Astro Black: Mythic Future, Mythic Past

But if you would tell me who I am, at least take the trouble to discover what I have been.

—Ralph Ellison

In April 1993 the American magazine Jazziz appeared on the newsstands with a front cover headline that read: "Sun Ra: Visionary or Con Artist?" If the question was, as John Corbett later claimed, "insulting and ignorant," it was not entirely unprovoked. As Corbett himself wryly noted: "Of course, anyone claiming to be from the planet Saturn will be the subject of continuing ridicule no matter how irrefutably out of this world and truly prophetic their music is."

Indeed, the insensitivity of the Jazziz headline was soon eclipsed by that shown in some of the obituaries that followed Sun Ra's death on 30 May 1993. In the Daily Mail, Benny Green referred to Sun Ra's "galactic gobbledegook," portrayed him as "wearing a short interplanetary Noddy bonnet," and complained: "The trouble has always been to know where to draw a firm line between the tomfoolery of an entertaining charlatan and the sincere missionary beliefs of a considerable musical pioneer." In the Independent, Steve Voce, while also acknowledging Sun Ra's "serious contribution to the music," nevertheless poked fun at his clothes and his philosophy, describing him as a "nutter" who "had only one joke." These remarks may have been exceptionally facile, yet their disbelieving tone was certainly not unprecedented in commentary on Sun Ra. Allan Chase has pointed out that "naivete, cynicism, facetiousness, inconsistency, and insanity" have all been put forward to explain what he calls Sun Ra's "differentness." Even writers sympathetic to Ra have tended to dwell on his singularity, perhaps not surprisingly given his claim that "I am not of this planet. I am another order of being. I can tell you things you won't believe."

It is clear from the above quotations that the controversy about Sun Ra has not been primarily musicological. Though critics have differed in their degrees of appreciation, few have had any problem relating his music to the African American creative tradition. Robert Campbell, for example, reported that in the 1980s a typical Sun Ra concert "contained Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington charts, freakouts, standards, blues for piano and organ, slices of R&B, you name it," and back in the 1970s Val Wilmer similarly noted that Ra's music "can range from swing to neo-bop to free collective improvisation, all in a single night." What provoked the accusations of chicanery and/or madness was the "galactic gobbledegook," or what I will call the "Astro Black Mythology," that filtered through the music, alluded to in song titles and lyrics, poems and interviews, and a pervasive influence as well on the design of his record jackets and many aspects of his onstage performances, not least the colorful attire worn by Sun Ra and his band, the Arkestra, which Wilmer has described as deriving from "midway between Africa and the realms of science fiction."

("Astro Black Mythology" is a phrase from Ra's poem/song lyric "Astro Black." In this chapter I use it to refer to what I see as possibly the axis of the Ra cosmology, that is, the creation of an alternative mythic future and mythic past for African Americans. In this context, "Astro Black Mythology" is an appropriate shorthand term for two reasons: it emphasizes Sun Ra's conscious creation of a mythology, and it conveniently encapsulates the two dominant facets of that mythology, the Astro of the outer space future, and the Black of the ancient Egyptian past.)

In an earlier discussion of this Ra mythology, I suggested that it should be looked at as "part of a black historical continuum that reaches back through the blues and slavery to an Egyptian civilization that began 5,000 years ago." My aim in this chapter is to further explore that contention by looking in particular at the two principal components of Ra's Astro Black Mythology: ancient Egypt and outer space. I should stress that I am by no means attempting to explicate Sun Ra's entire philosophy, which would require at least a book to itself. Nevertheless, as I hope will become clear, ancient Egypt and outer space were significant, perhaps core, factors in Sun Ra's mythology, and the fact that he linked them provides us with a key to better understanding what that mythology was about. At the least, I believe I can show that some of the apparently more eccentric and "insane" elements of Sun Ra's works were grounded in a particular cultural context and that a useful way of beginning to make sense of his work is to look more closely at its relationship to certain aspects of African American history.

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Sun Ra's concern with ancient Egypt can be approached by means of both its immediate musical context and the broader African American intellectual context. Norman Weinstein has shown that an interest in Africa, including Egypt, has been a feature of African American music since the early years of the twentieth century, and Frank Kofsky has documented a specific upsurge of African references in the American jazz of the 1950s, a phenomenon he attributes to "the growth of nationalist feelings among black musicians," and one undoubtedly fueled by the number of African nations that achieved independence from European colonial powers during this period. Insofar as Sun Ra was involved in nationalist activities in Chicago in the 1950s, when he also formed the Arkestra, and his composition titles at the time included "Africa," "Nubia," and "Aiethopia" [sic], he can be seen as a participant in the growth of these feelings among African American musicians. And insofar as this interest in Africa affected the actual sound of the music, Sun Ra can be counted among the leading participants. The Arkestra began to use two or three drummers, and Ra encouraged all the band members to play miscellaneous percussion instruments. According to Wilmer: "This emphasis on percussion, combined with chants set up by the musicians, was the first sign of conscious Africanisms to appear in the music since Dizzie [sic] Gillespie's Afro-Cuban period." And Chase, writing with reference to Ra's increasing use of "exotic" Latin dance rhythms in the late 1950s, points to both the direct African element in the composition titles and the more circuitous African influences in the rhythms. "Sun Ra's titles enhanced the association of these rhythms with the exotic, and with Egypt and Africa in particular: 'Tiny Pyramids,' 'Nubia,' 'Africa,' 'Watusa,' 'Ancient Aeithopia' [sic], 'Kingdom of Thunder,' 'Paradise.' The rhythms used were more Caribbean than strictly African,...