South Side of the Sun

’PHONE HOME Cohran invented the Frankiphone, an amplified African thumb piano.

“I am a consistent visionary,” boasts Kelan Phil Cohran, his vibrant energy belying the octogenarian’s elder status. “That means I’m a few years ahead of everybody else, so it takes people time to applaud what I’m dealing with. It was the same thing with Sun Ra.” Music aficionados long ago discovered Henry “Sonny” Blount, the man-alien that Chicago and Saturn helped transform into interstellar free-music icon Sun Ra, but the applause for Cohran is catching up.

His groundbreaking 1960s recordings are finally receiving international acclaim; he plays a central role in George Lewis’s outstanding book A Power Stronger Than Itself (University of Chicago Press, 2008), the history of the AACM (the progressive black music collective Cohran helped found); and a feature-length documentary is in the works about the multi-instrumentalist and his sons, who play in the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. This week Chicagoans get a chance to applaud in person when the Jazz Institute presents Kelan Phil Cohran and the Legacy of Sun Ra at Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion.

Born in Mississippi in 1927, Cohran was raised in St. Louis, where he cut his teeth in Jay McShann’s blues band. After settling in Chicago in the mid-’50s, Cohran became an integral part of the South Side’s cultural fabric during the next half-century, forming the AACM and turning a Bronzeville movie house into the Afro-Arts Theater (home base of Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble, Oscar Brown Jr. and Gwendolyn Brooks, among others). He also became a fixture in public schools, teaching and demonstrating his musical ideas from 1965 until the ’90s.

But Cohran is best known for his stint with Sun Ra’s Arkestra from 1959 to 1961. When the rest of the band left for New York (and subsequent acclaim), the independent musician decided to remain in Chicago, but Cohran still cherishes his mentor’s influence. “The most significant thing I learned from him,” Cohran says, “is to do nothing else [but music]. Sun Ra slept it, ate it, drank it. We rehearsed six hours a day from noon to six and would go and play six hours a night from ten to four.” These legendary performances took place at the Wonder Inn on 75th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, with the band decked out in capes and puffy shirts.

Sun Ra’s compulsive recording of every performance rubbed off on Cohran. “When I broke away from him was right when Sears brought out the first consumer reel to reel. I bought one,” he says. His stockpile of hundreds of concerts, lectures, rehearsals and plays is yielding fruit: Several of Cohran’s recordings, including The Malcolm X Memorial and On the Beach, are hot items among European and Japanese jazz and funk collectors. And the tapings of early AACM meetings, held at Cohran’s home, make up the most gripping parts of Lewis’s remarkable book.

Yet what makes Cohran’s work so compelling to contemporary audiences may be the ways he veers away from Sun Ra and his AACM colleagues. While Ra explored the spaceways, Cohran—although an accomplished freelance astronomer—studied his own planet: “I researched the Welsh, Lithuanians, Greeks, Turks, Egyptians, African roots,” Cohran explains. “What they call world music now is what I was doing in the ’60s.” Despite being fiercely individualistic, Cohran’s interest in folk, as well as an activist’s desire to serve the people, makes his music more populist than most experimental sounds. “My music is an expression of my community,” he says. “That’s why it lasts: because it wasn’t for me.” Cohran currently serves the people by mentoring a stream of students and by performing a weekly set at Edgewater’s Ethiopian Diamond restaurant on Broadway.

This week’s Pritzker concert should demonstrate both his populism and his individuality. Other than one Sun Ra composition, Cohran will be performing his own work with the help of his septet of musical sons plus dozens of instrumentalists, singers and dancers. “This concert,” Cohran says, “is going to be a pageant and a ritual to celebrate the effect that Sun Ra had on me and, as a result, the effect I had on my sons—and, as a result of that, the effect we all had on the world.”

Jazz Institute of Chicago presents Made in Chicago: Kelan Phil Cohran and the Legacy of Sun Ra at Pritzker Pavilion Thursday 14.