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Marshall Allen/Sun Ra
Charlie Haden
Ben Watson
Talos Festival
Freakwater

The House That RA Built

by Larry Alexander, photos by Karl Billerts

"Happy Space Age," came the greeting from the other end of the line, in a voice which sounded like that of alto saxophonist Noel Scott. What else should you have expected when placing a call "long distance in more ways than one" to the fantastically whimsical otherworld of the Sun Ra Arkestra?

Six years after the departure of their namesake and leader, the Arkestra carries forth under the direction of alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, who has steered its forward evolution in the context of his own compositional prolificacy.

In the annals of music, there are few locations as steeped in legend for housing creativity (as opposed to mere fame and debauchery) as the three-story Morton Street residence of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Never mind Graceland; you are now entering Space Land.

Such a pilgrimage brings to mind the essence of Sun Ra's speculative vision - Ra, ruminating poetically on the if and when of things: If you live in fables; When angels speak; When the world was in darkness; If you find earth boring. His remains an aesthetic of infinite possibility, underscoring the true role of art: to ask the questions which bear the seeds of human potentiality.

Step inside the Green Door and you behold a monument to wondrous out-trospection which begins to unfold in the large living room to the left;
once the site of so many rehearsals of lore, it now houses many artifacts of the Arkestraís voyages ñ paintings, photographs, sculptures, exotic stage decor, instruments, performance advertisements. And in a central location sits a shrine to the late bassoonist James Jacson, prominently featuring one of his trademark hats.

It's a traditional Philadelphia row-house, if you've ever seen one: tall and thin, reflective of the city's almost singular colonial physical make-up. It's contents imbue the ascendancy up it's sculpted staircase with a regal bearing, as if one is traversing levels of awareness, or at least divine mystery. Graduate to the second floor and you see bedroom doors of various colors nestled among dazzlingly adorned hallway walls; the one in the rear leads to the room which once housed the late tenor saxophonist, John Gilmore, who immediately succeeded Sun Ra as leader in 1993. Transcend to the third floor and there, in the rear bedroom, you find the current baton-bearer in the Arkestra's existential relay race, Marshall Allen; there is something fittingly poetic about the fact that he sits astride one of Sonny's keyboards, banging out chord progressions to demonstrate the melody of one of his new compositions to tenor saxophonist Ya Ya Abdul-Majid.

Looking at Marshall - who radiates warmth and charm, while embracing each day's challenge with an exuberance unmatched by people half his age -you almost have to wonder: is there some unwritten cosmic bylaw that in the Creator's band, the leader is the one with the orange beard?

The walls of the room are adorned with paintings of Sun Ra, one of them a striking juxtaposition of black and white and color renderings. There are various plaques and awards on display as well, offering a subtle timeline of Arkestral achievements. Jacsonís workbench, from which he used to create jewelry and other handcrafts, sits off to the side, and one wall is festooned with books, many of them extremely rare and covering an eclectic range of philosophical and aesthetic topics.           

Assorted instruments, including exotic percussion pieces, rest about the room, and there is a box of old vinyl that ranges in content from Fletcher Henderson albums to an original copy of the 1971 Arkestra release Nidhamu to a slew of unsheathed plain white label Saturn albums whose collective anonymity only serves to fire the imagination and quicken the pulse.

Ya Ya departs with his horn and his space is filled by Scott and trombonist Tyrone Hill. As you settle in for a fireside chat about the goings-on of the Arkestra, it is difficult not to notice the simple white cardboard Delta Airlines packing box which sits behind Marshall, forming a make-shift utility table to hold his coffee and cigarettes (which he would jokingly describe as his "diet"). So rampant is the spirit of creativity here that he has taken to drawing in and around the series of coffee stains left by the many cups that have rested there in the days since he brought the box home from a recent road trip, his pencilled doodlings suggesting some aberrant strain of Andromedal cartography.

What is most engaging about these men is the pure spirit of discipline and dedication which radiates from them. At one point, there is talk of
business-related negativity and your rhetorical suggestion of a Machiavellian counter-move is summarily and dispassionately dismissed as "not even in the karma for this Arkestra." Pure and simple. They have clearly done all that Sun Ra has asked of them and benefited greatly from his teachings, which they carry on with sincerity and humility. They have taken to heart Sun Ra's observation that most people want only to beg something from the Creator, whereas few actually endeavor to present the Creator with something.

Just before you depart, you are granted the honor of seeing Jacson's huge, legendary hand-carved drum, which he forged from the remains of a huge tree felled by lightning just across the street many years ago. Standing easily over five feet in height, its majestic placement adjacent to the shrine which features his hat evokes a powerful feeling of Jac's ebullient presence. Standing in this Morton Street structure, one realizes that at some point it must be formally registered as an historical landmark; but even that eventuality can represent little more than a belated bureaucratic technicality. Can natural beauty be subject to human sanction? And just who in the omniverse do we think we are to presume such authority in the first place? Time and activity, after all, have already bestowed landmark status on this house. (Although such notions of sanction reiterate legitimate questions of Sun Ra's place in jazz history vis-a-vis those of more celebrated luminaries such as Duke Ellington - particularly when their songbooks are compared along lines of stylistic range, quantity and complexity.)

In the end, though, it's just a house - and yet it's not. And this is most likely the point of the matter; any house, be it ever so humble, holds the same potential for such a creative approach to living. One has but to tap into it with the spirit of joy. It's a conclusion potent enough to send one home eager to reconsider, with fresh eyes, the if and when of things.

