Sun Ra and Henry Dumas - The Ark and the Ankh (rec. 1966)

Writer Henry Dumas and Sun Ra forged a close bond in the mid-1960s when they were residing in New York. This collaborative effort centers on commentary by Sun Ra on a number of social, political and historical issues.

Fascinating, lyrical, poetic and dramatic, the outlooks and opinions of Sun Ra remain timely and urgent. The meeting of the educator and the writer yielded an important project that allows the rays from the genius of Sun Ra to glow upon those who listen to the lectures. 

Amazon review

 

Henry Dumas - The Metagenesis of Sunra
(click below to read the story.  Watch it full screen!)

Sun Ra Research Booklet and a Poem

No music today, but I hope you enjoy this small book from Sun Ra Research.

Download Booklet

Also, Google dropped this poem in my lap recently.  You can find the original post HERE.

CHARLIE CLARK

Listening to Sun Ra, Birds Convene Outside My Window

A friend of mine likes to chide me
for what he calls my bourgeois proclivity
to listen only to music played in time.
So each time this afternoon I’ve put on
volume one of The Heliocentric Worlds
by Sun Ra, I’ve thought of that friend,
and wondered whether he would let this
qualify as sufficiently experimental,
though it isn’t the full recorded chaos
he often argues is the only moral
kind of music left. A silly pretense
of his, but one I can’t help sometimes
measuring myself against. And, I admit,
though there are stretches of incoherence
on this record that try my patience,
I can usually find a definite plotting,
particularly the sections where the bass
begins a walking line the other instruments
organize themselves around; making what
Sun Ra, in his own way chiding one critic’s
attempt to classify his compositions
as free jazz, more accurately dubbed
“phre” jazz: the ph signifying the definite
article, and though I don’t know how
in English to make that claim cohere,
it’s an assertion I’ll grant Sun Ra
not just because he may have meant
the definite article of some form of speech
not yet part of human understanding,
but also because it imbues everything
in his songs with purpose. There in the word,
Ra said, indicates the sun, so that his music
is the music of the sun. And really,
though I don’t hear on this record
the enveloping whiteout of sound
I think of when I try to imagine the music
of the sun, I appreciate his gesture
at something so large. And, in the most
chaotic moments, where I hear him
fumbling with the meter, when Sun Ra
lets out a too-quick flurry of notes and the band
behind him lets the song dissolve into
something like the noise of two dozen
pinched balloons deflating as they streak
across a room, I hear in it their collective
enthusiasm, all of them overeager to enjoy
at once all the notes in the song, which
validates the notion of this music as
a perpetual celebration of motion and being.
Perhaps that’s the thing that’s got
these two mottle-headed blackbirds
returning to my windowsill each time
I put the record on. Now, because I’ve made
my friend’s voice into one of the many critics
always running through my head, and so
clearly hear his claim to distrust something
as cogent as the pleasure one might take
from listening to arranged sound, I think how,
seeing this scene, my friend would say
that these two birds can’t be lingering here
to enjoy the songs with me; he’d claim how
they sometimes caw and flap around is proof
of agitation, their dancing a defense,
a sign they fear the source of such adamant,
inscrutable music, and he’d say that if there’s
a lesson to take from the nature these two birds
exemplify, it’s in the way they distrust art
like it’s some classic predatory foe. Granted,
I’ve stacked my lines against him; granted,
I’ve heard him sing “Daisy, Daisy, give me
your answer, do” to his daughter in perfect
tender pitch, and though when singing it
he did disrupt the tune’s rhythm, it wasn’t
to deconstruct the body of the song,
but so he and his girl could exchange
a bit of laughter. But I’d like to think
he would agree with how I’ve drawn him,
that this is an accurate description of how
he prefers to think about music, diminishing
the notion that art can provide joy,
calling me either wrong or naive
when I disagree. I can see him citing the way
I’ve made a prop of him here as proof
that coherence is all a false elaboration.
So what can I say to such a claim, other than
to admit I know no more than he does
how birds experience joy, and that
my pleasure in this scene comes as much
from listening to Sun Ra dismantling a melody
as it does from the wonder of these birds
returning to hop and sputter along my sill,
whether they gather here by chance, delight,
or to try to call the song to order.  

