The Sun Ra also rises

To say that Sun Ra was a visionary only tells half the story. For this avant-garde jazz keyboardist (born in 1914), DIY wasn’t just a trendy way to make a statement; it was the only way he knew how to do business. While he and his Arkestra were playing some of the most defiantly uncommercial music to ever be pressed on vinyl, Ra’s marketing ideas—as owner of Saturn Research, his own in-house record label—were just this side of eccentric in their own right. You can see the results at the Hyde Park Art Center in the exhibition “Pathways to Unknown Worlds.”

A self-taught artist who was long based on Chicago’s South Side, Ra wouldn’t just draw an album cover and use it for the entire run of the record; he would take each individual copy and draw new covers as he saw fit. When he did have uniform album jackets, he would use the same artwork but with different color schemes. Offbeat stunts like this flustered discographers and added to the allure. Clearly, this man had creativity to waste.

Fortunately, that is not what happened with his artwork after his death in 1993. John Corbett (a teacher at School of the Art Institute and gallery owner), together with SAIC teacher Terri Kapsalis and art critic Anthony Elms, managed to salvage some fascinating drawings and ephemera from Ra’s years in Chicago, right up until the core of his organization migrated to Philadelphia. In addition to art, we also get to see such artifacts as the enormous rubber stamp used to print up the 1964 release Other Planes of There. Of particular interest is a mid-’50s book called The Dome Personal Tax Record by Nicholas Picchione (a CPA tax specialist). Did Ra keep detailed expense summaries? If so, not in this book—he used the empty spaces to draw pictures of a three-story Saturn Records building, as well as a Saturn Records limo (?!), none of which came to fruition. But a genius can dream, right?

Corbett acquired this material through South Shore resident Alton Abraham, Ra’s late business partner, whom Corbett interviewed for his 1994 book, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein. “He was a fairly reclusive mystic himself,” Corbett says, “and in the process of that interview we met at a café. We sat down and he opened a briefcase and he said, ‘I want to show you something to prove who I am.’ I said, ‘Mr. Abraham, I have no reason to doubt you.’ And he pulled out the name-change papers that changed Sun Ra’s name from Herman Poole Blount to Sun Ra. I shook like I was looking at the Dead Sea Scrolls.” After granting Corbett permission to photocopy the papers, Abraham let on that he had a massive collection of Ra-related material. “I suggested that it would be a good idea to find some kind of museum or something and he agreed. We just never got far finding anything.” Abraham died in 1999. “A year later, I got an e-mail that alerted me to the fact that some Sun Ra stuff from Chicago was part of a house salvage,” Corbett says. It turned out to be Abraham’s. “We talked to a whole bunch of people we trusted including George Lewis, the trombonist and MacArthur fellow; Hamza Walker from the Renaissance Society…just people who we felt would give us really good advice about how to deal with the material.”

It’s fitting that the documents are on display at a South Side museum. The Hyde Park Art Center is not far from Stony Island, where Ra used to stand on the corner, preaching and passing out one-page broadsides (you can see 46 of them at the exhibit). One of these manuscripts, “Solar Precepts,” somehow made it to New York; it appears that none other than John Coltrane received a copy when passing through in 1956.

“Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954–1968,” is at the Hyde Park Art Center through January 14, 2007. Opening reception is Sunday 15, 3 to 5pm.