Saturn's Ark: The Improvised Archives, Politics, and Performances of Sun Ra by Brian J. Lefresne A

262 Pages·2017·21.79 MB·English

Saturn’s Ark: The Improvised Archives, Politics, and Performances of Sun Ra

by

Brian J. Lefresne

A Thesis
presented to
The University of Guelph

In partial fulfilment of requirements
for the degree of
Doctor in Philosophy
in
Literary/Theatre Studies in English

Guelph, Ontario, Canada

© Brian J. Lefresne, January, 2018
ABSTRACT

SATURN’S ARK: THE IMPROVISED ARCHIVES, POLITICS, AND
PERFORMANCES OF SUN RA

Brian J. Lefresne Advisor:
University of Guelph, 2018 Professor Ajay Heble

This dissertation examines the relationship between Black experimental performer Sun Ra (and his
ensemble known as the Arkestra) and the archives of Black expressive culture. The archive, both
conceptually and physically, provides a theoretical approach to understanding the cultural and social
influences present in the musical performances, social practices, and politics of Ra and the Arkestra.
In Chapter One, I detail how Ra’s elaborate concert spectacles known as “myth-rituals” should be
understood as an act of archival preservation and intervention. Within these concerts Ra was able to
maintain traditions of Black sacred and secular performance cultures that provided a performative grammar
to ward off the commodification of jazz and other improvised musics within formal settings.
In the second chapter, I shift my attention towards Ra and the Arkestra’s clothing and fashion. I
argue that these sartorial choices may be seen as an “alternative archive.” The materiality and style of Ra
and the Arkestra’s clothing function as an archival repository that captures the heterogeneity of, and often
competing, discourses around Black visual and embodied identity politics of early 1970s America.
Moreover, I suggest that Ra and the Arkestra’s dress is in dialogue with Black diasporic traditions of
dandyism and tricksterism.
The final chapter shifts towards the historical moment of the Space Race. In this chapter I suggest
that Ra’s sounds, words, and visual identity from the years 1969-1972 must be seen as part of a wider
movement of Black diasporic cultural actors whose works form what I call the Black counter-archive of the
Space Race. I contend that Ra and his contemporaries produced cultural artefacts that can be positioned as
part of an archival repository that critiques the mainly American and wholly white archive of human-
powered space travel and exploration.
In my conclusion, I examine how Ra’s persona and his performance practices (in tandem with the
Arkestra) confound conventional approaches to archives and archiving. This discussion is followed by a
brief coda where I explore the ways in which the practice of engaging in archival research might itself be
seen as an improvisatory act.
iv

Dedication
To Kim
v

Acknowledgments
This project would have never seen the light of day without the guidance of my sagacious advisory
committee: Drs. Ajay Heble, Daniel Fischlin, and Christine Bold. Thank you for reading every word of this
document and providing an untold amount of advice and guidance relating to this project and my studies.
To Jade Ferguson, it seems like only yesterday I was asking you to sign the waiver me in to your
seminar. Thank you for the numerous conversations, professional guidance, and fellowship over the years.
To Brent Hayes Edwards, thank you for reading this document in its entirety and your generous
feedback and suggestions for future directions to take this project.
This dissertation could not have been completed without the generous support of the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the Association for
Recorded Sound Collections, the African American Intellectual History Society, the Improvisation,
Community, and Social Practice Research Project, the International Institute for Critical Studies in
Improvisation, the University of Guelph. I must single out the Robert L. Platzman Fellowship from the
University of Chicago. Without this award, many, if not all, of the previously mentioned sources of funding
could not have materialized.
An enormous amount of gratitude is extended to Christine Colburn and Barbara Gilbert of the
Special Collections and Research Center of the University of Chicago and Sally Conkright and Adam Vida
of the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, Illinois. Without fail all of you rose to the occasion and
assisted with matters pertaining to your collections. This project is stronger because of your contributions
and insights.
It would be irresponsible of me to not mention Marshall Allen, Danny Thompson, and Knoel Scott.
The three of you were more than generous with your time and your knowledge over the course of two days
in 2013 and planted the seeds for what this dissertation ultimately became. More importantly, you are
keeping alive Sun Ra’s unique manifestation of a joyful noise.
Like my atypical journey through graduate school, the people that I need to thank is wide-ranging,
diverse, and representative of various phases of my life and academic journey. First and foremost I have to
thank Tamara Levitz. Your generosity and support during a time when the mere thought of talking about
the possibility of writing a dissertation seemed like a far-fetched idea made this moment possible. Your act
was my first exposure to radical pedagogy and what mentorship inside and outside of the academy should
look like.
To Elaine Chang, Julie Cairnie, Michelle Elleray, Jennifer Schacker, Mark Lipton, Paul Salmon,
Steven Powell, Danny O’Quinn, and Ann Wilson, much gratitude for the various professional tips and
personal advice throughout the years. To Justine Richardson, Liz Jackson, Rachel Collins, and Kim Thorne
of the ICASP/IICSI office, most importantly thank you for your friendship, but also thanks for your
assistance and support with this project and various offshoots over the past six years. To my esteemed
colleagues, peers, and friends Alec Follet, Kimber Sider, Mark Kaethler, Greg Fenton, David Lee, Mirali
Almaula, Paul Watkins, Cynthia Ing, Margot Beckmann, Leslie Allen, Hannah MacGregor, Nick Loess,
Alessia Ursella, Mark Laver, Erin Bustin, Mark V. Campbell, Rebecca Caines, Harald Kisiedu, Meagan
Troop, Tom Zlabinger, Vilde Aaslid, Chris Wells, Alicia Levin, and Allison Portnow Lathrop, thanks for
accompanying me on this journey and listening to my bevy of hot takes. I must also thank the staff of
SETS: Olga Petrik, Yvonne Yates, and Phyllis Reynen. All three of you rose to the occasion when need be.
Along these same lines, I must thank various faculty and staff members of SOFAM, SOLAL, and History
at the University of Guelph who have offered support from the sidelines over the years.
I also must acknowledge Eric Porter, Imani Owens, Sherrie Tucker, Monica O’Connell, Paul
Steinbeck, Aria Halliday, Lauren Jackson, Brandy Monk-Payton, Keith Cartwright, Kristin Moriah, Martyn
vi

