BY JEFFREY LITTLE | It’s 1966. Well, maybe…maybe-probably…it’s as 1966 as we’re ever sure we are of anything when we are talking about the fourth dimension and its relation to Sun Ra, musical iconoclast. For a Space Age man from the Past, time is a mercury foosball, and Certainty is elusive. If you are familiar with the man with the outer space plan, then none of this is news, and you realize that, among other things, there is no such beast as a definitive recording of Sun Ra. There are clusters, and among the clusters, beautifully strange instances that for better or worse we call albums. Or CDs. Better, rebuses. Hiccups of Infinity. If you are not familiar with the Ra, then there about a thousand places to start, each as good as the other, indefinable as to consensus, but I’ve been asked to choose just one. Call me Quorum.
OK. Ra plays jazz, yes, or world music, sure, or proto-rock big band Astro-Infinity noise-math, definitely, often in the same tune. There are hundreds of albums, and they span everything in the previous sentence, and more. Like the Sale signs say, “Everything Must Go!” Ra is everything all at once, and everyone has their preferred starting point, the logical entry. Well, what Sun Ra wanted above all else was to play the impossible. The possible had been tried, and failed, and this is what’s left us. So for me, I wanted to start from a point of impossibility, in the reverb-drenched high period Ra of the Saturn recordings that spanned the sixties. What he called his sub-undergound records, records he pressed himself in ridiculously small batches and peddled at concerts and record stores. Needless to say, Ebay fodder-cred for the Nouveau-Hip. And of these recordings, the one that stands out as the most Out, and yet the most indicative of the man’s methods, is Strange Strings. Quorum plays hardball.
So the recording quality sucks, but who gives a rat’s ass? Stick a microphone out into deep space and see if what comes back sounds like the Biebs. Or Black Flag. There’s hiss. The mic moves in, the mic moves out, often bumping into something (John Gilmore? Space Junk?) Songs just stop. There are effects, but there is no Production. No Product. Only sonic life, sonic death, and the man behind it all who believed that a wrong note could destroy the universe. As serious as your life? No fucking shit.
And the Arkestra, of course. The greatest band name ever. Ever. This is not open to discussion. The band as vessel. Emissaries from beyond, reaching further into the beyond. Ra loved puns, wordplay, and the band name works on this level as well. He had a sense of humor that was born of the Blues. The real kind, so you can just keep on walking B.B. King, this ain’t Lucille, this is Killing Floor Blues. Laughing to keep from crying. Some jokes can kill you, and Sun Ra is that kind of funnyman. He grew up in Birmingham. Had a friend lynched when he was a child. He’s laughing with your heart in his hands. “You need this?” Smiles that wry Sun Ra smile. “I thought so.” Then he’ll hit you with a Space Chord, or a chant, like at the end of the tune “Atlantis” (another essential Ra for another essential day) where after about a 20-minute apocalyptic organ sole, a drum sounds, and the Arkestra breaks into “Sun Ra…and his band… from outer space…have entertained you here.” And I wasn’t even in their fucking army anymore.
This period Arkestra carries the big three, Ra’s saxophone kings: John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, and Pat Patrick (Duvals’ dad, go figure.) Plus Danny Davis and Robert Cummings filling out the reeds, with Bugs Hunter on the reverb machine. Always a big plus in this period is Ronnie Boykins on bass. Top shelf, and none of the knuckleheads (Ra’s description) who would sometimes fill out the ranks of the Arkestra in later years, when “serious” musicians started moving out of Ra’s orbit. Their loss, and ours, not Ra’s, he was on a bigger mission, and he would more than make do with who he had on hand. The kicker on this album in particular is that it’s really only the Arkestra-as-we-know-them on the first track, “World’s Approaching.” But more on that in a bit. Suffice it to say that you could do far worse in starting your Arkestra collection with any number of albums from this period: Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow, Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy, When Angels Speak of Love, Secrets of The Sun, The Magic City, Atlantis, Other Planes of There, When Sun Comes Out. All on Saturn Records and reissued by Evidence, or Atavistic, sometimes two to a CD. You get the picture. These are the glory years.
