Sun Ra in DC
This essay is not the comprehensive journalistic (or ethnographic) chronology of the late jazz eccentric’s working life in and around this nation’s capital. It is one listener, one fan, fondly mining memories of Ra formed in the little bourgeois town (see Lead Belly) that has been my epicenter of operations, my de facto hometown, even after migrating to its rural exurbs.
I, therefore, can only mention in passing some of the most legendary of Ra’s landings in what we fondly remember as Chocolate City. I never, for example, heard Sun Ra at dc space. I did not hear him at Ed Murphy’s Supper Club on Georgia Avenue in 1973. Nor did I hear poet Gaston Neal host Sonny at the New School of African American Thought near 14th and U St. I also missed his 1977 contribution to Fort Dupont’s long running free summer series.
I was in college in Rhode Island in 1978–79 when I first heard the two syllables that would radically alter my earthly life. They fell from the mouth of none other than long time DC resident Robert Northern, a/k/a Brother Ah. His non-credit course (taught out of Brown University’s Third World Center) was my formal introduction to the indelible mark of Afro-Diasporic (i.e., Black) culture on music and the world. He peppered his lectures with demonstrations on flute, drum, conch, and bullroarer. He dropped the name Sun Ra with a rock-solid sense of the authority that this name should carry with a roomful of young undergraduates. I, for one, was thoroughly clueless. But I was intrigued. Brother Ah, who played French horn in the Arkestra for about a decade beginning in the 60s, started teaching at Washington’s Levine School in 1982 and was the host of a popular weekly program of collectible vinyl on WPFW-FM before he left the planet on May 31, 2020.
Sometime after Ah had infected me with the Sun Ra meme, I purchased my first Sun Ra albums, two bought at the same time from a Haitian grocery store that used to be one of the hubs of old H Street. In addition to being a broadcaster, concert promoter, and record producer, Jimmy Black Fire Gray was also a distributor of Black vinyl, maintaining a series of wire racks that would display all the hippest liberation jazz LPs in the checkout aisle of that shop on H Street and many similar stores in the community. To my mind, this is one of the most innovative ways to introduce advanced musical culture (I got my first Arthur Blythe and Archie Shepp off a Black Fire record rack) to grassroots audiences ever, and it didn’t involve subsidies from the tobacco industry.
My first live experience with Sonny and his organization was a disquieting concert in a nightclub in the Midwest. At the time I couldn’t imagine anything being as performatively extra as P-Funk’s best-honed stage show, but there it was, sometime late in 1981, the weirdest shit I’d ever seen on a stage. It didn’t quite register as concert as much as sensory overload. A little too strong a dose for a neophyte, so I backed off, to reflect.
There was a lot more listening, but a pause on space travel. I don’t have a clear recollection of the date of my next ride on the strange celestial road, but I’m sure it was after I had started volunteering at WPFW in the mid-80s and that it was in DC, quite possibly at the 9:30 Club when it was a much smaller, balcony-less venue on F Street. What is important is that my engagement with the Arkestra, its Captain, and their collective and irresistible gravitational pull began in earnest with the very next go. It was at the 9:30 club that I would meet Sun Ra. Lured backstage by the destiny-jacking antics of Ras Kwabena-I, I discovered the leader at the center of this swirling astro Black vortex, speaking into space like it was his audience. He seemed to occupy space in a way that I didn’t understand. I had never met an angel before, and that, too, was initially a confusing situation.
If you study Sonny’s concert history, you can see that as he aged and the economic realities of touring a large Black ensemble in the racist you-es-of-A deteriorated, dates in DC and NY made a lot more sense to consider from the band’s terrestrial headquarters in Philadelphia than bookings in more distant parts of this country. Unless well-supported, it made more sense to book domestic gigs along the east coast or take the more lucrative jobs available in Europe if they must fly anyway. There was a stretch in the late eighties when Sun Ra played 9:30 Club at least twice a year. I tried to make every show I could. It was comfortable to me, and their music sounded very good in that room, and did I mention, I met him there?
Sonny played in the suburbs, too. In April 1990 he played a show at Wolf Trap’s Filene Center in Vienna, Virginia. It happened to align with our youngest daughter’s second birthday, so we took her to the show. She rocked to Arkestra music on legs still learning the ins and outs of walking.
