Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia, is your average small neighborhood in the north-eastern US. Some blocks boast palatial mansions, others contain boarded-up tenements. Then there are the “row houses” connected in a continuous line. They can be difficult to tell apart, but one has a very particular history.
5626 Morton Street is where Sun Ra lived from the late 1960s until his death in 1993. It’s also the place several members of his astonishing jazz ensemble, the Arkestra, still call home. The living room is the Arkestra’s main rehearsal space and a veritable shrine that honours its trailblazing leader – one of the most adventurous and open-minded musicians of the 20th century. The room is almost as eclectic as Ra was in life: a cornucopia of intergalactic sculptures, celestial regalia, portraits and paintings, plaques of honorary citizenship in Atlanta and New Orleans, a working upright bass with deep lacerations, even a hi-hat that has completely rusted.
“My father said: ‘I got a house for you and you can move the band down here,’” says Marshall Allen when I meet him at the house in November. The 99-year-old has been an Arkestra member since 1957 and the group’s leader for nearly 30 years. He has now retired from international touring, however, and the Arkestra is considering how to approach its next phase.
The house’s previous owner “was a man who drove trucks, 16-wheelers. He had all these big tyres upstairs,” Allen recalls, laughing. “I threw them out in the back.” Since Allen already had a home in Germantown, he turned down his father with one proviso. “I told my father to sell it to Sun Ra, and he sold it to him for a dollar,” says Allen. “All the band members had a room, with a space down here for rehearsal. We don’t do much rehearsing now because we’re trying to fix the house.”
Arts foundations have funded work on major structural issues, and several Arkestra members have provided repairs. “Sun Ra couldn’t move out of here because he was sick, so we put in a new toilet back there,” Allen says while pointing to the back of the house. “Our drummer was the plumber.”
From peeling paint to chipped brickwork, the house’s deterioration sadly undermines its significance (though there are plans to designate it a historical landmark). But as you sit in the rehearsal space, it is difficult not to feel the energy shift, a powerful omnipresence from all the Arkestra members – past and present – who performed in that room, especially Ra himself: someone who revelled in the avant garde and reimagined the possibilities in experimental music, while reaffirming Black pride in the here and now.
“Ra said that he was sent here from outer space,” says Vincent Chancey, a French horn player for the Arkestra since 1976. “He said he had an encounter on a spaceship where aliens told him that he was responsible for saving the Black race.” Ra’s cosmic mindset pre-empted that of other groups, such as Parliament-Funkadelic. There were worldly reasons why he wanted to transcend earthly bonds and bring deliverance for Black America: he, Allen and another Arkestra leader, John Gilmore, all hailed from the segregated US south.
Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914. A prodigy of the piano, he was composing music by the time he was in grade school, and saw the likes of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson (the latter of whom he composed and arranged for) when they reached Birmingham on tour. He was awarded a scholarship to attend Alabama A&M University, majoring in music education, but dropped out after one year.
It was around that time Ra would have his extraterrestrial encounter, and when he arrived in Chicago, he closely studied science fiction and reinterpretations of spiritual scriptures, coupled with a heightened awareness of the Black American struggle and his people’s ancient Egyptian connections. Informed by his early exposure to the giants of big bands and jazz, Ra began mapping the framework for “Astro-Black mythology”, merging ancient history with an interplanetary exodus that would lead to a futuristic Black utopia.
Allen, meanwhile, was a native of Louisville, Kentucky, who settled in Philadelphia with his father. At 18, he enlisted in the military and played alto saxophone and clarinet as a member of the 17th Division Special Service Band, part of the Army’s 92nd infantry division, widely known as the Buffalo Soldiers – Allen is one of the only surviving members of the renowned Black Cavalry.
While in Europe, Allen performed alongside artists such as Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas, Art Simmons and James Moody. “Even some of Duke [Ellington]’s band – everybody was there.” He was honourably discharged in 1949 and instead of returning to the US, he opted to go to France and enrol at the Paris Conservatory, studying clarinet.
When Allen returned to the US in 1951, after almost a decade away, he settled in Chicago, where his mother lived. “I stayed there for a couple of years, jamming and playing with anybody that would hire me. One day, I went to the record store – Joe Segal had a record shop, and he sold me a demo of Sun Ra. What was it?” Allen turns and asks longtime Arkestra saxophonist Knoel Scott. “It’s that swing tune.” Scott begins scatting the melody, hoping it might jog his memory. “Whatever it was,” Allen continues. “Anyway, I said: ‘Man, that band sounds good. [Joe] said: ‘Oh man, he rehearses up there every night, and he’s always looking for talent.’”
Allen took his drummer along with him to meet Ra. “We went up to the boiler room where Sun Ra was rehearsing. He was talking about outer space. I was saying: ‘What kind of band is this? I want to be in this band!’”