Enough with the introductions. We have come here to speak of that singularity known as Strange Strings. The original album contained three pieces of music: “World’s Approaching,” and the shitkickers: “Strings Strange” and “Strange Strings.” Two pieces which share the same instrumentation, and methodology. To this the Atavistic reissue adds a single, glorious track, “Door Squeak,” which does as much to explain the genius of Sun Ra as any other single piece of music. Yes. Ra plays door. Ra as door, is door. This, too, we shall come to.
The overriding sense of “World’s Approaching” is just that, approaching, that while we are “here” now, soon it will be a different world altogether, and you better get your shit together. It begins with tympani kicking some boom and Ronnie Boykins on bowed bass. Then the horns come in sounding like the best ’60s science fiction music of all time. It’s fuzzy, it’s all over, and Marshall Allen’s oboe (jazz oboe!) takes the first lead, sounding like maybe those folks who said the pyramids were built by aliens might be right after all. Hell, these dudes may even be those aliens.
The flutes here in the ensemble sections work well. I, for one, have a hard time with traditional jazz flute, even when played by someone as great as Eric Dolphy or Sam Rivers. They just seem too, well, tooty. But the flutes in Ra have more of an African/Middle Eastern feel, more often than not providing texture, and when they do take the lead they tend more toward groove. Here they fill the higher reaches of Ra’s sound spectrum while an internal shifting is taking place, more tympani, and percussion scratchings, and then the mighty John Gilmore and his tenor saxophone take the helm.
Gilmore’s sound comes out of the same field as John Coltrane, a hard edge that cuts through bone, with a tone that says simply “Gilmore.” Yet while it is incredibly forceful it often carries a little behind the beat, which can be hard to discern when he’s blowing as fast as he is here. It’s everything that we think of when we think of free jazz, except that this isn’t free jazz, it’s Ra’s jail, and even at its wildest this is scripted, improvisational music. Gilmore occupies a well-defined area, and within this area he is free to fill it as he sees fit. But make no mistake, Ra has been here before.
It’s then that the plates shift in “Approaching” and Bugs Hunter hits the reverb and suddenly this is a music you have never experienced before. It dimensions. As in a verb. There is echo everywhere. It rolls back in on itself and it sounds like Gilmore is now two. It’s some seriously wild shit. And just as you start to wrap your head around this Gilmore freak-out Hunter hits the switch again and it’s as if gravity has been restored and the tenor rolls to a slow close, sharing the space with a trombone with the reverb switching on and off. More flutes, and tympani, and then Ra gets behind the wheel with what I guess is an electric piano though it sounds more like a clavinet. It doesn’t matter. It’s Ra. It’s funky and it’s wild, tonal, atonal, again it doesn’t matter. It’s a hell of a solo, and it’s taking you back to the world of the horns and a return to the theme. But the theme again, is of approaching, and what’s approaching is the two-headed monster of “Strings Strange” and “Strange Strings.”
These two pieces are what Ra called a “study in ignorance.” For years he had been picking up stringed instruments in thrift stores, some vaguely described as “oriental” and on this day, without telling the Arkestra his plans, he gave each of them an instrument they had never played, or maybe never even seen before. Think of Ra as the mother bird kicking chicks out of the nest. Aleatory Music for the Otherworld. Ra often conducted with hand gestures, and I’m sure that this is how “Strange Strings” was worked, and why it works so well. For a piece with no preconceived plan, at least as far as the other musicians were concerned, the music unfolds naturally, with a flow that shows Ra in total control. Call it what you want, this is easily the equal of what Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, and the rest of the “modern music” boys were gathering their grants and getting their props for.
Alongside the strings, it is the percussion instruments that carry the music. A piece of sheet metal, lightning drums (tympani) played by Ra, it’s like the junkyard band as orchestral shock troops. Sections of meandering strings are juxtaposed with a din that Ra called his joyful noise. I believe it’s James Jacson or Art Jenkins who was beating and shaking the sheet metal, a large piece of tempered steel with a big X scratched into its surface, but it might as well have been the theologian Jonathan Edwards, because it’s a fire and brimstone sounding thing when it gets really going, and Ra, for all his space wonk tendencies, was an old testament kind of guy.
