The Sun Ra Arkestra began the first of four San Francisco shows at SFJazz’s Miner Auditorium on Thursday night, like a rocket ship landing in the middle of San Francisco.
The 16 musicians who comprise the Arkestra were dressed in bedazzled costumes, mixing ancient Egyptian symbolism with spacesuits. They wore golden flat-brim hats, colorful kufis and the crowns of pharaohs.
They arrived mixing theatrics and classic big band swing, immediately disorienting and pumping confusion into jazz standards with layers of sound. The group is, as the current bandleader Knoell Scott himself pronounced during the Thursday night show, a “Chicago jump band with frills.”
The big-band group has been an archetype in the world of experimental jazz music since its founding in the mid-1950s. It was created by Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount), the prolific bandleader and composer of more than 1,000 pieces.
Sun Ra was born in segregated Alabama in 1914, but proclaimed that he was from Saturn. A major influence in the field of Afrofuturism, Ra and his Arkestra inspired artists like the band Parliament-Funkadelic, San Francisco-born jazz musician Idris Ackamoor and the writer Octavia Butler.
Ra founded the Arkestra with a vision of Black utopia on Earth. The biographer Paul Youngquist later wrote that Ra coded “political messages as intimate feelings,” using music to turn “confrontation into consolation, confinement into release.”
“I would hate to pass through a planet,” Ra once said, “and not leave it a better place.”
When taking a break from cosmic tours, Ra and the Arkestra would come to Oakland, said current bandleader Scott, in an SFJAZZ interview; the Black Panther Party members were big fans of the Arkestra, and would invite the group to play at many of their meetings. In the 1970s, Sun Ra filmed his cult classic film, “Space is the Place,” around San Francisco and Oakland.
But when Sun Ra died in 1993, the group continued playing on. Despite the loss of Sun Ra and the passing of time, the Arkestra hasn’t lost its spark. The 16-person big band cast its own shadow, lit up by a great, still-burning Sun.
It’s the first time that the Arkestra has played at SFJazz in more than two years, and it will be at SFJazz’s Miner Auditorium this weekend with a different show each day.
Aug. 1, they’ll play “Big Band Swing,” a collection of big band arrangements that Sun Ra composed; on Aug. 2 they play the “Marshall Allen 101 Salute,” celebrating the band’s current 101-year old leader; and on Aug. 3., they’ll play “Space Is the Place,” an avant-garde show that Scott said in an interview would be “a true Ra initiation for the new guys.”
Utopian aspirations aside, the Arkestra’s biggest threat might be its audience. On opening Thursday night, the Arkestra seemed disconnected from the people below.
It was a Thursday, to be fair, but the “dance” floor was lethargic. The crowd was peppered with bobbing gray male ponytails willing to dance, but many of the attendees seemed unprepared or unaccepting of the irregular rhythms and tones.
This lack of excitement didn’t feel like a reflection of the band’s electric energy — moreso of SFJazz’s average audience member.
Paul Henderson, director of the S.F. Department of Police Accountability, was among the more young and hip of the crowd. The Arkestra did everything it could, even stepping down into the “dance” floor to walk through the crowd blasting revolutionary tunes. They still seemed like they were in another world.
What the audience lacked in energy, the band made up for in its own sound. The 16-person Arkesta is composed of disciplined trumpeters, percussionists, and all-around masters in performance.
Among them are the powerful singer Tara Middleton, french-horn specialist Vincent Chancey, trumpeter and “intergalactic scientist” Michael Ray, and Kash Killion, a S.F. native whose cello sounds like a blend between brass and electricity.
After Sun Ra’s death in 1993, leadership of the Arkestra passed to now 101-year-old saxophonist Marshall Allen. Allen no longer plays with the band outside the Philadelphia area, but bandleader Knoell Scott has taken his place.
Scott is a tall, lanky man, and on Thursday night he shone from head to toe. Holding a brass saxophone, Scott’s body and instrument seemed like one continuous arc of gold.
The music could be disorienting. Sometimes, the tunes got as close to cat screeches and record-scratches that human instruments can approach. But it collapsed into beautiful, cascading notes when everything came together. The discord felt purposeful, pointed towards Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist vision, where jazz has no reason to stay restricted or subdued.
The music could sound like an argument, or a Hollywood chase scene in space. But it never quite sounded like jazz of this world. After ending with the Sun Ra classics “Enlightenment,” “Strange Mathematics,” and “Rhythmic Equations,” Scott asked the audience to buy a ticket to outer space.
“One-way, or round-trip,” he said. You decide.
For mere mortals, this type of music, while fulfilling, can be very difficult to dance to. The rhythm is often obscure and unpredictable, and listening to such complex music usually requires a certain amount of focus and concentration. Insulting a friendly, attentive audience and referring to them as a “threat” is b.s.
Oh and they just played three nights at Great American in November, not two years ago where, I might add, the live sound engineering was far superior. The lobby and the livestream at SFJazz always sound better than the auditorium. Go figure. Someone needs to get the engineers out of their monitors and into the seats once in awhile, it’s been a problem for years.
Hey PB, appreciate the comments and corrections. It’s easy to let things slip by in. Should all be updated. Appreciate the catches.
Not a bad writeup except it needs a fact check. The legendary trumpet player is Michael Ray, of Kool & the Gang, not “Milo Rey”. Marshall Allen does still play with the band, he just doesn’t tour outside of nyc/philly area. There are sixteen, not nineteen in the Arkestra on this tour, including the new dancer who goes unremarked in the article. And not sure about Octavia Butler , that claim is new to me, but George Clinton’s Funkadelic was not inspired by Sun Ra, Clinton says he didn’t check out Sun Ra until the 1990s, but he acknowledges they both came out of Doo Wop. https://www.nuvo.net/music/george-clinton-talks-sun-ra-kendrick-prince-jimi-hendrix-and-more/article_e3f8b681-7990-5bf8-a3d2-6c1013e3bfa8.html