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Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra: Outer Space Employment Agency (1973) |
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Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals
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Monday, 16 January 2006 10:50 |
Outer Space Employment Agency
Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra
Recorded Live at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973
Total Energy Records
By John Sinclair
Sun Ra was one of the biggest hits of the 1972 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival. The Solar Myth Arkestra appeared on opening night, Friday, September 8, on a bill with Howlin' Wolf, Junior Walker & The All Stars, CJQ and the Seigel-Schwall Band, and completely wowed the crowd with its spectacular presentation of space-age improvisational music and brilliant costumery.
Sun Ra & His Arkestra would have been considered an unlikely audience pleaser in Ann Arbor and the Detroit area were it not for the band's historic performances with the MC-5 during 1967-69, including shared bills at Community Arts Auditorium, the Grande Ballroom, Ann Arbor Armory, and the first Detroit Rock & Roll Revival festival at the Michigan State Fairgrounds in June 1969.
Ra was a particular favorite of the MC-5, who adapted his wild space-jazz style and his poem "There Is" into their tour-de-force number called "Starship," and the band's enthusiasm was quickly picked up by its legions of followers in the area. The Arkestra's appearance at the 1972 Blues & Jazz Festival marked its return to the area after a three-year absence and became widely regarded as a must-see event.
Just over a month after its triumphant appearance in Ann Arbor, the Arkestra made its first major label recording, a magnificent opus titled Space Is The Place issued by Bob Krasnow's Blue Thumb Records. His reception in Ann Arbor and widespread positive critical response to the new album served to thrust Sun Ra much further into the consciousness of music-loving Americans than ever before, beginning a 20-year period of steadily increasing performance opportunities and international acclaim.
When we began programming the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, the closing show on Sunday night was set aside to showcase the most popular artists from the previous year's festivities: the great Luther Allison, the irrepressible Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers, the mighty Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra, plus a star-studded Chicago Blues Revue featuring Otis Rush, Homesick James, Eddie Taylor, Carey Bell and Lucille Spann, all backed by the Mighty Joe Young Blues Band.
Sun Ra's 1973 appearance was even more highly anticipated than ever before. The Arkestra--16 members strong--was at the peak of its powers, with an array of brilliant soloists like John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, Eloe Omoe, Ahk Tal Ebah and Kwame Hadi continually swirling forth from Ra's inexhaustible font of music and color, fired by three sets of drums and an equal number of hand percussionists and topped by Sun Ra's intergalactic keyboards and the space voice and interpretive dancing of the magnificent June Tyson.
As a bandleader, Sun Ra had always insisted on a high level of musical and orchestral discipline as a means to unprecedented freedom of expression. These goals had been achieved through long hours of daily rehearsals over a 20-year period, augmented by the leader's endless lectures on every topic under the sun.
Now he was incorporating his philosophical disquisitions into the stage show itself, casting his views into verse and presenting them via a three-part vocal chorale to stunning effect. A new suite based on the previous year's smash success, Space Is The Place, had been prepared to introduce Ra's concept of an Outer Space Employment Agency which would put the idled workers of post-industrial America back into a productive mode outside the tired orbit of Earth.
By 1973 Sun Ra had maintained his Arkestra continuously for 20 years, rising from obscure Chicago origins to the heights of international acclaim as the premiere avant-garde big band in jazz. Like Duke Ellington, Sun Ra had developed the Arkestra as a means of realizing his unique compositional concepts and created works built around the musical personalities of life members like John Gilmore, Pat Patrick and Marshall Allen.
The Arkestra operated under several banners--Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra, Space Arkestra, Solar-Myth Arkestra, Astro-Infinity Arkestra, Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra--according to the particular musico-philosophical goals Ra had established for each discrete series of performances or recordings to be undertaken.
Later in the 1970s and 80s, after he had incorporated a great deal of historical material by Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson and other classical jazz composers into the Arkestra's repertoire, he would bill the band as the Omniverse Arkestra and, when they starting touring regularly, the Omniverse Jet-Set Arkestra.
These traditional elements were woven into the Arkestra's seamless five-hour presentations along with Ra's space anthems, wild solo and group improvisations, throbbing massed percussion and June Tyson's other-worldly vocals. Almost invariably, at some point in the performance, the entire Arkestra would leave the stage to chant and snake-dance through the audience.
* * * * *
Born Herman Blount around 1915 and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Sun Ra began to emerge as a musical force shortly after World War II. He worked with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra at Chicago's Club DeLisa during 1946-47, graduated to house pianist and musical director at several prominent Windy City showbars, and organized his Arkestra around 1952 to perform the pianist's idiosyncratic jazz compositions and arrangements.
At this point the pianist began his long association with Chicago philosopher/businessman Alton Abraham, took the name "Le Sun Ra" and began to reveal his cosmic visions through his compositions, song titles, poetry, elaborate costumery and, beginning in 1956, a series of wildly iconoclastic LPs under his own Saturn Records imprint.
Packaged in crude space-age covers and bearing titles like Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth, We Travel the Spaceways, Supersonic Jazz and Secrets of the Sun, these albums presented the innovative, often startling compositional creations of Sun Ra delivered with exceptional musicianship by the Solar Arkestra.
. Sun Ra's avant-garde works utilized elements like a "space key," where the players were instructed to improvise without regard for conventional tonal centers; superimposition of one chord over another; modal pieces with no fixed harmonic structure; and songs played in multiple keys.
His works wove a musical tapestry of unusual rhythms and colors, swinging like crazy at will or moving entirely out of regular time to project a musical environment evocative of outer space.
