A Pure Solar World

Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism

Paul Youngquist

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781477311189
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito musicale

"Youngquist brings considerable skills to the life and work of the legendary but underappreciated and often misunderstood composer, keyboardist, and poet." — PopMatters Sun Ra said he came from Saturn. Known on earth for his inventive music and extravagant stage shows, he pioneered free-form improvisation in an ensemble setting with the devoted band he called the "Arkestra." Sun Ra took jazz from the inner city to outer space, infusing traditional swing with far-out harmonies, rhythms, and sounds. Described as the father of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra created "space music" as a means of building a better future for American blacks here on earth. In A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism, Paul Youngquist explores and assesses Sun Ra's wide-ranging creative output—music, public preaching, graphic design, film and stage performance, and poetry—and connects his diverse undertakings to the culture and politics of his times, including the space race, the rise of technocracy, the civil rights movement, and even space-age bachelor-pad music. By thoroughly examining the astro-black mythology that Sun Ra espoused, Youngquist masterfully demonstrates that he offered both a holistic response to a planet desperately in need of new visions and vibrations and a new kind of political activism that used popular culture to advance social change. In a nation obsessed with space and confused about race, Sun Ra aimed not just at assimilation for the socially disfranchised but even more at a wholesale transformation of American society and a more creative, egalitarian world. "A welcome invitation to the spaceways." — Jazzwise

1

ALIEN

He came from Saturn. Arrival date: May 22, 1914. Place: the Magic City, Birmingham, Alabama. Terrestrial identity: Herman Poole Blount, the apparent son of Cary and Ida, who had moved to Birmingham from Demopolis, a one-time French utopian community.¹ They started a family, adding a girl and two boys to Cary’s son from an earlier marriage, but their hopes for happiness together flagged, and before long, Cary and Ida separated. Ida and the children moved in with her mother and an aunt. Their house was spacious and only a block from Birmingham’s Terminal Station, the biggest depot in the South, where Ida and her aunt both worked in the adjacent restaurant. With the two of them gone much of the time, the day-to-day task of raising Herman fell to Ida’s mother. He grew up with mothers all around him, or so the women thought. But the boy felt otherwise. “I never called anybody ‘mother,’” he once confessed. “The woman who’s supposed to be my mother I call ‘other momma.’ I never call anybody ‘mother.’ I never called anybody ‘father.’ I never felt that way.”²

The musician and poet who dubbed himself Sun Ra likewise never called planet Earth his home. “I’m not human,” he said. “I’ve never been part of the planet. I’ve been isolated from a child away from it.”³ In the world but not of it: Sonny Blount (as he was known in his early years) lived at a distance from others and the common concerns that ruled their lives—getting and spending, winning and losing, courting and marrying, even living and dying. He would reject his family. He would leave Birmingham. He felt he was not human. He liked to say he belonged to another race altogether, the angel race, which graced him with an awareness of worlds far superior to planet Earth. “It was as if I was somewhere else that imprinted this purity on my mind, another kind of world. That is my music playing the kind of world I know about. It’s like someone else from another planet trying to find out what to do [. . .] a pure solar world.”⁴

Have you ever felt like an alien? Homeless in a deep cosmic sense? How would you live on a strange planet? The answer for Sonny Blount was his music. The words he uses to describe it sound strange, however: “my music playing the kind of world I know about.” His music plays a world, a “pure solar world.” A world beyond this one, better than this one. This book listens to Sonny’s music as it plays that solar world in all its extraterrestrial strangeness, space music that nevertheless arose in response to life on planet Earth in a country called America and a city called Chicago. However alien Sonny may have felt, he composed music peculiarly suited to the hopes and needs of living people, black city people inhabiting an inhospitable white world. He was the original brother from another planet, dedicated to inventing a future for fellow aliens consigned to dark streets and dead-end dreams.⁵

An astonishing body of work testifies to the vitality of his vision and ranks Sonny Blount among the planet’s most important artists: over two hundred recordings, myriad poems, and countless performances, interviews, videos, and visual images.⁶ But he was equally important as a social activist, using his art to awaken a world on the brink of upheaval. His creative development coincided with the restless decades of the fifties and sixties. As the movement for civil rights gave way to black power, as passive resistance crackled into open defiance, Sonny envisioned another way to change society. “Politics, religion, philosophy have all been tried,” he said, “but music has not been given a chance.”⁷ His activism drew its inspiration not from a moral or political imperative but, more simply and beautifully, from sound: music to change the planet, space music heralding other, happier worlds. Making it became the purpose of his sojourn on planet Earth: “I would hate to pass through a planet,” he said, “and not leave it a better place.”⁸ Through numerous compositions and recordings, he labored tirelessly to improve life on planet Earth, challenging listeners everywhere to heed a simple call to joy. He became the prophet of a better tomorrow, and music was his message.

