Glimpsing the Ra Ship

[Sun Ra Arkestra @ Cafe Oto, London. 18/08/15]

I’m having a pint by myself in the Wetherspoons on Brixton Road, scribbling to-do lists on the back of a gas bill envelope when I get a call from one of my friends. She says she has a free ticket to see the Sun Ra Arkestra and that the show starts in half an hour. I hop on to the Victoria Line and back out into the late-summer drizzle, arriving at Dalston’s Cafe Oto damp and flustered, the lady at the door eventually letting me in after spending several minutes unable to find my name on the list. I buy a beer from the bar and immediately spill half of it down my leg when a woman bashes into me.

I was hoping the first time I witnessed the Arkestra would be a transformative experience, lifting me out of myself and delivering me to alternate realms. Instead, I’m drenched and dying for a piss, getting dirty looks from everyone I stumble past on my way to the toilet in the furthest corner of the venue, which is crammed with people, clouds of sweat condensing over their heads.

I’ve arrived just before the interval, but as the Arkestra retake the stage, my mind is in the way of the music. I have trouble deciphering the sounds I hear and can’t find any words to describe them. I sometimes find that is a problem with jazz music in general, and with the timbres of the saxophone in particular. It is almost too pure an instrument. It is as though the player spits their soul through it, and into the ears of the listener. It is, at first, a jarring and bewildering experience. But then perhaps that is the point of the music of the Arkestra, deriving from Sun Ra‘s intention half a century ago to uproot us from Earthly consciousness and to take us somewhere altogether different, utilising whatever frequencies are necessary.

Much as I try and get lost in the music, my frazzled mind can’t help but get distracted by my surroundings and the reactions of the crowd around me, which my friend later describes as ‘a mixture of Afropunks and conservative jazz farts’. I start to wonder: if Sun Ra were still with us on Planet Earth, what would he make of all this? What would he make of this trendy venue, nestled amongst the social contractions and violent juxtapositions of gentrified East London? What hope would he offer beleaguered citizens living under the corporate junta of modern Britain? What would he make of rent rises and benefit cuts? Of smart phones and dating apps? Of civil wars and migrant crises? I imagine he would laugh it off. That he would tell me I’m looking at it all wrong; that there’s other way of perceiving it if I would just listen.

Two hours later and the band, led by the magnificent 91 year-old saxophonist Marshall Allen, is still playing. Not only are they still playing, but they are slowly dismantling the expectations of the audience: members of the brass section keep breaking away from the stage and snaking through the crowd, arriving in the middle of huddles of listeners, wielding trombones and trumpets like alter-dimensional weapons, blaring snippets of riffs before carrying on. The energy and stamina of the band, all dressed head to toe in Afrofuturistic reds and greens, is breathtaking. And slowly the logic of the music starts resonating with my jangled brain waves: the music is a life force in and of itself, simultaneously euphoric and peculiar. In tunnelling through the crowd it is almost as thought they are tunnelling through our perceptions, reminding us that there is always another way of looking at things.

…..

For my previous post on Sun Ra, Space is The Place and Afrofuturism, click here.

Music is the vessel

[Reflections on Sun Ra, Afrofuturism and music as liberation]

I recently attended a packed-out late night screening of the 1974 film Space is the Place, shown as part of Bristol Watershed’s Afrofuturism season. For the uninitiated, the movie showcases the unique talents and perspectives of one of the twentieth century’s most significant musical innovators – Jazz musician, mystic, prophet, and space traveller Sun Ra, who became the key philosopher of what would later come to be termed Afrofuturism. This cultural movement, which evolved against the backdrop of the struggle for black liberation in the 1960s and ’70s, is heavily influenced by sci-fi, various forms of mysticism and Afrocentric ideas. Along with Sun Ra, the ‘holy trinity’ of Afrofuturist innovators were funk pioneer George Clinton and dub revolutionary Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry – three outsiders operating in completely different sonic and cultural contexts, yet all of whom incorporated the theme of space and space travel as a key element in their outlook. The infinite possibilities of outer space came to be seen as offering uncharted territory for musical and cultural exploration, and a reimagining of possible futures to offer alternatives to the alienation experienced by humans in general, and the African diaspora in particular.