Adding flute to his arsenal, Allen began touring and performing with the Arkestra across Chicago, Milwaukee, and Montreal. “We were coming back home and said: ‘Let’s stop in New York and see our friends that used to be in the band.’ We stopped there, and a taxicab hit our car,” says Allen. “Now we’re stranded in New York with no car, no transportation to get home. And no money.” Each member had to live on 25 cents a day. “It was like: ‘You buy that, and I buy this, and we put it together and eat.’” In part, these experiences are what Allen says made the Arkestra like a family.
“It’s such a storied band,” says George Burton, who first played viola and violin with the Arkestra in 2012, then piano a year later. “What I realised about this particular band – maybe about most bands – is there’s this camaraderie. They are on the road so much that they’re like brothers. It takes place on the stage, too. They take all that emotion on the stage, so the music is ever-changing. In most bands, you get the music; the composer tells you exactly what they want and how they want it. In this band, it’s always constantly creating. There’s no set plan of how this is going to happen.”
While the music of Sun Ra has often been described as open and free, both Allen and Scott will tell you that it is, in fact, quite the opposite. “Sun Ra hated the word ‘freedom’,” says Scott. “He believed in discipline and precision; he worked everything out by using equations. People thought that they were playing freedom and it was [really] scientific.”
Allen gradually adapted to Sun Ra’s tenets. “It took quite a few years to see what he was talking about, so that’s how I learned – the hard way, and work, work, work. A man cannot learn without discipline. All he needed was your time.
“He’d say: ‘You’ve got a nice sound when you play, but something is missing.’ The other part was the spirit. That’s what he was working on. Not that I couldn’t play or I didn’t have a sound – I couldn’t play his music.” When Allen did eventually grasp the music’s spirit, “it wasn’t just playing the notes, but the way you played it. That was from here,” Allen says, lightly tapping his chest. “From the heart.”
Ra’s composition style was unpredictable. After Allen worked all week on a new part he’d been handed, he realised that “Ra can change it, give it to somebody else, and give you a whole new part. It wasn’t easy. He would say: ‘I don’t want you to know anything. If you know something, it hinders you.’”
Following Sun Ra’s death in 1993, the writer Mark Dery coined the term Afrofuturism. Defined for many by Ra’s cosmic vision and since used to describe everything from Grace Jones to Octavia Butler, Afrofuturism imagines a totally different space-time for Black Americans, away from their fractured past, elusive present and uncertain future.
“I still have a tough time [defining] that,” says Tara Middleton, vocalist and violinist in the Arkestra since 2012. “Sun Ra’s Afrofuturistic vision is deeply rooted in cosmic philosophy. It imagines the future of Black people as free from these social and political limitations imposed by all these historical narratives. His music conveys that cosmic consciousness, urging people to explore the boundless possibilities of existence, but it also incorporates elements of African mythology and symbolism.”
Middleton is now the sole female member of the Arkestra, a precedent set by the singer June Tyson. Already a fixture in Harlem’s arts scene, Tyson’s voice was a compass that emboldened a new generation of listeners to venture into Sun Ra’s cosmos.
“June Tyson, for me, is kind of an apostle,” says the violist Melanie Dyer, founder of WeFreeStrings, who performed with the Arkestra for a spell beginning in 2017. “I think of her as a person who lived the spirit and the gospel according to Sun Ra. Her voice is very colourful and present, and she believes in the message she’s delivering. The band held a power greater than the sum of its parts and she was there to help generate that power.”
In 2007, The University of Chicago Library acquired an extensive collection of Sun Ra’s recordings, manuscripts, photographs and other ephemera, while another archive is kept at Emory University. The group nabbed its first Grammy nomination in 2021, in the best large jazz ensemble category, for their album Swirling. But the Arkestra’s legacy remains chiefly in its members and the music, which is almost impossible to fully take stock of. “I have garbage bags full of Sun Ra’s music,” says Allen. “He has so much music you could spend the next 20 years sorting through it all. He wrote the music like you’ll write a letter!”
According to Middleton, any decisions about the band’s future leadership will be made by the Arkestra’s senior members. “The passing on of the reins is just this very delicate dance between legacy and then exploring, and also extending, the band,” she says. “Newer members are now gracing the stage and thinking of the orchestra more like a living entity.”
With his 100th birthday approaching in May, Marshall Allen credits Sun Ra for him living this long, repeating his leader’s mantra: “Discipline – you can’t accomplish nothing without it.” His international touring may be over, but his music isn’t: “I can stay put now and do my work.” So does Allen have any plans to mark his birthday itself? “To stay alive, by hook or crook!”
• Knoel Scott’s album Celestial, featuring Marshall Allen, is out now on Night Dreamer