Sun Ra in Egypt (article from The Revivalist)

Sun Ra in Egypt

The story of Sun Ra in Egypt begins with the journeys of three men from three geographical origins and three disparate cultures. Their first unification in Egypt in 1971 carries a level of mystery four decades later that still holds significance in the world history and power of jazz music’s transnational exchange. Very little has been documented about it, but it demonstrates a synthesis of ideas years before its time, a self-fulfilling prophesy of Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism movement, which married Afrocentrism with science fiction and ancient spirituality.

The mysticism and obscurity of Sun Ra has reemerged over the years with increasing intrigue. Ra was always eccentric and his creative and political development was eons ahead of his contemporaries. He developed his own unique world philosophies, yet vehemently defended that he was a creator of equations rather than a philosopher of amorphous theories. His distinction was that equations were exact and precise, whereas theories lacked certitude. He was also the ultimate springboard for the merging of space-age mysticism in American fringe music. His equations stemmed from astronomy, numerology, Egyptology, Freemasonry, Black Nationalism, and various other spiritual belief systems that were beyond obscure at the time, and many of which were derived from ancient Egypt. Ra’s deep passion for the history of Egypt was demonstrated in his excavation of Egypt as the root of modern civilization asserting that much of the Grecian influences from the great philosophical thinkers to their artistic achievements were derived and stolen from black Egyptians. His journey would not be complete before reaching the source itself—Egypt.

(continue reading - lots of interesting info at The Revivalist)

 Thanks to Charles Blass of Saturn for bringing this article to my attention.

And by way of example:

Sun Ra and his Astro Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra
Live in Egypt 1
Dark Myth Equation Visitation
Nature's God
Saturn 1272 Thoth Intergalactic KH-1272 (1972)

Another Shade of Blue - Sun Ra on Record

It's Library Day at Adventure-Equation!

I hope you enjoy this short (20 pg) booklet by Sun Ra scholar, Chris Trent.  Written before his involvement with 'The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra 2nd edition,' it gives brief descriptions of several of Sun Ra's albums.  What I have for you is a collection of jpeg scans of the complete booklet.

New pdf links

RS

HF

Another Shade of Blue (jpeg)
(alternate d/l) pdf 

[ Thanks to I-) for the pdf ]

Previous Library Posts at Adventure-Equation:

1970 Souvenir Programme

Sanford & Sun

Heliocentric ExtRAs

Harvey Pekar on Sun Ra

Harvey Pekar & Sun Ra

 

(click to enlarge)

"american splendor" issue no. 4 (1979)

Pekar retold the story in 1994. The single page appeared originally in the
Village Voice, May 24, 1994, p. 55
Thank you, I-)

In addition to the comic above, in 1975 Pekar wrote an essay introducing Ra and his music.  The article was published in Coda 12, issue 139, no. 7 (June-July 1975) and reprinted as a small book in 2002.  It was simply titled
Sun Ra by Harvey Pekar (pdf)

Below is an interesting/informative article about Pekar from Sabotage Times

The joyfully downbeat stories of everyday life penned by Cleveland, Ohio native Harvey Pekar, who died in July 2010, elevated comic books from pulp to literary fiction. Pekar portrayed himself as a world-weary curmudgeon but when I met him in 2003 he was much more than that...

'Cheer up Harv, the nurse is ready for you...'

Slumped into an easy chair in the lobby of a London hotel, Harvey Pekar looked plum tuckered. He had just travelled down from the Edinburgh festival as part of a whirlwind promotional tour for American Splendor , a film adaptation of his long-running comic book of the same name. The film doubled as affectionate portrait of his life (as filtered through comics) that artfully blends documentary with fictionalised re-enactments of his stories.

