“In the gap between expectations and consequences, there lies history. And here is history documented without edits: all the sounds of the encounter between one of modern music’s most insightful, iconoclastic theorists and one of its most outlandishly original visionaries, held in view of the Atlantic while beachgoers sauntered by. Cage and Sun Ra, both outliers to conventions, had arrived at this point from very different paths, with no reported previous contact and very little commercial or social overlap. Yet, they’d both asserted powerful influence on the arts in their shared era, and the influence of both artists endures – as over 30 years ago we thought would be the case. So if you heard then that John Cage was meeting Sun Ra in Coney Island, you wanted to be there, too. Now you are.” – Howard Mandel
While the music of this meeting between John Cage and Sun Ra was released in 2016, Record Store Day 2019 saw the first release of the video recording of their fateful performance.
Recorded live in 1982 on VHS tape, the film itself is incredibly vernacular. It honestly looks like a home video. It’s a single camera on a tripod. The camera operator zooms in and out somewhat randomly while the camera itself auto adjusts to compensate for the drastic change in lighting. Sometimes they pan out across the audience seated in a dark warehouse on Coney Island. The audio was from a separate tape, but it cuts in and out, often times desyncing from the video: relaying the artifacts of the live performance and adequate equipment.
It’s magnificent.
Personally, I adore vernacular photography. It shows everything I love about the medium: the honesty and the low barrier of entry. After listening to the 2016 release of the Hy Maya album The Mysticism of Sound & Cosmic Language, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to experience arthouse happenings in a recorded format is through bootlegs. When the tape saturates, when the film skips, when the preamps clip, it’s accidental and honest. For me, someone whose early childhood was recorded straight to VHS, there’s an element of nostalgia to this presentation as well. This medium has always shown me things that have happened, but I’ve never remembered.
It’s not glossy; it’s not perfect, and it shouldn’t be. Their performance wasn’t glossy and perfect. Live recordings of these styles of music are incredibly interesting.
Performance art is a temporal medium. It exists as it happens and then never again.
Live music is a performance art. A recording of that doesn’t devalue it, in my opinion, but there is a different sort of appreciation for the flaws.
If this was a studio recording, and there were the same audio issues, you might ask, “Why didn’t they fix that?” With a live recording, the answer is “Because that’s how it happened.” For a recording of performance art, it needs to show how it happened, honestly.
The performance itself was interesting from the very beginning. I’ll refer back to Mandel’s liner notes for your description:
“Rick Russo, who, with his partner Bronwyn Rucker, [had] produced the entire affair … banged a drum to call the proceedings to order. A bare-chested black man with a hieroglyphics-marked terry cloth towel wrapped around his middle walked onto the cheaply draped stage holding a bowl of smoking incense in one palm, clasping an ankh with his other fist. Right behind him was Marshall Allen, Ra’s longtime alto saxophone-playing lieutenant.
Allen raised an oblong metal wind synthesizer … to his lips and blew a fanfare as crude and arresting as a blast from a ram’s horn, leaping immediately to blunt and piercing extremes of pitch and timbre. Then out came Ra, in a purple tunic with silver foil sleeves, a star-studded cloth cap on his head so that only a fringe of orange-dyed hair peeked out from over his ears. A tuft of neatly trimmed orange beard decorated his second chin. Alongside him was Cage, dressed as usual in faded blue jeans and grey jacket over a blue denim work shirt. Cage sat a card table, leaning in towards a mic on a stand. Ra stationed himself about four feet to Cage’s right, directly facing the audience from behind his Yamaha DX7 keyboard.” – Howard Mandel
From there the two took turns performing their pieces. Ra improvised synth solos, and performed poetry. Cage performed passages from his text Empty Words.
To be honest, if you don’t know who these people are, this will sound like noise to you. So, I’ll make an attempt to begin to remedy that.
John Cage was born in 1912 and was formally trained on piano in his youth. Around the age of 21 he began to work with Arnold Schoenberg, and their friendship and collaboration continued for many years.
Cage first became popular with his invention of the prepared piano: a modified piano that created new sounds by placing screws and other objects between the strings.
In the 1950s, Cage started to investigate the idea of indeterminacy within music. “Indeterminacy in music” is when some aspect of the performance of a piece is intentionally left to chance. Three well known pieces from Cage’s beginning with this are Imaginary Landscape No. 4, Music of Changes, and 4’33”.
Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is a piece for twelve radios with two performers a piece. The performers have to tune the radios to specific frequencies in time, following all of the articulations Cage had written. With this piece, Cage had wanted to rid the sounds that were being performed of his biases. There was no way anyone would know what was going to come out of the radio. However, the piece is still composed by him. He had written a full score for it, even if it wasn’t a traditional one.
Music of Changes was different. For this one Cage had created a chart of notes, sounds, articulations, etcetera. Then he used the I Ching, a traditional Chinese divination tool, to determine which ones would be performed.
4’33” was a piece where the performer was instructed not to play their instrument for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. There is a lot that could be said about this piece, and I will defer to the YouTube channels, Adam Neely and Sideways, instead of just repeating their talking points.
While these are landmark pieces in Cage’s career, he continued to write for years and continued to perform until his arthritis deteriorated too much.
In 1974, Cage released the book Empty Words. When he performed these passages on stage with Sun Ra, it was mostly unaccompanied. He sang/chanted what sounded like vocables: inherently meaningless syllables commonly found in Scat Singing and Native American Music.
Conceptually, Cage created this piece by taking sections from The Journals of Henry David Thoreau and used the I Ching to first remove sentences, then phrases, then words, and finally syllables. Cage first performed Empty Words in Milan in 1977, infamous for the rowdy crowd that tormented Cage until he won them over with his tenacity.
