Most people don’t love jazz but those who do probably have a similar progression. On the spectrum of “in” and “out,” people start in and gradually get further “out.” At first, you need splashy cymbals and a tight walking bass to give a sense of coherence, pulse, and beat to the sound. Gradually, you need to rely on these things less and less. Put another way, after you get used to what you’re hearing you’re eager for what’s next, how things stretch from there.

Musicians go through this same progression. John Coltrane is a great example. He played big band jazz, then looser but highly constructed, structured stuff with Monk, then played with Miles and his own quartet in ways that would have seemed very loose and free-form compared to his big band era, but restricted compared to later albums like Ascension. Maybe the simplest way to think about it is that after both musicians and listeners hear the same thing for a while, they get bored and need a change. There’s only so many ways to solo within the changes before something else needs to change.

If I’ve talked to you in the last year or two, you know I am currently very, very in love with the Sun Ra Arkestra. Why? What is its appeal? I’d like to describe it in musical terms but spiritual ones too because that group cannot be explained fully via notes.

I’ve said that the Arkestra represents for me the height of discipline and freedom. This sounds like a cliche so let’s look at this to see precisely what I mean. When the Arkestra wants to be tight, nobody is tighter. With the snap of a finger they can reel off Fletcher Henderson’s big band charts so accurate they include the mistakes musicians made during a live performance. The Arkestra was a huge group, a fixed core with a revolving door of musicians stopping in for days, weeks, months at a time to play with the band, but it was tight.

At the same time, their structure required a certain type of looseness and individual freedom to be what it was. When Arkestra mainstay Marshall Allen first played for Sun Ra, Ra asked him to just play, to test his spirit. There was no music in front of him and he wasn’t playing any song. Anyone who has ever heard one of Allen’s remarkable alto solos knows this spirit. You can’t transcibe what he plays. It’s grunts and high-pitched squeeks and squaks that seem impossible to produce from an alto saxophone, even though overblowing a horn was a technique Coltrane used too, which he heard from 50s RnB players. Allen’s playing took me a while to appreciate, and seeing him play makes it make a lot more sense than just hearing it would have. I wasn’t sure it was even “music,” but part of Ra’s freedom is being in the realm of sound, not notes deriving from a scale.

Sun Ra’s music doesn’t just span the entire musical spectrum; it expands it, making me realize just how varied, rich, wonderful music can be. He’s like the Shakespeare of music, encompassing every mood and character with unmatched technique.

When I listen now to the groups who were my favourite a few years ago–70s Miles fusion and Parliament Funkadelic–they seem almost limited, staid, and small. I still love them dearly! It’s not their fault, everyone seems small compared to the Arkestra. They’re a force that goes deeper and started what everyone else is doing.

Miles got rid of the European-tailored suits because his girlfriend, a beautiful model and killer musician (whose music I also love) Betty Davis told him it wasn’t hip. P Funk bought a lot of their stage wardrobe on Toronto’s Yonge Street, but only after Ra spent years talking about space and looking otherworldly on stage with homemade wardrobes that looked absolutely beautiful.

Ra had multiple dancers at his shows, half-hour long percussion solos, an impossible range of horns and percussion instruments and synths and other keyboard instruments. It’s like his engine never stopped or slowed. His music in the 50s is different than the 80s and 90s, but no less inspired. You can listen or even watch his band play and ask yourself, “what is that instrument?”

His freedom is multi-dimensional. There’s the space concept, the wardrobe, and motion on stage, the way his musicians will walk off stage and break the barrier between audience and musician, or even walk off stage at the end of the show, still playing their instruments. His freedom is also embodied by his just off kilter harmonies, the instrumentation, the time signatures and the shifts, the way instruments can shift ahead and behind the beat, sometimes within the same songs. The chanty songs have a type of tight drawl yet also a kind of upbeat or off-beat quality at the same time that I just love. To Nature’s God comes to mind, a beautiful song praising elements of nature.

It sounds sometimes like all the musicians are playing a different song all at once, but that’s just because they’re playing melodically at the same time, rather than a few people doing chords or vamping to support one soloist at a time. If chords are frozen arpeggios and arpeggios are melted chords, then their solos imply a world of chords or tone. They live within the in-between worlds. It’s kind of a game, to playfully mask or hide the structure, or whatever the key is that opens up the song’s hidden core, and delight in finding it, or feeling it. You don’t need to think about all this music, sometimes it just makes you feel instinctively very good! It can really swing and have a strong sense of melody. But other times it can be extremely dark, dissonant, and you wonder just what this cacophony even is. I’m shocking myself lately by liking this latter mode more than I ever thought I would.

Many of the Arkestra’s musicians lived together, a communal existence that let them rehearse and play 24 hours a day. It kept them out of trouble and simplified meals. Despite being leaders in American jazz who got a wonderful reception in European cities, they never made a ton of money. They needed cash. Yet they were incredibly prolific, putting out over 200 albums, some on Ra’s own record label, Saturn Records.

When publishing a new Saturn album, Ra would hand each band member a few copies, and together they’d do crafts around the kitchen table, drawing on the covers in markers and taping photocopied type-written notes about what songs were on each recording. It was incredibly DIY and resourceful! For laminate, they’d use transparent shower curtains. These hand-decorated, one-of-a-kind records were sold at concerts for cheap and are now some of the most prized collectibles in the world of vinyl. A VG copy of Lanquidity goes for $1,500 cdn. Discipline 27-II went for $1,200 at a store near me.

I’d love to own such a collector’s item not for the monetary value (I’d never, never sell it), but to know that exact album passed through the band’s hands. It’s impossible to imagine a group of artists more commited to their vision. These guys lived the life day in and day out for years. The band started in the 1950s and, while Ra left the planet in 1993, the Arkestra still plays today under the leadership of 100-year-old Marshall Allen.

The spirituality and vision underpinning the music comes from Ra’s imagination and his readings into mythology, the occult, history, numerology, and lots else. For all the out-there strange ideas, it’s also filled with humour, playfulness, and it’s extremely sweet. Ra might have insisted he was from the angel race from Saturn and not a human being, but his music is extremely concerned with people, or maybe as he’d put it, Earthlings. It’s Black music, 100%, but it’s for everyone, too. I read somewhere it’s like Count Basie meets Thelonious Monk and this feels true, but maybe inadequate.

I’m totally floored by the Arkestra’s talent, vision, their raw force, their commitment, their range. It’s exquisite art on many dimensions that’s inspiring and very calming. There are initial barriers to accessing some of their music that once overcome will change the way you appreciate music forever and even your life.

I’ve been obsessed with music from a young age but, in a way, feel like I’m hearing music now for the first time. I hope this isn’t my final musical epiphany in my life and don’t see how it won’t be, yet this band has shown me that musical possibilities are as endless and vast as the cosmos themselves. I feel like I could write more words about each particular album of theirs I love, even each song–it’s extremely difficult to write concretely about such an ever-shifting musical behemoth. Suffice it to say, for me, the Sun Ra Arkestra is more like a miracle than just music.