Six months passed and we were together again, this time at Freedom Plaza, where Sun Ra and his band from outer space played a District Curators sponsored free show. It was October, overcast and threatening rain. This would be the last time that I would ever see June Tyson and Sun Ra dancing together, refulgent in susurrations of sheer, heliotropic light. My sole recorded interview with Sun Ra was conducted at his hotel room about an hour before this show.
Sun Ra played Wolf Trap again in June of 1991. My wife Paula Ballard and our friends planned a party, a good ole-fashioned southern cookout, to be waiting for Sonny and the band at our friend Alan Madison’s house in Brentwood, Maryland. When the band’s bus finally found a way to park its bulk outside Alan’s fenced yard without blocking the street, the band crawled from the vehicle looking less than impressed to have something else to do before they could go home. But we had the right kind of potato salad. We had yams, coleslaw, and we had Jackie’s chicken. (I’m vegan, but I heard it’s mean chicken.) We had plenty of cold beverage on a hot afternoon.
None of us who had set up the party had gone to the show. The Sun Ra that came off the bus was not the same Sun Ra who had twirled on that stage at Freedom Plaza. Sonny (like Ali) had earned a period of enforced silence towards the end of his life. This Sun Ra, quieted by a series of strokes, exuded bitterness, in contrast to the Sun Ra of only eight months earlier, who could still enchant you with his childlike belief. The band felt it, and this might have been what we were feeling in them. But, hey, Alan always knew how to throw a nice party and before you knew it, trombonist Tyrone Hill and bassoonist Jac Jacson were a little drunk and trading jokes. Sun Ra wanted chocolate ice cream and iced tea, not the best snacks for a geriatric patient with high blood sugar, but that is what he wanted. It was beautiful. It was bittersweet chocolate ice cream.
On April 11, 1992, Sun Ra played at First Congregational Church at 10th and G Streets. It was the last time that he would be well enough to play before a DC audience. Sun Ra was uncomfortable about being seen by the audience during the effort that it took to move his wheelchair-bound body onto the part of the church altar that served as the stage. Actually, I believe that as soon as the gravity and direction of Sun Ra’s health problems were obvious to Sun Ra, he became extremely self-conscious about being publicly bested by Death — the target of his most scathing attacks. The Last Angel of History’s mortality was showing and for it not to have embarrassed Sun Ra would have required him to break character, and maybe he thought he owed us more than that.
After pleading to Bill Warrell and Katea Stitt, it was agreed that the audience would be kept out while Sun Ra was positioned at his keys, preferably on the piano bench and not in his chair. There was a flight of stairs leading up from the back of the church to the sanctuary. I can remember Katea crying as Sun Ra’s wheelchair was hoisted from one stair to the next.
There was nothing retiring or morose, however, about the joyful noise summoned by the Arkestra that Saturday afternoon. The band ripped through their material in top form and full energy. The formal set ended with a pumpingly insistent Theme of the Stargazers sung by John Gilmore. As a thunderous ovation dissolved, a bandmember (on tape, it’s sounds like drummer, Thomas Bugs Hunter) introduces the band and pushes the records and t-shirts — merch. The band leaves the stage, the entire ensemble, except Sun Ra who was rather stranded on the rostrum. The audience didn’t move. In fact, we weren’t going to move while Ra was still sitting there. Sonny had a keyboard (if memory serves, a Yamaha DX7) that he was fond of. He loved new technology and it was one of the earlier digital synthesizers that was actually playable. Sun Ra started to playfully tease its keys to life, filling the awkward silence with a slowly building cacophony of abstract sparkles that mounted into bracing electronic slashes against dense walls of synthesized harmony. What a rare and unexpected gift from one with so much to give, right up until the end. When Sun Ra’s solo electronic recital had reached something of a climax, his crew scrambled back onto the deck of the ship to close out the show and cap off the most amazing encore I had ever experienced to the most amazing life that I have ever caught a glimpse of.
“Music is a universal language. That is, it goes out to the whole universe. Everything played on this planet goes straight up. It does not stop. It goes on out forever. Sound travels. It goes to other universes, other beings. And they listen to the music to see what you’re doing. They can tell by the music how far you’ve developed. That’s how they tell. They can tell by the music how far you’ve developed.”
Sun Ra
October 1990, Washington, DC, Earth
Thomas Stanley aka Bushmeat Sound
<paypal.me/bushmeat> or <$cosmoApe>