Pekar was a far more unassuming figure in person than his comic book id would suggest: a tightly-wired ape of a man with an intense glare, a thinning pate of mussed-up hair and crumpled attire. Dressed in denim workpants and a shapeless white t-shirt emblazoned with a poster for the movie Comic Book Confidential, his real-life avatar seemed similarly unconcerned by appearances. Contrary to his brusque persona on the page, Pekar’s Cleveland brogue rarely raised itself above a hoarse whisper. Joyce Brabner, Pekar’s wife, constant companion and biggest fan, sat curled up on the couch next to him like a house cat. Their relationship seemed to be one of mutual support and irritation. When Brabner figured her husband wasn’t promoting himself to the best of his ability, she would cut him off mid-flow, at which Pekar rolled his eyes in exasperation and sank deeper into his chair.

Pekar was almost single-handedly responsible for transforming comic books into an adult medium. Not ‘adult’ as in the sex-obsessed playground fantasies of ‘60s underground comics, but ‘adult’ as in a literate, thinking feeling art. Pekar wrote comics for grown-ups, largely about himself: a belligerent jew and blue collar intellectual with a fervent interest in politics, literature and music.

It all started for him in 1962, when he was introduced to underground comics icon Robert Crumb through a mutual friend. They immediately bonded over a shared enthusiasm for rare and obscure jazz sides. Crumb, then a 19 year-old illustrator of cards for the American Greetings Corporation whose family had just moved to Cleveland, showed Pekar some illustrations for a project he was working on, a graphic novel called the Big Yum Yum Book that reworked Jack & The Beanstalk into a fairy tale about a yearning adolescent sexuality (Crumb was still a virgin at the time). The young artist’s work made a huge impression on Pekar and got him interested in the potential of comic books as a literary medium. Although a fervent collector comics in his youth, he had since disregarded them as a childish infatuation. “But Crumb got me thinking about doing autobiographical comics of my own,” Pekar explained, “based on mundane occurrences which, I thought, when added up could have a major impact on a person’s life.”

Pekar was a far more unassuming figure in person than his comic book id would suggest: a tightly-wired ape of a man with an intense glare, a thinning pate of mussed-up hair and crumpled attire.

Taken individually, Pekar’s stories can seem rather unremarkable. But, seen as a whole, ‘American Splendour’ provides an extraordinarily rich description of the anxieties, trials and tribulations of adult life. Typically, nothing much happens in a Harvey Pekar story. There are wry character studies of friends, neighbours, colleagues and former girlfriends (like the vengeful ‘Ripoff Chick’), observational asides told with a dry humour (the self-explanatory ‘Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies In Supermarket Lines’). However there are rarely any punchlines to these conversational anecdotes; many are based on routines he first ran by friends and acquaintances as a street corner raconteur.

“I would just work up these riffs, When we were hanging around the corner,” he recalled. “And I would get such a kick out of making other people laugh that I would practically memorise these things, tell a story to five guys then run around and tell it to five other guys who hadn’t heard it yet.”

Pekar titled his comic book with the same kind of understated irony that pervades his stories, mashing a reference to the ‘All American’ superhero comics of his youth with a nod to one of his favourite movies, Splendor In The Grass.

“I figured people wouldn’t really see my life as very splendid at all,” he deadpanned. “When I started I didn’t even figure anybody would want to publish my work. So what I decided to do was quit spending my extra cash on collecting records, save it up and use it to publish a comic book. I didn’t expect to make money off it for years, if at all.”

The first person he showed his stories to was Crumb, presenting them on pages of foolscap divided into panels and crowded out with crudely-drawn stick figures, hand-scrawled dialogue and instructions to the artist:

“Crumb liked them and asked if he could take them home and illustrate them. He had never illustrated anybody else’s work before and he never did again after that. So that made me look pretty good, getting an endorsement from Crumb like that; it gave me instant recognition.”