Read Larry Alexander & Thomas Stanley's interview with Marshall Allen, Noel Scott and Tyrone Hill in its entirety in the new SIGNAL to NOISE.

~~~

CD Reviews...       11/99

Walt Dickerson
Impressions Of A Patch Of Blue
(Verve Records)

But for a casting quirk, this album would surely never have escaped from the cut-out limbo into which it descended almost as soon as it was released in 1966. But it has been collector-scum bait for years because it is one of the rare occasions when Sun Ra played as a sideman. But that's not the only reason to check out this lavishly packaged cd reissue; it's an intriguing piece of chamber jazz that takes the Modern Jazz Quartet's instrumental line-up (vibes-piano-drums-bass) and concept (swinging jazz meets classical refinement) into places John Lewis and Milt Jackson probably never dreamed. Vibraphonist Dickerson approaches the admittedly slender material (themes from a then-popular Sidney Poitier vehicle) with such a brisk, ahead-of-tempo attack that the performances win me over even when the tunes do not. Drummer Roger Blank and bassist Bob Cunningham handle the shifts from bluesy comping to texturally oriented coloration with aplomb. And Ra? He's not as out here as he was on Arkestral recordings of the same period, but his dissonant clusters on Part 2 of the title tune, his behind-the-beat percussive solo on "Bacon and Eggs," and his spidery harpsichord lines on three tracks still push the proceedings into a more distant and eliptical orbit than one might expect such a project to attain. -Bill Meyer

Joe Morris
Racket Club
(About Time)
Joe Morris is known for recordings which ignore any remotely hum-able rhythmic or melodic device in favor of raw, exploitative adventuring. His latest records, Like Rays (with Hans Poppel) and ìA Cloud of Black Birdsî, bear this out, with the Connecticut axeman digging into collective performance guided by nothing but the whim of its creators. There was a time though (1993 apparently) when Morris demanded more from his sidemen than just improvisational savvy. Racket Club documents a period of structure-seeking, spotlighting more than a few arrangements, horn charts, and honest-to-goodness soloing in a package that - though compelling in moments - rarely sparks the spontaneous implosions of Morris' recent work. Despite the presence of a snazzy sextet including two drummers (longtime Morris man Jerome Dupree and Curt Newton) and Nate McBride playing a wicked electric bass, the ensemble gets bogged down to often. Stagnating in the lengthy wrote sections of tunes like "Rumble Strip" and "Instinct", they forego collective spelunking for brief, often pointless soloing. While it's slick, at first, to hear Morris' familiar bleeps and blurps eel-ing through slapping bass grooves and good, old fashioned funk (thatís right, funk) McBride and co. keep the low-end locked too tight, refusing to follow the soloists into the wild blue even when the situation clearly calls for it. When the jamming does, at last, get thick on barn burners ìInstinctî and ìSlipshodî itís enough to make you wish Morris had loosened the reins on the group more often before moving away from this intriguing, almost big-band style format. -Greg Corrao

Sam Rivers
Inspiration
(RCA-Victor)
By any reasonable standard, 77-year-old saxophonist Sam Rivers should be resting on his laurels as a semi-legendary jazz iconoclast. Instead, his latest album is one of his most ambitious undertakings ever, with Rivers leading a jaw-dropping assembly of jazz brass (no pun intended) through a lengthy and energetic program of his own tightly orchestrated compositions. The esteem in which Rivers is held can be assessed just by eyeballing the roster of his Rivbea All-Star Orchestra, which includes notables like Steve Coleman, Hamiet Bluiett, Chico Freeman, Gary Thomas, Art Baron, Bob Stewart and Greg Osby. The compositions are essentially unconventional, admittedly none-too-memorable frameworks for jazz improvisation, and it takes soloists of an especially high caliber -- not least of which is Rivers himself -- to pull it off. Unfortunately, even repeated listenings fail to dispel the impression that a number of the pieces, to put it as bluntly, sound the same. (Can anyone tell "Vines," "Inspiration" and "Whirlwind" apart?) One factor that could prove controversial among Rivers' longtime fans is his incorporation of a rock/funk-derived backbeat in much of this work. To my ears, the combination of Rivers' dense, dissonant orchestrations and that clunky backbeat proves more oppressive than exciting, though others might well disagree. It should be noted that as far as his prowess as a soloist goes, Rivers is still going strong, with intricate melodic lines weaving around harmonic barriers with the agility of a sea serpent on the prowl. (The only exceptions might be his occasional jumps to flute, which are competent but unremarkable.) The other soloists maintain a consistently high level of inspiration that makes it difficult to single anyone out, assuming one can identify which chorus is taken by whom in the first place. (The liner notes are silent on this point, which is a miserable oversight.) The closing track, "Rejuvenation," contains some especially notable solos from various trumpeters and trombonists, whose instruments never lent themselves to the jazz avant-garde as easily as the various saxophones. -- Dave Reitzes

Departments

NEWS, VIEWS & ERRATA: Boston's Zeitgeist Gallery; sound bites in brief
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: The Jeff Robinson Trio's musical poetics
LIVE REVIEWS: Bill Cole :: Autumn Uprising :: Naftule's Dream :: Widespread Panic
CD REVIEWS: More than 50 recent releases covered this issue!

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