Space is still the place for Afrofuturist legends Sun Ra Arkestra

Two nights before this conversation, Sun Ra came to Knoel Scott in a dream. The late jazz composer and cosmic philosopher would have had no trouble finding his lead saxophone player because he was sleeping, as he does every night, in the long-departed maestro’s bedroom in Philadelphia.

“He was a little perturbed. He said, ‘You gotta play a different instrument.’ That was it,” says Scott, mainstay of the Sun Ra Arkestra for most of these past 45 years. Since the recent retirement of 100-year-old bandleader Marshall Allen, he’s also its senior custodian and conductor for tours like the one that visits Melbourne next week.

The day after his dream, Scott was preparing to rehearse downstairs in the fabled “Ra House” he shares with Allen and other veterans of the 70-year-old Arkestra. “I hadn’t looked at my horn from the gig the week before,” he says, “so I pulled my horn out to play, and it wouldn’t play. It was dented. So I had to use my spare horn.

“Sun Ra had already told me,” he whispers with the wonder of a man touched by divine mystery. “He was trying to tell me my horn was broken. That’s the kind of relationship we have.”

It’s a relationship that’s with him every day, three decades since the earthly passing of Ra, the incredibly prolific Alabama-born prodigy who denied all connection to his former identity, Herman Blount, after his fabled enlightenment on a trip to Saturn sometime in the 1930s.

Since 1968, the ramshackle stone house at 5626 Morton Street has been a kind of mission HQ for Sun Ra’s master plan to change the course of black history through the intergalactic language of music. In recent YouTube videos, it exudes the crumbling air of a bohemian shrine.

“Marshall’s father sold the house to Sunny for one dollar,” says Scott. Today he brings his centenarian friend “breakfast and dinner every day”: observance of the selfless collective consciousness that characterised Ra’s vision of a new black utopia in space.

It was the collective, always shifting and flamboyantly arrayed but deeply disciplined, that first blew Scott’s mind as a Charlie Parker devotee studying music in his home town of Queens, New York. “I was very political, and I didn’t have a classical music background, and I was having a hard time,” he remembers.

A life-changing gig at the Beacon Theatre – “it must have been 1976” – sealed his vocation. “I heard the best band I’ve ever heard before or since … It was Marshall and Danny Davis. It was June Tyson. Sun Ra was there, and he looked like the reincarnation of the pharaoh himself. John Gilmore looked like Akhenaten …

“My minor was African-American studies, I studied African percussion and dance, I followed African dance groups around … and this was like being in a musical African village in front of my eyes. That was it. I got it.”

His rapture escalates describing his first exposure to Jazz in Silhouette, Sun Ra’s third album, released in 1959. “Musicologically, they were flawless. Each solo was a masterpiece … Oh, the deceptive nature of the compositions! They were so complicated. I mean, Enlightenment went through all these changes! I said, ‘Oh, my God, I got to play with them! That’s the best band in the world!’”

It came to pass a few years later, when trombonist Craig Harris was ready to leave the Arkestra for greener pastures and offered the bandleader Scott and two others in his place: “Three of us, because Sun Ra has psychic powers. You don’t want Sunny mad at you.”

Playing with Sun Ra was an act of devotion, Scott stresses, not a career move for fame and fortune purposes. “Any time you spoke with Sun Ra, in that conversation came the Creator. He was totally committed to the Creator.

“He said, ‘You musicians, you got it all wrong. You’re playing to get a woman, or you’re playing for money because you want to pay your rent, you play your skills because you want to impress other musicians … No. I’m interested in none of that. It’s your spirit that delights the Creator. I want your spirit.’”

After winning the gig and moving to Philadelphia, “one time I said, ‘Sun Ra, every morning you’re on the piano. How come?’ He looked at me. He said, ’People always ask the Creator for things. They want a car, they want a good job, they want to buy a house, they want money …

“‘Everybody all over the world is always asking the Creator for things. Nobody ever gives the Creator anything. So every morning, I give the Creator a song.’ To this day, that’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard.”

It amounts to a hell of a lot of songs: well over 1000 pieces recorded to date on more than 100 Sun Ra albums. The vast repertoire under Knoel Scott’s care is a living history of jazz, from New Orleans to New York and Chicago: ragtime, swing, bebop, funky as hell, elegant as Ellington and as freaky as Zappa.

Swirling, one of a spate of recent releases, was nominated for a Grammy in 2020. As he approaches his 101st birthday, Marshall Allen’s role as scribe and arranger has been crucial to keeping the show on the road.

“When Sun Ra left, there was no music,” Scott explains. “Marshall had to write the whole book … hours, transcribing Sun Ra and then rearranging it … so for me, my job is much easier. I’m just trying to get the band to give respect to the beautiful music that Sun Ra wrote, and Marshall rearranged.”

The good news is the process won’t hurt a bit. “We’re coming down there to bring some groove, bring some happiness, some joy,” Scott croons. “We come down there making joyful noise. We come down there to give homage to the spirits and the souls of our ancestors who have [played] there, and to link geographically, metaphysically with the cosmos using that location as a starting point.”

The bad news? Well, it’s all around us. “The truth about planet Earth is a bad truth, and the truth about the people of planet Earth is a bad truth,” Scott says gravely. “But you can change your destiny. There’s five dimensions, six dimensions. We don’t know how many dimensions there are, so the possibilities of change are astronomical.

“We are all in service,” he says, going full evangelical. “You serve God or you serve the devil. We are in service of the most high. We’re in the service of Ra. We’re pointing a new way, an altered destiny for humanity.

“What do you do when you know that you know that you know that you’re wrong? You gotta face the music. You gotta listen to the cosmic sound. If this planet is going to survive, if this planet is going to make it to Mars or Jupiter, the stars, we gotta change.”

Can’t wait.