Performing the Past to Claim the Future: Sun Ra and the Afro-Future Underground, 1954-1968

Abstract

On the South Side of Chicago in the early 1950s, jazz musician began a lifelong project to re-envision the relationship between music, technology, society, and African American identity. While the popular image of during much of his career was that of an offbeat, creative character at the margins of both mainstream and avant-garde jazz, a significant number of scholars in our time and place now see as a central figure in the era's African American embrace of science and technology. Ra's art, in this view, looked to both the past and future to re-imagine and claim new metaphorical and material spaces for the diaspora. The extraordinary collection gathered together in Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68, curated by John Corbett, Terri Kapsalis, and Anthony Elms, adds many layers to our understanding of and his work. The former exhibition is now a book. As an exhibition and a comprehensive, lavishly illustrated guide (Corbett, Elms, and Kapsalis), Pathways is a lost manuscript that chronicles fourteen years of a largely untold, subcultural history of Chicago's South Side. Pathways leads us through the marked transformation of a musician who began his career under the tutelage of Fletcher Henderson, one of the architects of the big band sound, but who during the 1950s, embarked on an extraordinary project to reinvent African American history and claim the technological future. This transformation is captured through the vast array of artifacts that Pathways gathers from Ra's Chicago years, that seminal period in which the themes that the musician and members of his sprawling band explored throughout their long careers first took shape. For example, a 1956 exhibition photograph of Ra, the mainstream jazzman, sitting stolidly at a piano, quickly gives way to a video of a late-1960s performance, with band members attired in elaborate Egyptian and outer-space costumes. The strongest aspect of this exhibition and guide is an expansive logic of inclusion that allows for revealing juxtapositions. Ephemera such as business cards, receipts, and letterhead sit alongside do-it-yourself (DIY) analog and electronic instruments, all of which document how Ra's artistic practice unfolded across several media and across many social contexts. In this light, the mundane becomes startling (a 1957 flier advertised a benefit dance for a Mayor of Bronzeville candidate with music performed by SUN RA [Sun God of Jazz]), just as the startling also becomes mundane (expense ledgers served as doodle pads for artists drawing album covers that explored themes of outer space and enlightenment). Indeed, the exhibition and guide wonderfully reveal many aspects of the art world that traveled through, and capture him variously as a working musician, outsized performer, Big Band leader, entrepreneur, and inventor. Pathways also makes clear the importance of Ra's collaborators and the city of Chicago to his artistic practice. The Chicago Afro-Futurist Underground included a host of musicians and artists such as Claude Dangerfield, who designed a number of album covers for the band, including many stunning outer-space landscapes that were never used. Meanwhile, long after moved to New York in the early 1960s, Alton Abraham, Ra'S business manager and co-owner of the El Saturn record label--one of the first musician-owned record companies--manufactured the band's albums in Chicago by relying on the city's independent, black-owned businesses (Corbett, Sun Ra 7-8). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Pathways forces us, as the best archival collections do, to reconsider our assumptions about Ra, his art, and his era. How do we explain Ra's founding, in 1951, of Thmei Research, a secret society dedicated to the study of the occult, Egyptology, the Bible, and new technologies? Or and Abraham's plans for a Saturn Records research center devoted to the Bible and outer space? …