The other instrument that really makes the piece is actually the human voice, with a twist. Art Jenkins had been trying to get into the Arkestra for a while but his singing was just too straight for Ra, who as he often said, wanted the impossible. So the story goes that one day Jenkins picked up a metal megaphone, turned it backwards and started warbling through it like a ram’s horn in a distinctly human-theremin kind of melding. Well, Art got his in, and on “Strange Strings” he takes over sections while the strings and percussion burble beneath him.
For a first listen, just shut your damn mind down and let the piece take you where it will, there’s really no other way to approach it. It’s a wonderful thing to hear, and even more wonderful when you think of the man behind it. Scorned, ridiculed, pushed to the outer boundaries of music, Sun Ra thrived on the edge of the possible. It’s like he’s saying “You want jazz, I’ll give you this. You want modern, here, top this. I’ll be dead for twenty years before you’ll even begin to understand, but those little kids over there, and there, they get it now.” “Strange Strings/Strings Strange” is a special piece of music, but frankly, it’s really something you just have to hear. Like the idea of Negative Capability, the more you try to describe, to wrap your head around the music, the farther you move from the thing-in-itself. That said, you’re on your own. Happy trails.
Now, what makes the Atavistic reissue a major event is the inclusion of a piece called “Door Squeak” recorded at around the same time as Strange Strings, the instrumentation being the giveaway. Except in this case, Ra is, as I said before, playing a door. It had a squeak that he found compelling, and I’ll be damned if he doesn’t play the shit out of a door. It’s amazing. First, just the idea of it. Who else would hear a squeaky door and have the mindset to think, “Damn, that’s a sound I can use?” And not just to use, but to make the main voice in the piece. Again, you have to realize that for Sun Ra there was no notion of rehearsals, or “practicing” music. Everything the Arkestra did was a potential record, and he made damned sure that everyone knew that just as the cosmos was created by a sound, it sure as hell could be destroyed by one, too. If he was going to play a door, you better believe he was going to make it more than a door. Shit, check out the new Down Beat poll, Sun Ra wins again, on Door.
For a being like Sun Ra, where everything was a symbol (numbers, names, colors, you name it) the idea that he was playing a door would certainly have cachet. Here was another pun he could use to forward his own ends. Music was a door, Sun Ra was a door, and if he found a door that made a sound that spoke to him from Somewhere There then clearly this could be no accident. He found meaning where others found only “noise.” He took “noise” and created Noise. And if you can’t hear the difference, then call him a fool and keep on walking. He knows where he will find you.
Ra begins with some slow movements of the door, which sounds a bit like a stringed instrument itself, or an electric keyboard, or that damn theremin again. You can hear him testing it out, and as he does so, the same sort of sonic drizzle that filled Strange Strings starts creeping in. There is reverb, but for the most part Bugs Hunter keeps it on the quieter side, as I think he knew that something really different was happening here. You can even hear him move the microphone around which in this context takes the form of another instrument. There are going to be folks who hear this piece and won’t make it past the first second when they realize that the sound they hear is a door. I’m talking to the rest of you. It is a door. Open the damn thing, and walk inside. There’s room for everyone in here.
There are “greater” compositions in the vast Sun Ra canon (CANNON!) than “Door Squeak” and others that equal or perhaps surpass “Strings Strange” and “Strange Strings.” I get that. But that’s just Ra. He’s great. He’s a mountain chain. There are goddamn peaks everywhere. Go grab a seat. But to get in his head and see even if just a little bit the why and the wherefore, it’s something like wearing god’s glasses. You want a mindfuck: if you like this, then immediately check out Jazz in Silhouette from the late ’50s and Lanquidity from the Philly period in the ’70s. You’ll soon realize that this world is far bigger than you ever thought, and you can see for fucking miles and miles. Do it. Thank him. Thank Sun Ra.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