Sun Ra also introduced several daring instrumental concepts during the mid-1950s, including early use of electric piano, Solovox, Clavioline, Hammond organ, Farfisa organ and electric bass; creating an acoustic and electric bass team; utilizing two drummers and exotic miscellaneous percussion to create unprecedented polyrhythms; crafting features for two baritone saxophones and other unusual combinations of instruments; and insisting that each member of the reed section double on flute, oboe, bassoon or bass clarinet.
Historically, Sun Ra's writing and arranging followed the advances made by Tadd Dameron and Jimmy Mundy in the 1940s and were contemporaneous with the experimental writing of Charles Mingus and George Russell. His musical concepts and extra-musical concerns deeply influenced jazz giants like John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Cecil Taylor, as well as an entire generation of Chicago musicians who became active in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
Sun Ra also had a deep and lasting effect on the self-determination movement in jazz. With long-time partner and mentor Alton Abraham, he operated his own label, Saturn Records; his own music publishing company, Enterplanetary Koncepts; and his own production company, Infinity Inc.
While he recorded for and leased masters to a variety of labels, including Transition, Savoy, ESP-Disk, Blue Thumb and ABC/Impulse, Ra continued to issue albums on Saturn Records so that as much of his music as possible could be documented and made available to his small but fanatical public.
Sun Ra was a thoroughly unique individual whose provocative persona generated endless myth and controversy. To hear him expound his philosophical equations and his views on the future of interplanetary humanity was always a delightful experience. And to witness his outlook in action as interpreted by the Arkestra--under whatever rubric--provided aesthetic thrills beyond measure.
There was only one Sun Ra, and we lost one of the most colorful and beloved figures in 20th-century creative music when the celebrated pianist, composer and bandleader left Planet Earth on Sunday, May 30, 1993, almost 20 years following the remarkable Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival performance captured on this album.
His epochal Saturn Records releases are now being made available to contemporary audiences in a series of 16 CDs issued by Evidence Records, while ESP-Disk has restored his classic Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volumes 1 & 2.
His mid-1950s recordings for Transition Records have been issued on CD by Delmark Records as Sun Song and Sound of Joy, his 1961 Savoy album The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra by Nippon Columbia, the 1972 Blue Thumb recording of Space Is the Place by MCA/Impulse, and there are many European recordings available on a variety of labels.
But there was nothing like seeing and hearing Sun Ra & his fabulous Arkestra in the full flight of performance, and no better place to witness the magic of Ra than standing in Otis Spann Memorial Field next to Huron High School on the outskirts of Ann Arbor in the early 1970s when the Arkestra took the stage after it had been absolutely leveled by Junior Walker & the All Stars or Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers and then lifted it off into space and took the audience of 15,000 unsuspecting music lovers along with it.
That'll be where you're going, too, right now, as soon as you slip this disk into your machine and turn it on. Bon voyage, dear friends, happy landings and many, many happy returns.
--New Orleans
January 24, 1999
(c) 1999, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra: Outer Space Employment Agency
Recorded "live" at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973
[1] "Discipline 99" (Sun Ra)
[2] "Love In Outer Space" (Sun Ra)
[3] "Watusa" (Sun Ra)
[4] "Discipline 27-II" (Sun Ra)
[5] "At First There Was Nothing >
[6] "The Universe Has More To Offer You" >
[7] "Wake Up Angels" (Sun Ra)
[8] "Outer Space Employment Agency" (Sun Ra)
Produced by John Sinclair for Big Chief Productions
Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra: Sun Ra, Farfisa organ, Mini-Moog, & vocals; Kwame Hadi, trumpet; Akh Tal Ebah, trumpet, mellophone & vocals; Marshall Allen, Danny Davis, alto saxophones & flute; John Gilmore, tenor saxophone, percussion; Eloe Omoe, bass clarinet & flute; Danny Thompson, baritone saxophone & flute; Ronnie Boykins, bass; Tommy Hunter, Lex Humphries, Vic Morrison, drums; Alzo Wright, percussions; Atakatune, Odun, congas; June Tyson, space vocals.
All compositions published by Enterplanetary Koncepts (BMI)
Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra appeared at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973 by arrangement with Alton Abraham & Saturn Research, Inc.
Recorded live at Otis Spann Memorial Field, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Sunday, September 9, 1973 by John Ryan & Jeff Jones for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation under the supervision of John Sinclair.
The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1973 was produced by Peter Andrews, Darlene Pond & John Sinclair for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation and was presented on stage at Otis Spann Memorial Field, Ann Arbor, Michigan, September 7-8-9, 1973.
These "live" recordings were produced by John Ryan for the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation and recorded by the Butterfly Mobile Recording Service. Director of Recording and Chief Engineer: Jeff Jones. Recording Engineers: Karl Shojdahl, Robert Fries, Al Jacquez and Dave "Ball" Bartlebaugh. Special thanks to Steve Gebhardt & Robert Fries.
Digitally transferred from the original 7" stereo master tapes, edited and mastered by Keith Keller at Chez Flames Recordings, New Orleans, March 3, 1995.
The producer would like to extend special thanks to Alton Abraham, David Sinclair, Peter Andrews, Darlene Pond, Gary Grimshaw, Frank & Peggy Bach, Roland Young, John "Chinner" Mitchell, Keith Keller, Greg Eveline, Bill Lynn, R. Curry Miller, Celia Sinclair, Sunny Sinclair, Elsie Sinclair, Chonita Michaels, and to my wife Penny for her understanding and support.
The producer would also like to express his appreciation and gratitude to Jerry Brock & Barry Smith at the Louisiana Music Factory, 210 Decatur Street, New Orleans, LA 70130 for their extraordinary assistance and support during the course of this project.
(p)(c) 1973, 1999, 2006 John Sinclair.
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