News / / 10.06.14

Sun Ra Arkestra

Barbican, London | 31 May

Cloaked across the Barbican main hall walls are dimmed constellations, astrological signatures tattooing the solar system. Like distant mirages, the images are gently recast into the form of the Great Sphinx. Its illusionary magic is equally comic as it is chimeric. Glammed and glittered saxophonists scream down their reeds as surdo-slamming percussionists generate submarine bass notes. Saturn-born Sun Ra may have left our earth in 1993, but his mythologised jazz legacy is being capsuled perfectly by the Sun Ra Arkestra under the rhapsodic direction of Marshall Allen.

Celebrating the centenary of the other-worldly composer, poet and cosmic philosopher’s birth, Allen has evened the hodgepodge of free jazz, doo-wop, traditionalist swing, Disney ditties, analogue electronics and Afrofuturist ideology with respectful precision. The night plays like a wake in space; a celebratory canonising of a genius’s lifework.

“What is Jazz?”, husks John Sinclair, who dutifully opens tonight’s splurge accompanied onstage by The Founder Effect. The ex-MC5 manager and post-leader of the White Panther Party stands almost immobile other than a soft hand gesticulation. His croaks and caws filter through ad-hoc guitar noises and irregular drum fills. Despite his static gestures, his presence is enormous. Reciting quotes verbatim from a Sun Ra interview, the theatre temperature slowly drifts to a hazy sub-tropic degree. Sinclair owns his audience’s heeded attention as if channeling the attitude of Sun Ra himself. And, with cymbal crashes and atonal keyboard smacks, he falls silent and waits for the Arkestra to emerge.

Visual trickery from The Liquid Light Orchestra envelop the Arkestra’s stage. Gloopy colour wheels rotate over asymmetrical geometric shapes. Allen, adorned in kaleidoscopic uniform, hoots at his alto sax during opener, Planet. Space-ward tenors squeal as Knoel Scott incites impromptu call and responses from his fellow improvisors. Congratulatory applause is frequent from each musician’s freewheeling feature slots. Singer Tara Middleton’s Wish Upon A Star is greeted with soft semi-melancholic awe before Scott practices his somersaults for first half closer, Space is the Place.

A twenty minute interlude seemed almost expendable as the tight-fisted grooves of Interplanetary Music reign in overwhelmed bystanders. Scott, again, struts from stage left to right with maniacal glares. “Have you seen the captain?”, he hastily enquires, only to concede that said Captain “Left this spaceship in the year of 1993.”

The night ends with Angels and Demons. And, while the band’s depleted energy levels becomes all the more distinct, this offbeat homage to their leader seems more bombastic than ever before. Space is the place, and, even if only for two hours, the Sun Ra Arkestra certainly took us there.

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sunraarkestra.com

Words: Tom Watson

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