Sonny was fond of telling a story that explains how he acquired this vocation. “These space men contacted me. They wanted me to go to outer space with them. They were looking for somebody who had that type of mind.”⁹ Through a process of “transmolecularization,” he lost his human form and found himself transported to the planet Saturn, where the spacemen, little antennas over each ear, taught him “things” that would save planet Earth: “When it looked like the world was going into complete chaos, when there was no hope for nothing, then I could speak, but not until then. I would speak, and the world would listen.”¹⁰ In this narrative, spacemen abduct Sonny and prepare him to communicate a message of salvation to a doomed planet.

In a curious way, this story retells the whole harrowing history of African slavery. Africans were abductees, after all, and the slave ships of the Middle Passage were the first alien motherships. This account of alien abduction assimilates a three-hundred-year history of subjugation to futuristic images of flying saucers and spacemen. It looks backward and forward. It retrofits a history of terror to the Space Age, transforming both to make the world a better place. Sonny Blount was a brilliant and innovative musician. But he was more than that; he was also a poet, a mythmaker, an activist, and a movie star. In everything he did, he worked to beat chains and manacles into dreams, turn history into myth, and transform cries of terror into sounds of joy. “The outer space beings are my brothers,” he said. “They sent me here. They already know my music.”¹¹ Sonny’s music reaches other worlds. Maybe it takes an alien to change planet Earth.

2

MARIENVILLE

Before migrating to Chicago in his early thirties, Sonny had an experience, among his most formative, that prepared him for life in that segregated city even more completely than growing up in Birmingham had done. By 1941 the United States government was seeking able-bodied men for the war effort, harvesting them like summer wheat. Sonny would not be the only African American musician to fall afoul of the draft (others who did included Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, and, most notoriously, Lester Young), but the pale touch of the Selective Service System would leave an indelible mark on his life and music.

Work in Birmingham was steady for a musician of Sonny’s caliber. Sonny led his own highly acclaimed band, the Sonny Blount Orchestra, playing throughout Alabama and the neighboring territory. As war drained away his most experienced players, he turned to high-school students for replacements, often training them himself. Then his own induction notices came in the mail, first one and then another, addressed to “Herman P. Blount (colored).”¹ He ignored the letters. What use had he for this white man’s war? Clearly it had a use for him: catching bullets or shrapnel on some desolate battlefield. He didn’t have time for mortality. He lacked interest in death and the portentous words like “heroism” and “honor” that made it appealing to so many young men. His life was music.

He had recently happened upon another word—one full of whispers—that promised happier prospects: “pacifism.” Perhaps he was a pacifist. He wanted to find out, and so he attended a meeting of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an organization committed to peace, justice, and nonviolence that had been founded by an English Quaker and a German Lutheran just after the start of World War I. Some years later, it would sponsor the first Freedom Ride across the southern United States. Now it offered support and assistance to men who, as Herman Poole Blount did, found the project of killing other men intolerable.² The people in attendance welcomed him warmly. They understood the prompting of his heart. Address the draft board directly, they said. Take your case downtown in person. Become a conscientious objector.

Sonny arranged an appointment with the draft board. On October 10, 1941, wearing the dark suit he reserved for society bookings, he walked purposefully toward the Brown-Marx Building at First Avenue North and Twentieth Street, with sixteen stories once the tallest building in Birmingham but now just another high-rise. “The heaviest corner on Earth”—that’s what they used to call First and Twentieth. Four skyscrapers in the Chicago style buttressed the sun, their glass-eyed façades crowning steel pylons sunk deep. Looking up from the corner, he felt small, creeped out by all those staring windows. He pushed through the brass-trimmed door and entered a mausoleum-like lobby, all marble, hush, and echo. His shoes double-slapped the shiny floor with every step. A woman stood in a pool of light, her face shrouded by a veil. When he reached the elevator, Sonny touched the “up” button and waited. He felt a low rumble in his gut as the car descended and heard a faint keening four octaves higher. Comforting somehow, the sound of machinery in motion.

