions in the mid-1960's and he regularly incorporated sundry instruments from various countries in his recordings long before "world music" became vogue. His somewhat mellower late-1970's / 1980's recordings showcase Ra’s life-long affinity for Swing-era sounds (Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman) and are masterpieces of slightly fractured big band jazz. Further, Sun Ra was also one of the first to privately press his own independent records, a basic idea in today’s DIY music scene. He released an astounding 300 or so albums during his lifetime, most on his own self-financed, produced, and distributed Saturn Records, a practice which allowed him to survive outside the realm of the corporate music marketplace. Many of his LPs were first issued with hand-painted covers in very small batches and all the original Saturn LPs now command very hefty sums on the collectors’ market. Evidence Records re-issued about 30 of his classic titles on CD in the 1990s and it’s a good place to get Sun Ra music at a reasonable cost. Ra’s 1972 film "Space Is The Place" found some infamy on the art-house movie circuit as a post-psychedelic hybrid of free-jazz magick, social documentary, and blaxploitation kitsch and is highly recommended on DVD. Although Sun Ra’s appeal to the general public or even to most jazz fans remains fairly minimal, his influence on modern music including rock and funk is very significant. Artists as diverse as David Bowie, The MC 5, Sonic Youth, Phish, Parliament-Funkadelic, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, NRBQ, Bootsy Collins and John Cage all cite Ra’s music as a pivotal influence and a few have even attempted to cover his songs on their own albums.

The ultimate and lofty goal of all this high-minded musical abstraction was markedly singular: ecstatic peace. The special communion between deep spirituality and music is explicit in much avant-garde jazz and many Ra titles like Interplanetary Consciousness, Beyond Sin & Thought, Space Ankh, Interstellar Force and We Travel The Spaceways manage to invoke astral journeys, jazz music, and worship of a higher being almost interchangeably. A lifelong teetotaler and vegetarian, Sun Ra’s alien mysticism and guru-like control over the organization and strict regimen of his band became legendary and he was famous for making enigmatic, poetic pronouncements on subjects ranging from UFOs to bio-molecular science to religion to communal living. Ra’s fixation with ancient Egyptology, extraterrestrials, time travel, and all things metaphysical was sometimes perceived as a weird 'out-there' gimmick. In actuality, his philosophy worked as an empowering belief system in which the struggles of the Black race were soon to be rewarded by the cosmic freedom promised in the outer space of the future; Sun Ra's music envisioned an ever-expanding universe of Black people and a pan-African world with colored folks fully in command of their politics and culture.

Always personally suspicious of all politicians and centralized power structures on either the right or left, Sun Ra’s latent championing by the era’s nascent hippie culture was only one example of the way avant-garde jazz became aligned with revolutionary street spirit. It may also mark the last instance of any jazz music, originally born and raised in the ghetto, still having some emotional resonance with the people down on the ground it purported to serve. Unfortunately, current jazz has collapsed into a sorry state no thanks to easy-listening Weather Channel-theme fodder and flaccid smooth-jazz radio formats. But way back in the day, jazz music was as alive and vital as the turbulent protests and fervent shouts for equal rights. Social change and political Black consciousness may certainly have been the controversial matrix of the new avant-garde jazz but Sun Ra never once preached any hatred or separatism, only pure love. On his bright glowing planet, everyone of all colors vibrated sympathetically to the same wonderfully crazy celestial beat.

J. A. Cervera has been a professional musician for over
25 years and an obsessive record collector since age 12.
He has many thousands of LPs and deals vinyl online
all over the world from his home in Livingston, Montana.

Please send any obtuse comments to:
souljazzbass@gmail.com