Taking the reins of a jazz band numbering over a dozen musicians is challenging enough. But Marshall Allen faced a unique obstacle after eventually replacing the deceased Sun Ra as director of his eponymous Arkestra.
“The whole band left the planet,” Allen said.
This is just another aspect of the Sun Ra mythology, as told by an Alabama musician born Herman Poole Blount, legally named Le Sony’r Ra and commonly regarded as one of the most influential jazz composers ever.
It isn’t the unique backstory that will be on display, however, when the Arkestra comes to Page Auditorium this Saturday, featured on a double bill with the Mingus Big Band. It’s the revolutionary avant-garde take on American music that will come center stage. This abrasive and exotically futuristic wielding of the big band format has exerted an inestimable influence on Ra’s contemporaries and disciples.
The last five decades have seen the Arkestra work in the midst of an aggressively evolving musical landscape, but Allen is able to offer a concise evaluation of what’s different for the group since he joined 51 years ago.
“It’s changed because Sun Ra’s not here,” he said.
The founder’s presence is still a tangible and vital aspect of the group despite his death—or his “ascension,” in band lore—in 1993. Shows involve a substantial amount of his compositions, and the theatrical tradition of performing in colorful costumes is one he originated.
“We like to tell a story, different ages of music, you know,” Allen said. “Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, ‘Count’ Basie, we play some of those things, old stomps and things. We play modern arrangements, we play Sun Ra originals and I play my originals too. And then we play avant-garde and all the rest—mix it all up.”
The Arkestra has always been cognizant of the artistic atmosphere it existed within, and the group hasn’t lost this awareness in its current stage. Along with the Mingus Big Band, the two outfits are able to use their legacies and abundant technical skills to articulate a past, present and future of music.
“You’ll have these two different musical languages, both existing within jazz, both related to the roots of a sound, but also then both pushing boldly forward,” said Aaron Greenwald, director of Duke Performances. “My thought would be as they push forward and reference the past, you’ll see a bunch of places where they overlap.”
The Arkestra’s performances are in accordance with this dedication to something beyond; they encompass a visual aesthetic that allows the instrumentalists’ wardrobes and the use of color to alter the aural experience.
This link to visual art makes even more sense when seen in the light of the paintings, costumes and similar artifacts Sun Ra left behind, all currently on display at CCB Gallery downtown.
“There’s this synergy with the exhibition of the Durham Arts Guild, which is really a pretty massive exhibition, pretty critically acclaimed and a real coup for the Arts Guild to get,” Greenwald said. “So, it seemed like there was going to be a campus-wide, if not community-wide, conversation around Sun Ra and the Arkestra that we wanted to participate in…. [The exhibition] gives you the visual angle on the Sun Ra universe.”
But despite the intricate layering of music, mythology and visual and performance art, the serially inflected jazz of the band still astounds in its own right. And it speaks wonders to the sheer competence of Sun Ra and his successors that they managed to convey his unique vision and maintain such an unwieldy apparatus as a big band for so many years.
“Both Sun Ra and Charles Mingus are ideal examples of folks who have created new, bold music and, in Sun Ra’s case, a bold mythology that centers on a certain modernism,” Greenwald said. “There’s a newness to what they’re creating, a sense of imagining what the future of jazz or African-American music in general sounds like.”
The community is certainly recognizing the Arkestra’s importance, but for Allen, the band’s mission can be stated far more simply.
“We come down there to play.”
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