He published annual editions of American Splendor from 1976 on, apart from the period following a diagnois of cancer in 1990. During his treatment and recovery, Pekar and Brabner (and artist Frank Stack) collaborated on Our Cancer Year, a graphic novel about their personal ordeals set against the backdrop of a country readying itself for war in the Gulf. The book won several national book awards but the critical lauds never translated into commercial success. Even a rash of appearances on the David Letterman Show in the 1980s, as an irascible comic foil to the host (that turned Pekar into an unwilling national celebrity) had failed to stimulate sales. But Pekar persevered, self-publishing his project up until his illness, at which time he passed the reins over to an established comic book publisher.

The milieu in which Pekar wrote his stories had a tremendous impact on his writing: born, raised, and a lifelong resident of Cleveland, Ohio, a bleak urban environment in heart of America’s Rust Belt

American Splendor presented some fundamental problems for traditional comic book readers. Up until that point, comic books were a medium largely-concerned with escapism, Pekar grounded them firmly in reality: his reality as a working stiff employed as a file clerk in a veteran’s hospital, in the rust belt city of Cleveland, Ohio. It was exactly the kind of environment that would inspire dreams , but escape wasn’t an option. Pekar was stuck there and he made sure to remind his readers that they were stuck there with him. There wasn’t any plot to speak of in his stories and the drama, where it occurred, was largely internal. But then, as Pekar explained, the antecedents for American Splendor didn’t come from comic books at all but from stand-up comedy and literature.

Pekar considered himself to be something of a literary scholar, with a particular interest in a seam of 20th century socialist Jewish-American literature (specifically that of Henry Roth and Daniel Fuchs) that was also connected to the work of naturalist writers like Balzac and Zola. But he cited his most formative literary influence as James Joyce.

As the character that populated his writing, Pekar played up his kinship with the protagonist of Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom: the flaneur, or street-walking poet, who is an observer of the scenes and manners of city life. (Literary critic Walter Benjamin pegged the rude poetry of Baudelaire as the prototype for the flaneur, whose reckless dedication to his art provided personal fulfillment beyond the need for traditional notions of success.)

Pekar is also related to Leopold Bloom by heritage. Bloom’s father is identified in the text as a Hungarian Jew and Ulysses has been read as an allegorical novel about the emergence of Ashkenazic Jewry from Eastern Europe. Pekar’s father was an orthodox Talmudic scholar who habitually played selections from his collection of Jewish cantorial records every night before going to bed; his mother was a staunch communist who sent her nine-year old son out to canvas for Henry Wallace’s ill-fated 1948 presidential campaign. Together, they ran a Mom & Pop grocery story in Cleveland, Ohio.

The milieu in which Pekar wrote his stories had a tremendous impact on his writing: born, raised, and a lifelong resident of Cleveland, Ohio, a bleak urban environment in heart of America’s Rust Belt that seemed to be suffering from terminal depression through loss of heavy industry post-WWII. Cleveland is to Pekar’s American Splendor what Dublin is to Joyce’s Ulysses.

Pekar also owes elements of his literary style to Joyce, who cited a turn of the century French art critic called Eduoard Dujardin as inspiration for his use of the ‘internal monologue’ in Ulysses. Dujardin’s novel Les Lauriers Sont Coupés (translated into English as We’ll To The Woods No More) is usually-acknowledged as one of the first fully-realised examples of stream-of-consciousness literature that suspended the reader in the consciousness of a single character. Dujardin claimed to have been inspired by Wagner, translating the musical leitmotifs of his operas into a literary device to emphasise mood and character.

The musical idiom that touched Pekar’s ear was jazz. His first foray as a writer was as a jazz critic for Down Beat magazine in the 1960s. “Because he’s been this phenomenal jazz critic and writes so much about music, he’s got this tremendous ear for dialect,” says Brabner interjects. “He treats lanuage as music. And so he will start giving back the way in which that he hears.”

