Sun Ra performs on stage with the Sun Ra Arkestra at Meervaart in Amsterdam in 1984. Photo: Frans Schelleke
There is arguably only one band in the world that has, throughout more than five decades, touched on the entire musical history of jazz, from ragtime to swing, to hard bop and free jazz and beyond - way beyond, in fact, to outer space. That band is the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra, formed and led by the late Sun Ra and continued today under the direction of original member Marshall Allen, some 53 years after he first joined.
In one of the highlights of this year's Melbourne International Jazz Festival, the Sun Ra Arkestra will play in Australia for the first time.
Sun Ra died - or ascended back to Saturn, from where he proclaimed he hailed - in 1993 but his dedicated band, which has seen dozens of members through the decades, have kept his unique musical vision alive, first under bandleader saxophonist John Gilmore and then, when Gilmore died in 1995, under Allen.
Where most musicians of Allen's vintage swap the touring life for recording, Allen, who turned 87 last week, says the Arkestra these days prefer live gigs.
''I'm still hanging in there,'' Allen says by phone from Philadelphia two days before his birthday, which he celebrated with a gig in New York.
''I'm not playing to show off or for money - I never made much of that - I'm playing for my wellbeing,'' he says, adding that he's excited to finally make it to Australia.
''I met a lot of soldiers from Australia when I was in the war. We used to say we'd go there but it never did pan out that way. It's wonderful we'll be there at last.''
The Arkestra are as famed for their extraordinary, innovative music - pioneering the use of electric bass, electronic keyboards, modal music and free-form improvisation - as much as for Sun Ra's all-encompassing cosmic mysticism.
The original afrofuturist, years before the handle existed, Ra - born Herman Blount, a name he often denied ever having - claimed he was from an ''angel race'' from Saturn. He created his own philosophy mixing black nationalism, Egyptology and science fiction, among other mystical beliefs, claiming space travel and music were tools for ''evolution into a new consciousness and tuning into holy vibrations''...
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