Astro-Afro Style

                                                         

February is Black History Month, and if there’s one thing I’ve always enjoyed about black culture is that early Seventies phenomenon of Astro-Afro style. This was a fashion trend that really hit its stride after the psychedelic glam of the Sixties. Some of the great style icons of this genre were Miles Davis, Parliament/Funkadelic led by George Clinton, Labelle, the OG space man Sun Ra, and a host of others too numerous to mention. I’m pretty sure that if Jimi Hendrix had survived 1971 he probably would have jumped that Space Ship.
                                                               

There’s even a movie that showcased Astro-Afro style, George Armitage’s insane “Darktown Strutters”, featuring a gang of female bikers dressed in their flashiest space drag. It was a sign of the times, a new style shoe-horned somewhere in between the psychedelic and disco era. What brought on this bizarre trend? Well:

1. An escape from the prejudice and stereotyping run rampant by society in search of a freer fantasy land. As Sun Ra expressed so well in his poem “Imagination”, “We came from Nowhere Here – why can’t we go Somewhere There?”
                                                                
2. Next to blaxploitation the most popular films that played in black theaters were science fiction films like The Omega Man (starring the great Rosalind Cash), Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes – all starring Mister Moses, Charlton Heston!, THX-1138, and a little bit later Logan’s Run and Capricorn One, all movies that employed more black actor and actresses than any other genre at the time. 
                                             

While I’m a big fan of glam fashion I’m also a huge fan of progressive, stretched-out music and many of the musicians listed above did not disappoint. It’s this pursuit of exploring new sounds that almost seems quaint in this day and age of crass and calculated junk that calls itself music.
                         

Hey! Hey! Hey! It's Black History Month

The first time I saw Rahsaan Roland Kirk he was performing at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan. I ran out and bought "Volunteered Slavery" when it first came out (in 1969) and three years later I was going to finally catch him in the wild, so to speak. He was a chunky guy with an even chunkier pair of sunglasses on. A very young guy helped him towards the center of the stage. Kirk wore a dashiki and had several horns and noisemakers, even the joke shop variety, hanging from his neck.

"I smoked so much pot on the way here I was blinder than a bat's asshole", Kirk joked, killing any guilt over paying to see a blind man perform. He then proceeded to play three saxes at once and blow whistles out of his incredibly huge gorilla nostrils. When he got winded on the raunch he'd filter down to sweet ballads in the Coltrane mode.

Five years later I hung out on the Long Beach boardwalk after a punk rock show, and I saw a familiar guy being lead by his assistant to a car in the distance - it was definitely Rahsaan Roland Kirk !(he must have been to The Lighthouse). He was so stoned he probably was blinder than a bat's asshole.



I saw Sun Ra's monstrous big band at Myron's Ballroom in downtown LA, then at The Palomino in North Hollywood (a Country & Western music bar), and finally at Slug's New York. Slug's was the smallest of the clubs Sun Ra performed at, but maybe the weirdest. At some point in his set he turned and smiled at me like he knew me from the other shows. (I stood in the back at those shows!)

The very first Sun Ra album I bought was "Nothing Is" on ESP-Disk, a label as mysterious and creepy as Mr. Ra-Mr. Ree-Mr. Mystery was. I bought the record in 1972 when I was at a crossroads in my life, trying to grow up and look for some guidance. Sun Ra and his messages of escaping the white darkness of Planet Earth was awe-inspiring to me.

Shortly before my brother-in-law passed away he told Rebecca of a dream he had where an old black man in furs and a cape dressed in gold met him in the desert and told him that he had nothing to fear. I said that he met Sun Ra. "It's the RA! It's Sun Ra!" This was 1996, and Ra had already departed the atmosphere three years earlier. When I told my in-laws it was Sun Ra they thought I was insane. Some people have trouble accepting the vision of Ra.



Jazz music is the only art form basically built by telepathy: the musicians completely communicate via their instruments and know precisely when to come in and when to stop without exchanging any words whatsoever. It's uncanny; a look is all it takes for the tempo to change or a small sound from a string bass and the key changes. There are no other art forms as telepathic as jazz.

Being a Jewish teenager in the Seventies was intense. Black people were finally making some serious money and moving into our neighborhood, making everyone nervous. School teachers and neighborhood leaders were telling me that black people were insane, wild beasts, which was ridiculous. My heroes at the time were guys like Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and Eric Dolphy, jazz geniuses who weren't even accepted by their own people because they were "so stretched out". But I didn't care: Their music offered me an escape from the bonds of my insane environment, and their personal philosophy was about elevating to a higher plane, not with drugs, but with an evangelical crusade of love for God via atonal music. The message was absolutely awesome.

That Gutbucket Beat

Punk rock couldn't compete with the explosion in my teenage life of seeing Rahsaan Roland Kirk on stage at Carnegie Hall kicking beer cans off the stage, blind at birth, blowing three saxophones at once, and me young terrified young kid thinking, "This is what life is all about, a cool shit blind motherfucker blowing three horns at once!" Even real-time sex or superhype cocaine couldn't compete with this rush, baby.

One year later I saw Sun Ra, grizzled old spaceman drag genius with his big band, all ninety years old blowing nightmares and daydreams on their space horns and realizing God kissed them on their ear drums and they're sending it home to us Earthlings.

I remember Miles Davis pacing up and down the stage like a caged black panther at the Greek Theatre while LAPD helicopters were flying above trying to kill his frequency and failing, his electric trumpet sending messages to my cerebrum, "The frequency cannot be cancelled - you must submit".

The following year I saw Ornette Coleman with his double electric band playing harmolodics, which is like a mobius strip of jazz with a trash disco beat. Blowing a plastic alto saxophone, the hypnotic signal transmitting messages to my Earthboy mind, "The frequency will not be broken - you will join us and communicate".

After coping with losing my mother, an absentee father and Rabbis screaming at me all day in Hebrew school I knew I could find solace in my wise black hipster guardians from the bop dimension. For every day of my life, jazz has led the way towards my galactic salvation.