Kevin Whitehead
Appearances
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Pianist Sun Ra called his sprawling orchestras orchestras, and like Noah's Ark, they crammed in an improbable amount of vibrant variety. He had his earworm melodies like that one, Watusi, with its percolating Afro-Cuban percussion.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
The orchestra played squalling free jazz barrages and sang genial vocal chants connected with Sun Ra's personal cosmology involving space travel and an interplanetary exodus.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
June Tyson, longtime singer and costumer for the orchestra, who decked them out in striking, spangled outfits that looked good when the chanting musicians did a ring dance in front of the stage counterclockwise like the ancestors. At the other end of time, Sunrise Keyboard Synthesizer could become a rocket taking off for, and maybe arriving at, a more hospitable planet than this one.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
This music comes from newly released recordings of Sun Ra in 1978 playing one of the Left Bank Jazz Society's weekly Sunday concerts in Baltimore. Some Left Bank regulars dislike the jazz avant-garde to the point of scolding musicians who went too far. And yet this show was Sun Ra's fifth for the Left Bank in under two years, making him very much a house favorite.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
He did draw his own audience, but the Left Bank's African-American standbys dug him too, knowing a comic persona and a black carnival act when they saw one. Sun Ra was serious, but it's not like he didn't know he was funny. His wisdom was couched in puns and wordplay. But Sun Ra's warm welcome was really because his rocket to the future flew straight through the jazz of the 1930s and 40s.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
I attended a few of Sun Ra's Left Bank concerts, and this one got even odder than usual when documentary filmmaker Bob Muggy's overhead movie lights came up after the first set, as if the gods were checking in from above. Some of Muggy's footage turns up in his fine film Sun Ra, A Joyful Noise.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
In the 70s, Ra started reviving then-obscure 1930s swing tunes by his early idol and one-time employer, bandleader Fletcher Henderson. Those vehicles for trumpet sensation Michael Ray let the orchestra traverse time as well as space. This is Yeah Man.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Sun Ra and his orchestra played three sets that evening in 1978, and the double album, Lights on a Satellite, gives a fair sampling of their range and includes a few tunes they didn't record so much. There are good features for tenor saxophone hero John Gilmore and altoist Marshall Allen. At age 100, Marshall leads a posthumous Sun Ra orchestra that also has a new CD called Lights on a Satellite.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
That modern band has its moments, But there's only one Sun Ra as a leader or keyboard player. Here he is on organ for round midnight, just playing the melody his way.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
The producer of this and dozens of historical jazz records, many of which we've praised here on the show, is Zev Feldman, who likes to fill out album booklets with extracts from interviews he conducts with witnesses whose memories are not always accurate or pertinent.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
The Sun Ra booklet contains a few contradictory or just plain wrong statements, some made by Feldman himself, about such easy-to-verify stuff as what day or days the orchestra played that weekend or at what time. Those famous ballroom shows were all Sundays from 5 to 9 p.m.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
In the booklet, someone guesses Sun Ra played three or four times for the Left Bank Jazz Society when it was 13 concerts in 11 years. Producer Feldman calls himself the jazz detective, but it's a detective's job to sift through conflicting accounts to tell us what really happened, not just throw it all out there before racing off to another case.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Valuable music like this deserves more scrupulous documentation. ¶¶