Bone, Jim Watkins, Zachary Vernon, Michael Bibler, Alex Corey, Daphne Carr, Claudia Carrera, Ali Neff,
Josslyn Luckett, Marcel Swiboda, and Lauren Mueller. All of you offered insightful feedback and
commentary about this project alongside camaraderie at meetings of the American Studies Association, the
Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium and I thank you for
that.
Shoutout to the SnapSquad! The non-ephemeral nature of this document prevents me from truly
expressing my gratitude and a host of other superlatives to the two of you, but here is a feeble attempt:
🐐🔥💎.
To my parents Wilf and Kay Lefresne, and my brother Pete Lefresne, thank you for everything over
the years.
To Emily, Ellison, and Quinton, you have provided an untold amount of joy in my life and have
kept me grounded throughout this entire process. I was able to complete this project because of the energy
the three of you emanate.
And finally, to Kim. There are no words. You have believed in me through thick and thin and have
been a greater champion of me than myself. The completion of this degree is a testament to that. The
sacrifices that you have had to make over the past six years are innumerable and can never be properly
repaid. Thank you for everything, I love you, and this work is dedicated to you.
vi i

Table of Contents

Preface .............................................................................................................................................1

Introduction ...................................................................................................................................8
The Dead Past ................................................................................................................................10
Sun Ra and the Jazz Archive .........................................................................................................16
Black Studies, Black Archives, and Archiving Blackness ............................................................22
Methodology: Why the Archive? ...................................................................................................29
The Long Civil Rights Era: New Temporal, Social, and Historical Frameworks .........................39
Chapter Breakdown .......................................................................................................................50

Chapter One: A Spectacle of Resistance: Sun Ra’s Sacred-Secular Stagecraft, Abstract
Noise, and the Archive ................................................................................................................54
Myth-Rituals .................................................................................................................................57
The Jazz Concert: A New Tradition .............................................................................................65
Abstract, Joyful Noise: Ra’s Keyboards and Sonic Subjectivity ...................................................83
Noise ..............................................................................................................................................91
Abstract planes of sound and sight ................................................................................................96
Conclusion—An Archive of Destabilizing Excess: The Limits of Archiving Blackness ............101

Chapter Two: Sonic and Material Weaves: Sun Ra’s Alternative Archive of Dress .........108

Clothing, Costume, Dress, Fashion: The Politics of Terms .........................................................111
Fashion Studies: The Politics of Studying What We Wear .........................................................113
The Fanonian Moment: Dress Covering Race .............................................................................117
Sun Ra and Black Diasporic Dress: Cultural, Historical, and Social Contexts ...........................120
Are Those Moonshoes?: Sun Ra’s Dress Addressing Black Power ............................................130
Dandy Tricksters, Tricked Out Dandies: Sun Ra and the Play of the Cloth ................................144
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................154

Chapter Three: Sun Ra and the Black Counter-archive of the Space Race, 1969-1972 .....156