“I’ve had a lot of discouraging encounters with magazine and newspaper editors over the years, especially when I run across an editor who is a pretty lightweight guy, who’s just looking for something that will conform to a house style.”

Pekar’s dialogue rings with the improvisation of everyday life incorporating overheard conversations that capture the nuances of regional dialogue and dialect. In particular, Pekar was a huge fan of Cleveland-born free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, who purported to channel the feelings of the ghetto through the uninhibited squall of his tenor sax. Ayler appears as a topic of conversation in one of Pekar’s most popular stories, a two-pager illustrated by Crumb called ‘Ridin’ The Dog’ in which the writer found himself on a Greyhound bus with Sun Ra and his Arkestra.

“I was actually writing an article about them for a Canadian publication so I walked up and down the aisles and talked to them. The stuff that Sun Ra told me was strictly accurate, believe me. I asked him what he thought about Albert Ayler and he said, ‘[Ayler] thought he could play with white people.’ He went on to tell me about how they found Albert Ayler’s body floating in the East River, as if he’d still be around if he had listened to Sun Ra.”

Pekar’s in-depth of knowledge of jazz allowed him to mix it up with the musicians on their level, but his passion for his subject matter often caused personality clashes with editors. “I’ve had a lot of discouraging encounters with magazine and newspaper editors over the years, especially when I run across an editor who is a pretty lightweight guy, who’s just looking for something that will conform to a house style.”

In one 1983 story, ‘American Splendor Assaults The Media’, he vents his spleen over the futility of the power politics that conspire to make the freelancer’s life so difficult. But the truth is that ‘American Splendor’ allowed him both the luxury of being his own editor and the largesse to critique others (as well as himself) with impunity. Pekar’s stories often contained endless ruminations on his own behaviour. But it was a trio of stories published in 1978 beginning with “Awakening To The Terror Of A New Day” that established the theme that seemed to define Pekar’s character on the page, as well as his life: the working joe riven by existential angst.

“I wrote those when I was going through some pretty discouraging times,” he mused, “and, because they were autobiographical, they reflected my mood. But I got through, kept on going and I just dealt with life as it came to me.”

And it’s just as well he did, for what Pekar left behind represents an extraordinary and unique chronicle of an exceedingly ordinary life.

Heliocentric Worlds Bonus Material

Spaceways

(excerpt)

It is a 16 mm film, directed by Edward English and "made with Sun Ra." 

Release date is unknown (Around 1980).

Last year, ESP-Disk re-released The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra's 3 volumes in one beautiful package. Though I don't notice any sonic differences between the previous releases and this one, I was excited to find that the CDs in this edition are enhanced with bonus material. Each enhanced disc in the set contains archival photos, critical writings and historical videos including the 18 minute documentary Sun Ra “Spaceways”.

Heliocentric Bonus Material

Sanford and Sun

I really like this script and have wondered how true the story of how the episode came to be might be.   For anyone  unfamliar with the 1970's TV show, HERE is a brief description.

When this post was first presented to the Saturn newsgroup, Charles Blass, the noted Sun Ra enthusiast and (former?) WKCR DJ mentioned that he was informed by an associate, Brad Markus, "that  Redd Foxx worked at the Club DeLisa, so in fact he and Sunny may well have crossed pathways somewhere there."

Fred Sanford Meets Sun Ra
(excerpt)
(for a link to the full script, scroll to the end)

SCENE 3:

[Knocking at the door]

Fred [waking up]: It must be the ladies. [more knocking]: Alright, alright, I'm coming.

[Fred opens door and a person with a huge ibis head mask of the Egyptian god Thoth and the other Horus with a hawk mask breaks the threshold]

[Fred backs up clinching his heart going into a fit]: Oh, no! [pause for laughter] Ohhhh! It's Aunt Esther! She evolved into her final stage! [roaring laughter] Oh Elizabeth! Elizabeth, I'm coming to join you honey! I'll be the one with the two 7 foot buzzards! [laughter]

Sun Ra [steps through the door dressed in elaborate ancient ceremonial garb]: Mr. Sanford [pause for applause] Mr. Sanford are you alright?

