Friday jazz profile: Embracing chaos with Sun Ra

 In many of these whatever-the-hell-these-are posts, I have provided snippets of jazz in a "here, you can handle this" manner.  Not feelin' it today.  Embrace the chaos.  Sun Ra.  Sun Ra was a madman, probably literally.  He claimed to be an alien, dressed in Egyptian garb, and led a jazz orchestra (the Arkestra) through wild music that challenged even those with open minds.  He was actually a skilled piano player, capable of straight jazz, blues, and anything else, but he was a restless artist, and this was the result.

"Space Is The Place."  This is among his more famous works.  Wild horns, singing and chanting, music spinning out into... well, outer space.  Dizzy Gillespie was famously booted from Cab Calloway's swing band because his deviations from the narrow confines of swing soloing and stage shenanigans were too much for Calloway.  Today, Calloway is mostly remembered for his cameo in The Blues Brothers, and Diz is... well, Diz.  He's the man, man.  Truth be told, I kinda prefer Dizzy to Bird by a very narrow margin.  Heresy?  Maybe, but that's my preference.  Sun Ra was so far out there that he is to Dizzy as Dizzy was to Cab.

So how does one listen to such chaos?  One bar at a time, for all practical purposes.  Each chant works as a moment in itself.  Each bar works as its own snippet.  The extent to which one bar relates to a passage ten bars prior... maybe.

So there's the old story about the naked emperor, and when the emperor wears faux-Egyptian Space Pharoah garb, is he just a fraud?  Does one note connect to the previous note?  Usually.  However, if you are looking for a coherent structure for the entire piece, you are misunderstanding it.  You are listening for connections within the chaos, while accepting the chaos.

Sometimes, that's what we see in the world.

Sun Ra.