Space is the Place, shows Sun Ra divesting himself, by the means of his Ra Ship, of the shackles and oppression of Planet Earth, its sounds of ‘guns, anger and frustration’, and visiting other planets where ‘the vibrations are different’. He then returns to Earth, touching down in Oakland, where he offers the young black people he meets a choice between the more harmonious frequencies available to them through his teachings and the music of his Arkestra, or to remain ensnared in the poisonous realities of addiction and violence, presided over by the nefarious, Mephistophelean Overseer.

In the context of the film, the FBI, who ineptly bungle an assassination attempt on Ra, understand very well the significance of what an ‘African Space Programme’ could mean: a psychic shift that could alter the spirits of African Americans, thereby threatening the very basis of American society, with its origins in white supremacist violence. Space is the place precisely because its potentials are infinite. In a limitless void belonging to no one, up and down do not exist and Earthly hierarchies become irrelevant. Space becomes a canvas and laboratory for exploring alternative ways of being. Devising an Outer Space Employment Agency as part of his recruitment drive to find fellow-travellers to explore these realms, Ra explains: ‘everything you desire upon this planet, and have never have received, will be yours in outer space’.

Not only is the film an amazing and frequently hilarious cultural landmark, but it illustrates a unique way of thinking about music. In the Sun Ra cosmology, music is both means and end: a method to communicate to Earth-bound creatures that their myopic understanding of reality is entirely defunct, and also an expression of a higher mode of consciousness – a guide to a different way of existing altogether. Music is therefore not a mere appendage to daily life, a temporary relief from its tribulations, but an essential element in the expansion of human capabilities and the traversing of alternate realities.

Sun Ra – who throughout his entire adult life maintained that he was from the planet Saturn – has long since returned to his home planet without leaving us a physical vehicle to explore the realities that he mapped out for us; our technological capacities for teleportation are still sorely lacking. Meanwhile, the oppression he sought to dissolve through music continues: many of us still lost down on Planet Earth are ruled by oligarchs and distant political classes, who enrich themselves while the populations beneath them writhe in limbo-states of anxiety and frustration. Even the racial oppression which Ra surely hoped would come to an end within his lifetime, continues, as the recent slaying of Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, reminds us. Yet the Afrofuturist impulse for music to be a vessel for expansion, experimentation and liberation, is as strong as ever.

Unsurprisingly, the LA Beat Scene, where the foundations of hip hop are being stretched, scuttled, dissected, and rearranged in multiple ways, is one of the primary bastions for this kind of sonic exploration. Brainfeeder founder and psychedelic electronic visionary Flying Lotus, has long been assimilating and reconfiguring Afrofuturist ideas. While his recently released album You’re Dead! Takes death as its central motif, his previous album Until The Quiet Comes is arguably an exploration of the idea of inner spaces – subconscious realms, dream states – as a starting point for re-envisioning life aboard Planet Earth. Likewise, LA beatsmith Ras G takes more explicit cues from Sun Ra’s ideas, taking up the mantle of the Afrikan Space Program for the 21^st century.

https://soundcloud.com/ras_g/live-from-spacebase-vol-1

Still stateside, Erykah Badu, Shabazz Palaces and Janelle Monae are exploring similar territories. But one of the lesser-known but no less talented proponents of modern Afrofuturist music come from Southeast London: United Vibrations have been exploring Sun Ra’s legacy for several years, rooting themselves in jazz, funk, afrobeat, but expanding ever outward, beyond definable genre. In an age where music is largely becoming a cheap and disposable commodity, a lineage of musical explorers continue in their quest to remind us that music is far more important: when created with the proper intention, it is a means to transcend our realities, to rethink what is possible, and to be a tool in our own liberation.