Do tell, do tell all, do tell all about, do tell all about it!

It was out of this world. Amazing, astronomical, revelational. It was soul food. It was confirmation of intelligent life out there down here. It was a much needed proof that jazz lives, that composition is worthwhile, proof that to make a better world you just need to make better music.

Sun Ra's method works. End of story. Whatever he did to these musicians to make them play like this, whatever he taught them, tutored them and taunted them, make no mistake, it is light-years ahead of anything taught at Julliard or Berkeley. And I know it works because here was the Arkestra sans Ra, two leaders now departed, in the hands of the third, the 'Quiet Beatle' of the original group, and the ship lifts off and carries us away as effortlessly as ever. Whatever it was he taught them, whatever it was he taught Marshall Allen, here was proof this teaching was transmittable, transferrable from master to pupil, and that is what marks Great Method from the wannabees.

I've heard that this method of Ra is not the normal path of scales and charts and learning the chops and paying the dues. It is not what gets taught at those $500 seminar boot-camps about embouchure or managing yourself in the World of The Biz. It's not what the blog biz pundits talk of. No, it's outside all that, it's beyond and within and it's a lance straight through to the heart of whatever it is that makes jazz swing. They can take every last shred of what came about in the whole twentieth century opus of great music, from Debussy to Sex Pistols, and they find a tight-fit right-spot place for it within a finely crafted jewelled timepiece. This isn't the sort of workmanship you just decide on a whim, "I'm going to learn how to play like that!" or compose like that, or arrange like that, and then expect to go do it ...

John Coltrane said, "Our music is a Secret Order" and Ra's was and is the most gnostic of the bunch. If this music is a Secret Order, if kung-fu means 'devotion', then Sun Ra's Arkestra are the Shaolin Monks, and by all accounts, driven nearly as hard. Ra's Arkestra braved the century of timewinds, some went academic, some went ambient, some archival, some went soda fusion pop, the Arkestra alone lived on to tell the living story of Jazz.

And tell it they do, each work as rooted in 1905 as it is in 2005, odd maybe, stretched and re-forged, but eminently comprensible as Swing to a Cotton Club Ellington as much as to post-bop Bird or orchestral Mingus, and that too is good evidence of Great Method, of breathing real living breath of prana into the tradition that is Jazz. Sure, maybe it really helps that Ra forced them all to learn every tune in the Fletcher Henderson book, note-for-note like the original, but I've known lots who could parrot the recordings, from Django-ites to DiMeolas, Robert Johnson copiests, devotees of John McLaughlin, all working dilligently like medieval monks painstakenly transcribing Greek gospel texts only superficially understood, errors slipping digits all over like the famous 616.

But these guys, this band, they get it right. "Exactly right," Trane said. This isn't a recreation of Big Band Sounds, this is it, the real thing, baby, very much alive and still kickin' the living daylights out of every stodgy dogma of expectations. Remember 'Energy Music' of Pharoah Saunders, Coltrane and onward? Today's Arkestra is high-octane polyrhythmic Energy Music harnessed for warp-speed propulsion. A Michael Ray trumpet solo that races round lightspeed bends like those UFOs that defy the rules of inertial, Marshall Allen's pulse-pushing blasts so finely fit into the stream like they were pure clean triads, like it's always gone this way, like you can't believe it's not powered like this in every big band since time began, or those twisting horn-section vamps, like odd fragments of tone all skewed and twisted and scattered on the soundspace like a casting of runestones that magically self-animate and smoothly ensemble rotate and translate across to fit cleanly into the vampness of a timeless standard. Awesome. Impossible. It goes, it takes you places you've never been, and it can blow you away in the wink of Marshall's eye. Sun Ra said, "When it's really really good, we say 'it kills me'." ... the 2005 Arkestra is still very much a lethal weapon.

And the venue was perfect. Lula's Lounge is a long room, dinner served on raised terraces on either side, a central pit that you walk down steps into, a raised stage at the far end of it. When I walked in it reminded me of the old 20's films of Harlem upscale clubs, but as I sat there, it reminded me more and more of the lounge or dining room of a cruise ship. Slightly Art Deco, standup bar to the side, hanging lights. Show time comes and the piped music is Monk, then Louis Armstrong, then the lights dim a little, the stage glows a little, and a disembodied rumbling synth/organ solo just burbles in the background.

"Just like the engines of a ship," I thought, like when the Ferry starts to rev the diesels, great roars of the ropes and chains of hoists and gangplanks, swells of organ and synth.

And best of all, the diners continue on, drinks in hand, greeting friends, talking, having diner. burrurrrbbblllleeeaaaaaakrrrrrrr, krrr, krrr, krrr not a care in the world, how swelligent elegant. A tall man in a sequenned red cap trimmed in silver and sequenned tunic walks out from the side door, greets people at their tables as he makes his way to the back. Ah, the First Officer exchanging pleasantries with the passengers! and at the back of the hall more space-uniformed crew assemble and congregate, some laughs, some re-checking of equipment; the engine throbs subside, fade, hush.

And then they launch ... and off we go.

I talked to Gary Topp for a bit during the intermission. He said he'd first seen this stage two years ago when Lula's opened, he'd booked an act into the hall and when he saw the stage, it spoke to him of an Arkestra trip. "They had to play here."

I told him my galactic cruise ship impressions, and I said all it needed was dancers on the dancefloor under a mirror ball. He pointed at the middle ceiling, "We don't want to over-use it ..." -- when the time came, during, of course, the Space is the Place finale, the picture truly was complete.

August 1990, Graham Lock backstage with Sun Ra at the University of London to ask about Saturn, about Egypt, about Music and the Fate of the Earth

"You can't get off this planet but two ways," he tells me. "You have to die off it or somebody rescue you. I can easy be rescued by spaceships. If I request rescuing, I can get it. If humanity won't help me, some other type of beings will land and take me away. I keep that exit open." He shoots me a momentary grin, but I'm starting to feel way out of my depth. Right now, I wish a spaceship would land and rescue me.

"I don't think this planet has treated me right," Sun Ra continues balefully. "They think I'm a joke, but I know what I know. They think they just dealin' with an old man - but I'm not a man, I'm a spirit being."
[ The Wire #78: The Mysteries Of Mr Sun Ra
found via Tell Me About It]

And Graham, like pretty much anyone else to chance a close encounter, had no reason to doubt it.

Sun Ra on Sun Ra:

"I'm never satisfied with myself.
I wake up every morning and I don't like what I did before,
because it's not going to fit another tomorrow.
But I put all that behind me
and I don't think about nothing but reaching people
with impressions of happiness.
If they get an impression of happiness that's pure,
that has no purpose really,
it just happens like birds fly,
then people can use that impression as foundation
to know the difference between
the makebelieve happiness and the real happiness."

[ excerpt from HoleWorld ]