Musicians Vie For A Spot On The Arkestra
Musicians Vie For A Spot On The Arkestra
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Musicians Vie For A Spot On The Arkestra 10 spots available for a residency with the late Sun Ra's legendary band. Correspondent a.d. amorosi reports Thurs., September 21, 3:00 AM EDT http://www.sonicnet.com/news/story.jhtml?genreNameForDisplay=Jazz&genreDirectoryName=jazz&id=1124296
PHILADELPHIA — On a rainy Tuesday night, about 15 to 20 members of Philadelphia's musical elite lined up at the Painted Bride Arts Center for the privilege of auditioning for a one-month residency with the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Ten slots — mainly strings and some flutes — were being considered. Those chosen will be paid to participate in three residency workshops in December and will perform in the Painted Bride's yearly Arkestra-led New Year's Eve festival.
Saxophonist Marshall Allen, who has been a member of Germantown, Pa.'s Arkestra since the mid-'50s and who has run it since Sun Ra died in 1993, led the auditions along with his assistant Knoell Scott, an alto saxophonist and 20-year Arkestra veteran.
"What I was looking for are players with a clean sense of time regardless of interpretation," Scott said. "People who are musically proficient to grasp what Marshall wanted them to play. Marshall can work with anybody, but we needed — for the sake of expediency — someone with attitudinal receptibility."
Translation: To play in the Arkestra, you need to have open ears and an open mind.
Not all the musicians trying out Tuesday night felt confident that they got the concept.
No Time To Time
One guitarist, a talented flickering-fingered jazz-type who seemed at ease with the material, asked Scott for a metronome.
"The heart is a metronome," Scott replied. "The melody, the breathing, dictates timing."
Later Scott elaborated: "If you call yourself a musician, timing is innate. It's part of the African context. True rhythm undulates. Like a yin and yang. Like a ship."
Gloria Justin — an avant violinist known for playing in experimental DJ-backed noise outfit Slipping Into Sublimnity as well as for working with the Philadelphia Orchestra — said, "I play classical professionally. I'm not a jazz player. I wasn't quite sure what they were looking for. I'm not certain they were sure either. I think they're looking for a diverse string session to play songs as opposed to improvisations. I would have liked it if it was more spaced-out, like their records."
Violinist Bianca Gallagher felt Allen and Scott didn't care for her intonation. "They were nice about it. But I don't think they liked what I was doing."
This was not a typical audition process. Marshall and Scott organized the hopefuls into informal groups, adding or removing participants at will. Some were politely asked to pack up, others stayed throughout the evening.
The hopefuls had to jump in behind Allen's sub-tone-then-squeal saxophone playing on his own tunes like "New Dawn," "Thoughts" and "Firefly," and on Sun Ra's "My Sweet." While Allen stalked the stage as good cop, Scott was bad cop, leading violins, cellos, basses, harp, mandolin, guitars, the occasional flute and the singular contrabass clarinet through Allen's arrangements. Allen and Scott both sported T-shirts with the Sun Ra slogan "Space Is the Place."
'Universal, Demanding Music'
Pairing top-level musicians with lesser-known, talented locals was the idea of the Painted Bride's jazz/world music curator Lenny Seidman. In the past he has hosted residencies with tabla master Zakir Hussain, saxophonist David Murray, cornetist/conductor Butch Morris and others.
When the Doris Duke Foundation and the NEA invited Seidman to vie for an educational grant, he came up with the idea for the Sun Ra residency.
"When you leave an Arkestra show, you're glad to be alive," Seidman said. "It's universal, demanding music."
Seidman was impressed that so many women showed up to audition.
"Historically, except for vocalists and dancers, the Arkestra has never had any women in it. I like it. It breaks down sexual and gender barriers. I'm as happy as many women showed up as I am sad more men didn't."
Actually, female players have occasionally performed with the Arkestra — violinist India Cooke, for example — but these are rare cases.
The auditions worked best when a team of young strings — black and white; male and female; cello, bass and violin — jammed as one behind Allen, sounding as woozy and interplanetary as the best of Sun Ra. Once a lead string came together, all else followed: Marshall's alto, Scott's alto, everything.
"They were good musicians," Allen said, confident in his evening's work. "There was no conflict. I really did feel at one with this crew immediately. The same track. The music's about projecting a feeling, not reading well."
Allen and Scott seemed impressed at how proficiently a string section came together without ever having seen or read the music previously.
"So many tunes I've written, I've written to a keyboard on 'string' mode," Allen said, laughing. "Push a button. Sounds like one violin. Now, here I was able to hear all these strings at once. And it was beautiful."
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