Sun Ra was born in 1914, and was somewhat of a child prodigy. By the age of 11 or 12 he was already composing and sight reading music. As he grew up in Birmingham, he saw many different Jazz musicians stop through and perform.
He spent his early career playing in big bands in Birmingham. He left college after his “Trip to Saturn” reinvigorated with purpose to perform music. In 1945 he moved to Chicago and started his career there.
Ra’s Chicago Era was referred to as “Cosmic Jazz”. He continued playing in Big Bands, but he drew influence from bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz. One good reference is his album, Jazz in Silhouette (1959)
Ra moved to New York in late 1961, a few months away from the release of Ornette Coleman’s landmark album, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation was released. As the Jazz scene changed, so too did Sun Ra’s music. His New York Era is categorized as being much more experimental. Incorporating new technologies such as tape delays and synthesizers. Ra was one of the first proponents of electric keyboards. He even received a prototype minimoog synthesizer from Robert Moog. In this era of Ra’s music, he began to include more percussionists, and had most of his musicians double on a different instrument. The focus on rhythmic elements and the use of electronic instruments are trends that would follow into the Jazz Fusion movement in the late 60s and early 70s. A good example of this era for Sun Ra would be The Magic City (1966)
In 1968, Sun Ra moved to Philadelphia. Again, as the scene changed, so did Sun Ra. For the most part, he settled into a more conventional sound, however his career was incredibly prolific and varied. Ra also took a larger interest in Egyptian culture and symbology. He spent a fair amount of time in Egypt as well, releasing several live albums from tours there, such as Nidhamu and Live in Egypt 1. A couple of good studio albums from this era are Atlantis (1969) and Some Blues But Not the Kind That’s Blue (1977).
Around the time of his performance with John Cage, Sun Ra released quite a few albums. Of the studio albums, Ra released Aurora Borealis (1980), A Fireside Chat With Lucifer (1982), Celestial Love (1982), and Nuclear War (1982). Of Live albums, he released the well received Sunrise in Different Dimensions (1980), Beyond the Purple Star Zone (1981), Dance of Innocent Passion (1981), and Oblique Parallax (1982). Each one could help you understand what his career sounded like at this point.
If you hadn’t noticed, Sun Ra was one of the first proponents of Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is media created at the intersection of Science Fiction and the culture of the African Diaspora. Other musicians have followed in Ra’s footsteps: Parliament, notably with the album Mothership Connection, and Janelle Monae, whose discography consists mostly of sci-fi concept albums.
The music released in 2016 can be found here.
In this performance, Sun Ra performs a series of improvised synth solos. Each as equally confusing as the last. He’ll change the timbre of his synth and then react accordingly, drastically changing what he’s performing. He also reads poetry, futuristic and hopeful for that future to be with knowledge and free of the struggles of the past. There is a performance of “Enlightenment” with June Tyson, somehow farther outside than Ra’s improvisations and Cage’s words.
Inbetween, Cage reads his Empty Words. A broken, shattered version of language often pausing in expressive silence.
If you listen to this, you may ask, “What’s the point?”
For me personally, it’s about the sounds. I really liked whenever Sun Ra would change synth sounds just so I could see what he would do with it. While Cage’s words may have seemed more limited, I was on the edge of my seat wondering not only what he was going to do next but when he was going to do it.
You could see this as commentary on the madness of war. This concert happened less than a decade after the end of the Vietnam War. The Cold War was still in full force. The US had boycotted the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. Carter’s SALT II plan to slow down the arms race between the US and USSR had been undermined. Reagan was in his second year of office. Over the next 5 years, the US would raise its military spending to the highest it ever had during peacetime. Berlin was still split in two. Gorbachev wouldn’t take office for another 5 years.
The language for this already exists. Whether it’s Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Ligeti’s Volumina, Dadaism, or other, similar works presented in Hitler’s Entartete Kunst. Many of these works seem to ask, “If that can be normal, why can’t this?”
Sun Ra himself was outspoken against war. He claimed to be a conscientious objector to the draft in World War 2. He served jail time after refusing to work in an alternate service, still standing by his moral obligations against war.
You could also see it as a celebration of the weird. A couple of guys follow a shirtless man holding a censure and an ankh onto a stage at Coney Island. They proceed to make noises for over an hour to a captive audience. This show was put on by an experimental art group in New York. These musicians could have done something more accessible, but that wasn’t the audience. Happenings like this are absurd, so why not have fun with it?
I recently realized that the fact that something was made means that it has a purpose.
It’s up to us, the audience, to understand it, and, if you don’t understand a work of art, that says as much about you as it does the work.
I love Jackson Pollock, because I hate Jackson Pollock. At the end of the day, Jackson Pollock was just some guy smoking cigarettes throwing paint on the ground.
However, at the end of the day, every painter was just someone throwing paint around.
Every photographer was just someone who happened to be there.
Every musician is just someone who walks on stage and makes noise.
Art is a discussion, and it’s important for the audience of this film to understand. I may have written quite a bit about all of this, but I don’t even feel like I fully understand it. In some way I know the words, but not what they’re saying.
Art is a discussion. With popular media, we know what they’re saying because we’ve seen it. We’ve heard it on radios or on Spotify. We’ve seen it in theaters or on YouTube. The average American audience member won’t get this film, and so, it’s important to understand why anyone bothered with this. With blockbuster films appealing to the lowest common denominator, the answer is easy: money.
Art is a discussion, and, especially with niche content like this, you need to figure out what questions are being asked, why, and what the answers are. You need to figure out who asked the questions before, why, and what their answers were. You should look to see who is going to ask these questions later, why, and what new things they have to say.
Art is a discussion, but, if you look at one piece out of context, all you hear are empty words.