The draft board—three white men in dark suits—awaited his arrival in a small room on the fourth floor. Sonny entered, introduced himself, and took a seat at the polished oak table. They asked if he had received his induction papers. He admitted he had. They asked why he had not responded. He said he could not believe the papers could possibly refer to him. And why not? Because he was twenty-eight and the papers listed him as twenty-five. One member of the board noted that they did not grant exceptions to military service for clerical errors. Sonny informed them that he was the main source of income and support for his seventy-five-year-old great-aunt. Another member remarked that many men with responsibilities had left home and family to fight Nazi Germany. Sonny replied with a list of personal qualities that, to his mind, rendered him ineligible for military service. He was not like other men. He suffered a debilitating physical complaint (a congenital hernia resulting from a maldeveloped testicle). He opposed violence, especially killing, and while not a member of any particular congregation, he was enough of a Christian to know that murder is a spiritual crime. The draft board said they had no further questions and thanked him for his testimony.

To Sonny’s surprise and momentary relief, he was later informed that the board had granted him a 4-E classification as a conscientious objector opposed to military service of all kinds, on or off the battlefield.³ But Selective Service Regulations section 652.11 required a person so designated to be issued an Order to Report for Work: “It shall be his duty to comply therewith, to report to the camp at the time and place designated therein, and thereafter to perform work of national importance under civilian direction for the period, at the place, and in the manner provided by law.”⁴ Sonny’s readiness to comply appears clearly on the questionnaire he completed for the National Service Board for Religious Objectors (NSBRO), where he listed his skills as writing poetry, playing piano, and composing music.⁵ The only options available to conscientious objectors with a 4-E classification, however, were prison or a more benign confinement at the inmate’s expense in one of the Civilian Public Service camps, which were run by a consortium of pacifist churches. That both were anathema to Sonny Blount appears clearly on the questionnaire:

Music to me is the only worthwhile thing in the world, and [. . .] I am sure no one could begrudge me this one happiness. [. . .] To separate me from music would be more cruel than standing me by a wall and shooting me. I think I would prefer the latter. I hope you can understand why I am so staunchly against being in any kind of camp where one must live according to certain rules and regulations and requirements.⁶

For Sonny, life was not possible without music. Confinement would mean spiritual death.

The NSBRO remanded Sonny to Civilian Public Service Camp 48, in Marienville, Pennsylvania, ordering him to appear there on December 8. He didn’t. Technically in contempt of Selective Service regulations, Sonny went about his daily business, playing his piano and rehearsing his band. Authorities apprehended him at home, took him into custody, and confined him to a space in an old post office reserved, in John Szwed’s words, “for malingerers and subversives.”⁷ A formal hearing of his case could not be scheduled until after Christmas.

When Sonny appeared before the judge, he brought his Bible, prepared to counter legal precept with a higher authority.⁸

“This is a court of law, son, not a Sunday School. Your Bible doesn’t get the last word here. You may be a conscientious objector, but you broke the law when you didn’t report for national service.”

“The first thing that happens when a man is brought before a court of law, your Honor, is he swears on the Bible to tell the whole truth.”

“That may indeed be so. And I expect you to tell the truth. Here you will abide by the rule of law.”

“‘He who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law,’ your Honor. That’s Romans 13. I’m a pacifist. I love my neighbor. How can I do that and kill him at the same time? Fighting in this war would make me a criminal. By the law of Jesus Christ.”

“I know my Bible too, boy. Here’s your loving Jesus: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ Matthew 10:34. And do you know why? Because men are evil and bloody minded. Isaiah 26:21, ‘For behold, the Lord is coming forth out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, and the earth will disclose the blood shed upon her.’ Do you not believe these Nazis are men of iniquity?”

“It is not for me to judge human beings, your Honor. Vengeance is not my business or any man’s. It belongs to the Lord, you see. Isaiah also says that the Lord shall judge between nations, that ‘nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’ Why does the United States lift its sword against Germany and Japan?”

“I’ll tell you why. Because of what Exodus 21:33 says, is why: ‘If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’”

The judge leaned forward in his chair, the collar of his black robe cinching the skin around his bull n...