Sun Ra is one of those musicians you either love or hate. I love most of his music - sometimes it’s a little too sloppy for my taste - but I really dig the person. Sun Ra was one of the primary intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement according to Amiri Baraka (arguable the central intellectual of the BAM). I would have loved to have met the dude.

One of the more fascinating aspects of Sun Ra is that he did not consider himself to be primarily a musician - in short, he called himself a teacher who wrote and played music. He would have been a fascinating teacher. He once taught a class at UC Berkeley, handing out a syllabus that required the students to find the reading materials in the library. When the students complained that most of the materials were not in the library, his response was that that was the point of having them search for the materials - why weren’t they in the library in the first place?

Currently, I am listening to Heliocentric Worlds, vol. 1. I’d love to know how Sun Ra structured his free improvs. There is too much consistency among the various musicians for there to be no direction at all. Certainly the music isn’t scored out, but there must be some way the musicians are directed. The free passages have varied textures, with individual musicians and sections of musicians dropping in and out like there is a conductor. If it weren’t for the fact that Sun Ra is playing the keyboards throughout, I might have imagined that he was conducting.

I find this idea of free jazz composition to be fascinating. I really got some insight into how free improv can be structured from reading an interview with Marion Brown about his composition Afternoon of a Georgia Faun. Brown organized the varied sections of the piece in terms of wind and water sounds, wood and metal instruments, as well as each musician’s primary, secondary, and tertiary instruments. Anthony Braxton, for instance, played saxophone as his primary instrument, flute and bass clarinet as secondary (doubling) instruments, and various incidental percussion instruments as the tertiary instruments. The entire composition has a consistent structure to it even while Brown didn’t write a “score.”

In fact, my position is that Brown certainly did write a score, he just didn’t write the equivalent of a European art music score. The same kind of open composition is what fascinates me the most about Sun Ra’s compositions. Certainly a composition like “El is a Sound of Joy” has a more standard big band feel to it - it definitely was scored out at some point…or at least that’s the way it sounds to me. That composition has some beautiful counterpoint and some thick chords in the horn sections. It also has one of the most swinging piano solos I have heard Sun Ra play.

I can feel that I am getting closer to resuming my musical practice. I’m getting excited about music again.