In late June, the Sun Ra Arkestra was onstage at Roulette in Brooklyn, swinging its approach by means of “Queer Notions,” a jaunty big-band tune by the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. The rendition hewed carefully to the relaxed, seesaw riffing of the unique, recorded by Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra in 1933. But there was one outstanding distinction: the barrage of bleeps, whooshes and wobbly theremin-like tones emanating from an EVI — quick for digital valve instrument — performed by Marshall Allen, the multi-instrumentalist and longtime Arkestra mainstay who had not too long ago celebrated his one hundredth birthday.
Allen’s longevity onstage could be noteworthy by itself. But whenever you soak up an Arkestra gig — watching Allen repeatedly leap to his toes to solo, resplendent in a gold-sequined cap and vest — his endurance is mind-boggling. Both at Roulette, the place the ensemble performed the concluding set of the Vision Festival in honor of Allen’s centennial, and through a trio efficiency on the Brooklyn Music School a number of days earlier, he wasn’t merely an eminent elder however a mirthful dynamo. His contributions on EVI and alto saxophone usually clashed brilliantly with the encircling textures, embodying the joyous eclecticism that helped make Sun Ra — the pianist, composer and Afrofuturist thought chief who helmed the Arkestra from the mid Fifties till his dying in 1993 — one of many twentieth century’s most prescient musical visionaries.
Much like Sun Ra’s personal keyboard work, Allen’s artwork is a examine in extremes. His alto saxophone phrases are mini eruptions: Tensing his shoulders as he blows and raking his proper hand up and down over the keys, he produces squeals, snarls and honks that register as Expressionist gestures as a lot as avant-garde sounds. Even set towards the alto work of a musician one-fourth his age — as on the tribute LP “Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City,” the place Allen seems alongside the rising star Immanuel Wilkins — his sonic splatters nonetheless maintain a bracing energy.
But specializing in Allen’s extra outré qualities can obscure simply how a lot historical past he embodies. Enlisting within the Army throughout World War II, he performed clarinet in a army band and, after an honorable discharge, studied on the Paris Conservatory and recorded with the bebop luminary James Moody. When he joined up with the Arkestra in Chicago in 1957, it was a compact, immaculately swinging big band, with a sound rooted in each Sun Ra’s admiration of giants like Fletcher Henderson and a pervasive Space Age aesthetic, manifesting in shiny costumes and sung slogans like “We journey the house methods/From planet to planet.” Allen was drawn in, he recalled to The New York Times in 2020, by the chief’s lectures on house and “all this different stuff: historical Egypt and the Bible.”
The Brooklyn Music School efficiency — the place Allen was joined by fellow Arkestra members Tara Middleton (vocals) and Farid Barron (piano) — served as a reminder of his agency grounding in a bygone period. Though the set featured loads of jump-scare saxophone and echoey EVI tones, there have been additionally roomy stretches of poignant lyricism. On “Sometimes I’m Happy,” a Twenties-era commonplace that Sun Ra usually performed, Allen answered Middleton’s traces with smooth, ruminative phrases that strongly evoked Johnny Hodges, whose legacy is as carefully intertwined with Duke Ellington as Allen’s is with Sun Ra.
Allen’s wilder facet has its roots within the early Nineteen Sixties, when Sun Ra relocated the Arkestra to New York and started steering it in a extra experimental route. Listen to Allen’s piercing, reverb-treated oboe on “Celestial Fantasy” or the tangle of ululating saxophones on “Next Stop Mars” to listen to simply how far he and his bandmates had ventured. (Allen has credited Sun Ra with serving to him entry a deeper a part of himself. “He’d say: ‘You’ve acquired a pleasant sound whenever you play, however one thing is lacking,’” Allen told The Guardian earlier this year. “The different half was the spirit.”) And on “Barrage,” an album by the pianist Paul Bley recorded the next 12 months, you may hear Allen’s signature alto sound in all its jagged, frenzied splendor.
In subsequent many years, together with the Arkestra as a complete, Allen would grasp the artwork of accessing the whole spectrum of jazz expression, usually inside a single piece. On “Ten by Two,” a duo album with the NRBQ pianist Terry Adams, recorded dwell in 1996 and 1997 and launched in 2005, his shock tactics regularly tag-team with his sentimental side, highlighting the efficiency of every. Like contemporaries such because the pianist Jaki Byard, who famously discovered a spot for Fats Waller-style stride piano throughout the ’60s jazz vanguard, Allen has challenged the concept that developments within the music wanted to take the type of schisms.
It works in Allen’s favor that jazz elders solely appear to accrue hipness and status with age, a sample that’s hardly the norm in pop or hip-hop, the place a era hole can look like an deadlock. (Witness Herbie Hancock’s alliances with Flying Lotus, Thundercat and Kamasi Washington, or the veteran saxophonist George Coleman’s coterie of young admirers and collaborators.) Along with common Arkestra appearances, Allen retains up a busy schedule of collaborations with artists such because the vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid and the pianist John Blum, and frequently collects plaudits from tastemakers throughout genres, together with members of Yo La Tengo, who continuously share payments with the Arkestra and turned as much as witness Allen’s Vision Festival look.
At Roulette, Allen was very a lot within the combine, huddling with associates and admirers on the curb exterior and within the foyer earlier than his set. Onstage, he radiated enthusiasm, enjoying ensemble passages and providing extemporaneous commentary every time the spirit struck. His continued vitality is a present, particularly provided that many jazz legends have died tragically younger. (To title only one: Eric Dolphy, one other multi-instrumentalist who helped to broaden the scope of jazz within the early Nineteen Sixties, who died 60 years in the past final month on the age of 36.)
But the explanation to go see Allen every time you may isn’t merely a couple of quantity. Onstage at 100, he nonetheless appears completely captivated by what sound can do, whether or not he’s outlining a young melody or venturing into his newest celestial fantasy.
At one level in the course of the Brooklyn Music School efficiency, Allen performed his EVI towards a backdrop of close to silence, his gently warped notes twinkling in starlike suspension. The sounds had been lovely however much more so was his sense of sustained engagement — the palpable feeling that, after a century on the planet and greater than 60 years within the orbit of his late, nice bandleader and non secular information, there are nonetheless additional house methods to journey.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com