The Arkestra was from Chicago, it’s leader was from Birmingham, and it’s essence was from Saturn, but the group didn’t attain widespread acclaim until they moved to New York City in 1961. The steadfast experimentalism of the Arkestra and the mystifying style of its leader didn’t lend itself to recording contracts, so Sun Ra started one of the first ever artist-owned labels, Saturn Records, named for the planet on which he maintained he’d been born. What, then, would the cosmic citizen’s national anthem sound like? Having assembled his Arkestra, Sun Ra went about creating a style that fused a big band sound with avant-garde harmonies and an exploration of the outer limits of sound. Perhaps a way to escape this racist trap is to seek cosmic citizenship.
A revealing glimpse of his thoughts can be seen in the lyric, "If we came from nowhere here / Why can't we go somewhere there?" Black people in the United States were (and still are) treated as strangers, unwelcome in the country they built. Anyone looking to plumb those depths should check out the lectures and reading list from the course on "The Black Man and the Cosmos" that Sun Ra taught at UC Berkley in 1971. There’s isn’t room here to unpack Sun Ra’s philosophy, which brought together African mythology, science fiction, and many strains of the occult, into a unique blend often called Afrofuturism. But unlike those who sought a new identity in earthly cultures such as Islam, Sun Ra looked towards the cosmos.
This rejection of what he and many others called "slave names" resembled that of Malcolm Little, who adopted the name Malcolm X just two years prior. In 1952, Blount legally changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra, soon simplified to Sun Ra. Sun Ra’s art is inseparable from the identity suggested by these many band names. By the early 1950s, he was leading groups that would evolve into his ensemble: Sun Ra and his Arkestra, aka Solar Arkestra, aka Outer Space Arkestra, aka Astro-Infinity Arkestra, aka Myth Science Arkestra, and a few more variations besides. By the 1940s, he’d made his way to Chicago, where he played piano in the club scene, coached and arranged for vocal groups, and worked for a period as pianist and arranger for the legendary swing band leader Fletcher Henderson. He was a musical prodigy and a voracious reader, as well as an eccentric thinker who was briefly jailed for refusing to serve in World War II. Herman Poole Blount was born in 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama. This post covers someone who did the opposite: moving himself and his entire band to Philadelphia for the last couple decades of his long and winding career.
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The first three subjects in this series ( John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, and Philly Joe Jones) spent varying stretches of their youths in Philadelphia, before making their careers in New York City.
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Every one of the bolded album titles below can be streamed for free with your library card via Alexander Street’s Jazz Music Library. This is the fourth in a series of blog posts highlighting major figures in jazz history who were in some sense from Philly.
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