Space Is The Place

"I joined Sun Ra's band in 1957,” alto saxophonist and now Sun Ra Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen's voice whistles down a phoneline so terrible it sounds like it's been bounced off Saturn, reconfigured and played backwards through an early gramophone prototype. “I joined the band then and I've been there ever since... When I looked for a band I looked for some place to call home. When I found this band I called it home, that's it.”

A friend aptly described the music of Sun Ra Arkestra as all Duke Ellington one minute and borderline unlistenable noise the next. The concoction, and namesake, of late keyboardist-poet-philosopher-space traveller Sun Ra (aka Herman Poole Blount, aka Le Sony'r Ra), the Arkestra are still blazing trails of space dust across the globe, peddling their cosmic compositions as they go.

Marshall's origins in music are much straighter than you'd probably expect – he played clarinet in a military band. He met Sun Ra (the man) while living in Chicago after returning home from his posting in France in WWII. “I liked Sun Ra's music and I lived on the South Side of Chicago where he lived,” Marshall continues. “So I said, 'Sun Ra, I wanna play in the band.' And he said 'No No', y'know, and told me about the Bible and goin' to outer space and I said, 'What about lettin' me play in the band!' After three days of that stuff I finally got a [chance]'.”

To fit in with Ra's way of playing, to a certain extent, says Marshall, you had to get with the man's way of thinking. During Marshall's early times with Ra, compliments were scarce. (“I just wanted to play alto, but he said he didn't want me to play alto, he wanted me to play flute, so I learned the flute.”) It took time for Marshall to learn not to overthink his playing in order to really connect with Ra and feel what it was he was setting out to achieve. “A lot of times I'd be playin' from the head and he'd say, 'Yeah, that's good but it's not what I want'. Because he knew I was thinkin'... He could feel it,” says Marshall of their early musical collaboration. “I was playin' some different kind of stuff so I couldn't comprehend what he was doin', but he understands what I was doin'. He's sayin', 'Oh you got a nice tone'. That's the only compliment he gave me.

“And then he begins to write all these different kinds of intervals in his songs and I said, 'What kind of songs are these?' But I played them tiLl I'd know what he's tellin' me to do... He would say, 'Well, that's good, but it's not what I want! And I'd say, 'Well, what do you want?' He could never tell me what... I had to get the concept of what he was doin', y'know. But he stuck with me and I stuck with him. I didn't let him get away. I found me a band I could play in! And I'm still playin' in the band.”