Sun Ra’s strange trip to the Egyptian pyramids: “He opened up a tomb”
Where do you even begin with Sun Ra? The world of free and experimental jazz was born out of protest. This was long before punk was a thing, and artists couldn’t be so outrageously outspoken with their music, so people had to get clever. While some listen to free jazz and hear horrible noise, others hear the blueprint to revolution, a manifesto scattered in scathing notes spread across solos and as raw as ever.
Sun Ra was an experimental jazz musician and very much operated within this realm of protest; however, that wasn’t why he said he took a liking to the genre. Sun Ra was convinced that he had been sent to Earth from another world as a messenger, and when he played notes out of key and out of time, he was receiving messages from these superior beings.
“You got to be ready when you play with this band…when the harmonies move in a direction that they seemingly are not supposed to move in and still fit, you got another message from another realm from somebody else, and Superior Beings would definitely speak in other harmonic ways because they’re talking to something different,” he said to Ahmed Abdullah, a trumpeter on his audition for the band, “You have to have chord against chord, melody against melody, and rhythm against rhythm. When you have that, you’re experiencing something else.”
Instead of laughing at the words of his supposedly alien bandleader, he thought there could be some logic in his approach. “It makes sense to me that if the Creator sent anyone here, it would be a person who had mastered music, the planet’s universal language,” he said, “Sound is the beginning of all creation, the Nomma, the Om, and the Nam that direct our lives, the basis for what Sun Ra called a Sound Government.”
No one quite knows the origin of Sun Ra or what higher message he could potentially represent. He is similar to the pyramids in that sense, as while we think we might know how they were created, there are still question marks, and the sceptics among us believe they could represent something much more extraterrestrial. As such, it shouldn’t be surprising that Sun Ra was drawn to them.
Another Sun Ra band member, Knoel Scott, likened the musician to the pyramids and the whole cosmology of ancient Egypt. “The more I study the cosmology of ancient Egypt the more I understand Sun Ra,” he said, “Because I realise that it really was as if he was an Egyptian priest, the concepts that he’s talking about.”
Danny Ray Thompson, saxophonist, recalls when he travelled to Egypt with Sun Ra and how the name Ra evoked a reaction from what should have been dormant surroundings. As well as being the artist’s name, Ra is affiliated with the Sun God and Creator of all other Gods in ancient Egypt.
“Sun Ra said, ‘We going to Egypt’. We stayed in the Mena House Hotel, the most beautiful hotel. It was right by the pyramids. We danced on the Sphinx, and I met the minister of culture, and the minister of antiquities for the region,” he recalled, “So he opened up a tomb for us that had just been excavated, the mummy was still in there, all the hieroglyphics were still on the wall.”
It wasn’t long before they started playing music and improvised a song called ‘Along Came Ra’. “About halfway through us playing, we head something go ‘Mmm…’ So we played it again, and got to the end and heard ‘Mmmm…’” he said, “We also went deep inside the Great Pyramid, said the name ‘Ra’ nine times, and the lights went out and it was unbelievably dark. I told the BBC this story when they came to Philadelphia, and the lights went out in the hotel we were in. I said, ‘I told you it was a true story!’”
