In September this year, trumpet player and former Sun Ra Arkestra member Ahmed Abdullah gave a talk at Sankofa Café in DC. It featured him reading from his recently published book, A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra, and adding occasional snippets of live horn playing to emphasize his words. At one point, he reminded the few of us lucky enough to be in attendance that Sun Ra “made music for the 21st century”.
The number of reissues and releases from 2024 alone is ample defense for his claim. There’s a collection of his Disney-derived material, Pink Elephants on Parade; the expanded reissue of 1967’s Strange Strings; the unearthed solo pipe organ recording from 1984, Excelsior Mill; the barely available collection of outtakes, Kingdom of Discipline; the newly discovered 1976-1977-era live recordings from Chicago’s Showcase.
Not to mention Lights on a Satellite, an album of new recordings by the Arkestra featuring the leadership and alto sax playing of Marshall Allen, who joined Sun Ra in 1958 and just celebrated his 100th birthday this year. Not bad for an institution whose original composer, bandleader, keyboardist, and pioneer Afro-futurist left the planet just over 30 years ago. Considering how near-impossible it used to be to find any of Sun Ra’s 100-odd titles, it’s a joy to be able to swim in the endless Arkestra tributaries available to us now.
All of which brings us to yet another release, also called Lights on a Satellite, the bulk of this one recorded live at Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom in July of 1978, a period where the Arkestra’s furthest explorations in omniversal sonic overload were tempered by early 20th-century big band standards and Sun Ra’s intermittent forays into strip-joint boogie-woogie piano. Like the Chicago Showcase material, this one was produced by jazz archaeologist and co-president of Resonance Records Zev Feldman.
Due to the bulging-at-the-seams amount of live Sun Ra now available from this period, much of what’s here can be found in one form or another elsewhere. Standards the Arkestra dug into at the time, such as the Half Nelson/Lady Bird medley or Fletcher Henderson classics “Yeah Man” and “Big John’s Special”, turn up on any number of other live Sun Ra releases. As do the piano and percussion workout “Watusi” or the familiar end-of-gig space chants full of audience participation, here represented by “We Travel the Spaceways”, a tune in Ra’s book since his 1950s Chicago days. There is yet another solo piano rendition of Sun Ra favorite “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.
So, yes, Sun Ra freaks have wallowed in this stuff before. None of which makes what’s here anything less than crucial, especially considering this is the audio Maryland-based, then-upstart filmmaker Robert Mugge recorded as part of the project that would become the film A Joyful Noise. Released in 1980 and long available on VHS and DVD, this was, for years, one of the only ways to get a candid glimpse of the man and his band. Featuring interviews with Arkestra members, a rooftop performance of some 50 or more players, and Ra’s own interplanetary philosophical musings, it also contains concert footage, some of it from the Baltimore gig featured here.
This release also comes with a booklet featuring Feldman-conducted interviews with Marshall Allen, Gary Bartz, and Arkestra drummer Michael D. Anderson; Mugge tells the story of how this project happened in the first place as well.
However, the music, no matter how many versions of this stuff are currently available, makes this release transcendent. After an opening procession of percussion, Sun Ra coaxes some interplanetary signals from his synthesizer before Saturnian goddess June Tyson moves to center stage with “Tapestry from an Asteroid”, a song that has only the most tenuous connection to the instrumental ballad of the same name, which the Arkestra recorded several times in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Tyson gives way to trombone jabs and uppercuts from Craig Harris and a typical outre alto sax explosion from Allen, who is joined at one point by long-term Arkestra member and tenor sax giant John Gilmore before Ra once again claims the space with echoing pings and whooshes from the synth. We’re already 17 minutes in before performances find shape in the residue of the formlessness.
Allen’s sax on the standard “Cocktails for Two” is of special note. Sun Ra teases the melody for nearly two minutes on the piano before he emerges, at first honing decently close to the tune before firing off a series of squawks and then landing once again in the song’s more earthy structure. It’s almost hilarious. Furthermore, it shows anyone only aware of Allen’s more “outside” playing that, like Sun Ra, he was steeped in the music’s tradition. But then, it was never Ra’s intention to stay still.
Any decision he made to start playing standards in the 1970s came only after he had already cleared a daring, deliberate, uncompromising path toward the future. This meant standards, which often as not became launching pads to an “unknown there”, were nestled in among 20 years’ worth of original material and sections of controlled chaos. This relentless determination in the face of indifference and poverty makes celebratory gigs like this one hard-won and vital now.