{"id":13355,"date":"2024-07-01T01:59:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-01T08:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=13355"},"modified":"2024-06-30T16:10:20","modified_gmt":"2024-06-30T23:10:20","slug":"centenarian-sun-ra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2024\/07\/01\/centenarian-sun-ra\/","title":{"rendered":"Centenarian Sun Ra"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The New Yorker<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sun Ra Arkestra\u2019s Maestro Hits One Hundred<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Marshall Allen, the musical collective\u2019s sax-playing leader, is celebrating with a deep-spacey video installation during the Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Robert Sullivan<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Illustration by Jo\u00e3o Fazenda<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Sun\u00a0Ra Arkestra, the musical collective founded in Chicago in the mid-fifties, moved out of the Lower East Side in 1968, and wound up in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, on a very green side street along the edge of a hill that feels a million miles from anywhere. An old row house became the Sun\u00a0Ra Arkestral Institute, a place to practice at all hours, in order to be ready. \u201cOne day it will happen,\u201d Sun\u00a0Ra said at the time. \u201cIt could be happening now\u2014that a voice from another dimension will speak to earth. You might as well practice and be prepared for it.\u201d The Arkestra practiced and eventually toured the world, the row house filling with gig posters, its plaster walls soaking up decades of music from a band that, under Sun\u00a0Ra\u2019s leadership, had set out on a course of inter-dimensional travel, using chords and time signatures and equations rather than rocket fuel. Sun\u00a0Ra died in 1993, and his saxophone players replaced him as director\u2014first John Gilmore, and then Marshall Allen, who last month turned a hundred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Allen bounded down the stairs to greet a visitor the other day, in between birthday celebrations near and far\u2014near being Philadelphia, where a public performance of the Arkestra was followed by a party for family and friends at a club called Solar Myth, named for a Sun Ra-ism. Across the Atlantic Ocean, during the Venice Biennale, a celebration occurred in the form of a site-specific video installation in an abandoned sixteenth-century church and hospital; it is directed by Ari Benjamin Meyers, a Berlin-based composer, who met Allen in person in 2022, in Philadelphia, and was, like a lot of people, \u201cblown away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at The New Yorker<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker The Sun Ra Arkestra\u2019s Maestro Hits One Hundred Marshall Allen, the musical collective\u2019s sax-playing leader, is celebrating with a deep-spacey video installation during the Venice Biennale. By\u00a0Robert Sullivan The Sun\u00a0Ra Arkestra, the musical collective founded in Chicago in the mid-fifties, moved out of the Lower East Side in 1968, and wound […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}