Outer and Black Geographic Spaces ............................................................................................161
From Flying Africans to Afronauts ..............................................................................................167
“The Eagle Has Landed . . .”: Apollo 11 and the Black counter-archive .....................................179
“…that space station they got out there”: Sun Ra and Salyut I ..................................................192
After Apollo?: Space is the Place and the Decline of NASA ......................................................196
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................198

Conclusion: Saturn’s Ark—A New Type of Archive..............................................................202

Coda: “Excuse me while I improvise”: Archival Research as Improvisatory Act ..............212

Works Cited ................................................................................................................................219
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List of Figures

Fig. 0.1 Album cover of 1973 version of Atlantis .........................................................................49

Fig. 1.1 Ra Standing at the keyboards at the beginning of performance .......................................83

Fig. 1.2 Closeup of Ra manipulating the Moog synthesizer ..........................................................84

Fig. 1.3 Album cover of 1966 version of Magic City ....................................................................97

Fig. 2.1 Sun Ra, John Gilmore, Kwame Hadi, and unidentified member, c. 1972 .....................108

Fig. 2.2 Sun Ra in the youth centre .............................................................................................131

Fig. 2.3 Sun Ra’s sartorial look ...................................................................................................134

Fig. 2.4 Angela Davis and her afro hairstyle. .............................................................................140

Fig. 2.5 Closeup of Sun Ra’s metallic hair. .................................................................................141

Fig 5.1 Cover of 16mm film canister, “Les Halles” ....................................................................212
Preface

Influential jazz musician, poet, composer, and bandleader Sun Ra continues to maintain his
status as the ultimate outsider within jazz performance. Embracing a cosmic persona, mixing
composed music with free-improvisation, and integrating theatrical elements into his
performances, Ra’s life and music straddle geographic borders, stylistic categories, generic
conventions, and conceptions of humanity––especially with regard to racial politics. In Saturn’s
Ark, I build on recent work from the fields of improvisation, race, gender, archival, and
performance studies to critically assess our understanding of Ra within musical, theatrical,
political, and intellectual performance traditions of the Black diaspora and the American nation-
state.1 Starting from Black working-class performance culture of the late nineteenth-century to
mass entertainment of the twenty-first, Saturn’s Ark explores how we can garner a better
understanding and appreciation of Sun Ra’s life and works through the prism of the archive.
Placing the relationship between Ra and the archive at the fore allows for a greater
discussion of how Ra engaged with and manipulated the archives and traditions of Black
expressive culture. My work generates space for a larger discussion about the nature of and the
relationship between Black diasporic peoples and their cultures and the knowledge warehouse
that is the archive. What this study will show is that Ra’s concert spectacles, his clothing and
fashion, and his engagement with key events of the Space Race suggest the need for new
conceptions and configurations of what constitutes, what is contained in, and what is considered
an archive.

1 Throughout this dissertation I have chosen to capitalize Black when I refer to peoples and
cultures of African descent and to follow recent trends by Black scholars and scholars active in
the wider field of Black Studies. For more on this topic see Tharps.
1
Indeed, approaching Ra’s life, music, words, and visual appearance in relation to the
archive unveils that he was more engaged with earth-based racial and social politics than he is
given credit for, and that he was more concerned with ideas of cultural memory and the historical
record than has been previously considered. In turn, Ra’s probing and remixing of various
archives of Black expressive culture forces us to ponder new considerations and approaches to
conducting archival research and the archiving practices of Black expressive culture.
But before any discussion of Ra’s musical practices and the notion of archives can
commence, one must have a clearer understanding of who Sun Ra was and what his musical
practices and philosophical aesthetics represent. As John Szwed writes in his biography of Sun
Ra, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, “at the heart of everything that Sun Ra
did or said was the claim that he was not born, that he was not from earth, that he was not a man,
that he had no family, that his name was not what others said it was” (5).2 This claim of non-
human existence was a recurrent topic in numerous articles about and interviews with Ra. In a
short article with Harriet Choice that appeared in a 1972 edition of the Chicago Tribune, Ra
refers to his earth name as “just a name to gig around with” as if to imply that his earth name was
just a label to wear so he could blend in on this planet (Choice). In other instances, Ra would
assert that he was a “being from another dimension” (Farris). What becomes clear throughout
interviews, articles, and essays is that Szwed’s description of Ra as an extreterrestrial life form
was not an exaggeration. Ra really did believe that he was not of this world and he would take
any and every opportunity to remind audiences and critics alike of this point.

2 For a more thorough and complete account of Ra’s biography and especially his early years see
Szwed, Space 1-50.
2