Fred [coming out of shock]: Ohhhhh...Hunh? What?

Sun Ra [coming to Fred's aid]: Are you alright Mr. Sanford?

Fred [looking up and down at Sun Ra's clothing]: Am I alright? Two 7 foot birds are standing in my living room with a black Liberace...do I look "alright"? [laughter] Who are you anyway?

Sun Ra [spreading his arms]: I...am Sun Ra.

Fred [scanning Sun Ra from head to toe]: You...Are...Sun Ra?

Sun Ra: I apologize if I startled you.

Fred: The way you're dressed, you'd startle Monty Hall. [laughter]

Fred, Ibis, Sun Ra Sketch

Sun Ra [shaking his head in amusement]: These clothes express our destiny and our identity. They were worn by your great ancestors, both on Earth and on Saturn.

Fred: Keep wearing those "ancestors" clothes from Saturn and your destiny will be a room with white padded walls and your identity will be "expressed" in a straight jacket. [laughter]

Sun Ra: Mr. Sanford, all catalysts at one time or another were called crazy.

Fred: Well, those catalysts probably had the wrong type of cattle. [laughter] They probably started off like you trying to herd giant birds instead of cows. [laughter]

Sun Ra [with a chuckle]: You don't understand Mr. Sanford. I'm just going to have to take you on a journey. As the ambassador from the intergalactic regions of outer space, please accompany me on my ship [with a courtesy gesture].

Fred [grabbing his baseball bat]: Nigga, let me tell you something [calm tone]. [pausing for roaring laughter] If you and Heckle and Jeckle aren't out of my house by the time I count to 10...I'm going to wrap this Louisville slugger around your head so tight, you going to look like you're wearing a wooden turban. [roaring laughter]

[strange pulsating sound starting up in Fred's front yard]

Fred: What's that sound?

Sun Ra: Those are the natural minors of vibro-ion accelerator engines.

Fred [walking to his door]:Engine?

[Fred looks out the door and sees a space ship]

Fred [clutching his heart]: What is that?!

Sun Ra: I told you Mr. Sanford, I'm an ambassador from the intergalactic regions of outer space.

Hereby,

our invitation

we do invite you

be of my space world.

Fred [slowly falling into a hypnotic state as Sun Ra's entourage escorts him into the ship]: ...be of your space world?

Sun Ra: Rhythmic equations...

Fred: Rhythmic equations...

Sun Ra: enlightenment is my tomorrow...

Fred: enlightenment is my tomorrow...

Sun Ra: ...has no plane of sorrow

Fred: ...has no plane of sorrow

Sun Ra: ...be of my space world

Fred: ...be of my space world

The complete episode at
Gorilla Face Uglymopotamus

Sun Ra Souvenir Programme (1970)

I found this online some time ago (but can't remember where) & thought it would be a good day to share.  Thanks to the original uploader!  A 'mint' copy is currently up at EBAY.

pdf

Sun Ra - A Space Warning to the Planet Earth

(Click to Enlarge)

Found here.

Sun Ra - THE-------O------L O G Y . . . .

THE-------O------L O G Y . . . .

The o logy concerns the o.
The o is the earth
The oath is the curse, the oath, the word
The earth is the erth, the eoarth, the orth/oith/oth . . .  the o . . the o/oeth/oat
The earth is three/thre
And X is three from the end of the alphabet . . .  zyx . . . Z-Y-X . . . . . .
Now X is C because C is the initial
But X is sometimes used instead
C is three and X is three.

The O..the cipher..the code
The code X . . the codex . . the law
The cipher is lu cipher
The Le is Lu because The is Thu
The cipher: Lucipher: Lucifer . . . . . . . .