The Sun Ra 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 Ra Arkestral Institute, a place to practice at all hours, in order to be ready. “One day it will happen,” Sun Ra said at the time. “It could be happening now—that a voice from another dimension will speak to earth. You might as well practice and be prepared for it.” 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 Ra’s leadership, had set out on a course of inter-dimensional travel, using chords and time signatures and equations rather than rocket fuel. Sun Ra died in 1993, and his saxophone players replaced him as director—first John Gilmore, and then Marshall Allen, who last month turned a hundred.
Allen bounded down the stairs to greet a visitor the other day, in between birthday celebrations near and far—near 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, “blown away.”
“Let’s sit here,” Allen said, finding a chair in the Arkestral Institute’s kitchen. A second seat was borrowed from the rehearsal room, where a bust of a pharaoh watched an old drum kit and an upright piano. Allen is lithe and sinewy and, in a Sun Ra T-shirt and cap, didn’t seem much changed from the guy on sax in the seventies or eighties, blowing and chanting and dancing. He reminisced about growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, where, in the nineteen-thirties, at a state institution for Black children, he was given an oboe. “I wanted the clarinet, but they’d run out,” he said.
During the Second World War, he served in the Army’s 92nd Infantry Division, known as the Buffalo Soldiers, and he remembered playing sax in a victory parade in Reims, France, after which, on a general’s recommendation, he studied music at a Paris conservatory. “I saw everybody in Paris,” he said. “Eartha Kitt, James Moody, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker.” Other Arkestra members were knocking around the row house as he talked, and Knoel Scott came into the kitchen. Scott, who has played sax and sung and danced with the Arkestra since 1979, nodded toward Allen when he mentioned Parker. “He played drums for Charlie Parker,” Scott said.
Allen started hanging around Sun Ra after the war, in Chicago, while working at a camera shop. “Sun Ra was a master musician,” Allen said, and by way of explanation he sang a few bars from “Shadow World,” a composition that shifts between time signatures. After Allen expressed interest in his music, Sun Ra asked him to play, a pattern that has continued for the band up through recent members, like Tara Middleton, who started playing violin with the Arkestra in 2012 and is now its singer. Players visited from the neighborhood, too, like Rufus Harley, the jazz bagpiper. Allen went on, “I mean, we’ve been all over the world, all these years, but what’s great about Germantown, see, is it’s nice and quiet, so you can study, and you can play your horn.”
“Marshall Allen, 99, Astronaut,” the film in Venice, shows Allen doing just that, in the row house, working out a tune on his sax, then in the Franklin Institute’s Fels Planetarium. In the planetarium, Allen plays his trademark electronic valve instrument, or E.V.I., a kind of synthesized sax that sounds like communications from deep space. A digital time stamp counts back in time through moon, star, and sun positions, starting a century ago, at May 25, 1924, as Allen, in a sequinned vest, floats through the planetarium’s galaxies. “His energy seems to be a renewable resource,” Mark Christman, the director of Philadelphia’s Ars Nova Workshop, which programs music at Solar Myth, said.
As far as living a century goes, Allen believes that music charted his route, and that it continues to do so, as do Sun Ra’s equations. “Create a better music and you create a better world,” Allen said. “And people hear that. They do. We were talking about the twenty-first century in the twentieth, and people were saying, ‘The twenty-first century? Man, that’s about forty, fifty years from now!’ But now we’re here.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the venue of the Venice video installation.
