Sun Ra Arkestra at Tri-C JazzFest 2025

Sun Ra Arkestra
Mimi Ohio Theatre
Tri-C JazzFest
Cleveland, OH
June 27, 2025

When is a band not a ghost band? It is a question posed by a Cleveland jazz media figure after a performance by the Sun Ra Arkestra on the first full day of the Tri-C JazzFest, and it was a fair one on the surface.

Here, after all, is a big band founded in the '50s that had no original members on stage (101-year-old Marshall Allen, who seldom travels these days, was absent) and played repertoire from the band's glory years. Check, check and check.

Yet the purpose of ghost bands is to give the people what they want, playing familiar arrangements in a rote manner, inspiration optional. They are economic vehicles, squeezing the last drops out of the orange by perpetuating a brand that has long since lost any legible meaning. Ask yourself: What place does the music of Tommy Dorsey have in contemporary culture?

The music of Sun Ra, and Afrofuturism, the philosophy of which it is an embodiment, has never been more pervasive and inspirational than it is right now. Looking down from Saturn (or wherever he is), its creator is surely smiling.

As for inspiration, how else to explain why, during a chugging reading of "Big John's Special," 68-year-old Knoel Scott set down his alto saxophone, ripped off his silver lamé cape with a theatrical flourish and began leaping across the stage apron?

And Scott was not even the oldest player on the stand. That honor went to French hornist Vincent Chancey, 75, who boarded the spaceship in 1976. Reed thin and dignified, he introduced "Tapestry from An Asteroid" with an unaccompanied solo made poignant by an occasional cracked note. At 72, trumpeter Michael Ray, who first joined in 1978, was another vital connection to the Arkestra's past.

Scott led the Arkestra in Allen's absence. Conducting from his seat in the three-man saxophone section, his gestures often seemed to respond to the music more than guide it. He clearly felt the spirit.

He channeled it too. Picking up his baritone saxophone, Scott announced, "Now me and this young man about to go at it," then ripped through "Two Tones," a locomotive bebop line for two baritones composed by Pat Patrick and Charles Davis around 1957. He and the band's bari player Anthony Nelson , resplendent in a pharaonic nemes headdress, flung 'come at me' volleys at each other and traded with longtime drummer George Gray, whose sinewy beat was the Arkestra's connective tissue throughout.

Vocalist Tara Middleton, majestic in a Lady Liberty crown, was a regal presence amid the spectacle of the band's set. She established the evening's guiding principle by declaring in the opening number, "We're living in the space age." Indeed we are, in a universe that Sun Ra brought into being. His body may have departed for other planes of there, but his music and spirit live on. He is no ghost.

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