To the accompaniment of a chamber section that sounded like it was sliding off the Titanic, a cool-blue guitarist with a Barney Kessel lilt, a grooving walking bassist, a thundering drummer, a squawking trumpeter with a silvery piercing clarity, two piquant vocalists and an old friend conducting their non-Arkestra while maintaining duties on multiple instruments, Marshall Allen played his record-release show at World Cafe Live. After his banging of a ceremonial gong, of course.
That’s a lot to say at one time. Then again, Allen—a Kentucky-born saxophonist who threw in his lot with Sun Ra in 1958 until the pianist’s death/interplanetary passage in 1993 and has resided in the Sun Ra House in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood while presiding over and arranging for the Arkestra as its leader—is doing a lot.
On top of his Arkestra duties and his floating-membership ensemble, Ghost Horizon (which will issue its debut, Live In Philadelphia, in May, featuring James Brandon Lewis, William Parker and members of Yo La Tengo, the War On Drugs, Wolf Eyes and others), Allen is just now getting the chance to shine as brightly as the sequins on his stage outfits with the release of his solo debut, New Dawn, at age 100.
Multi-instrumentalist Allen has released work with other avant-jazz associates, Ra and otherwise, and has even steered additional artists’ albums in the past. But New Dawn feels and sounds like a fresh beginning—something to be celebrated by this night’s 10-piece quirk-estra.
With Arkestra partner Knoel Scott co-conducting this troupe while adjusting Allen’s mic stands (and doubling on flute, roaring baritone saxophone and clarinet), Allen improvised his way through blaring slices of noise on his sax and the Theremin-meets-slide-whistle bird calls of his EWI (electronic wind instrument) during the evening’s quietest moments.
Allen took his time with an intense, calming, alto-sax solo by way of introduction to Sun Ra’s hypnotic classic “Springtime Again,” and he sweetly and sonorously conjured his Chicago roots and friendship with percussionist Babatunde Olatunji, entering the gates of “New Dawn” and its occasional Christmas-music-meets-Wes-Montgomery sway. On the angular bebop of “Sonny’s Dance” (where Allen welcomed his old friend), he created squealing-in-space, multi-chord chaos while ringing his long, bony fingers along his saxophone’s keys as if he were Pete Townshend smashing another guitar. Without the ornate robes of the Arkestra beside him, this brand of violent sax attack appeared all the more vivid and theatrical. That is, however, when Allen wasn’t busy messing around the whirrs and wheeze of his slip-sliding EWI.
Starting the evening with the winged-strings-filled “African Sunset,” Allen and his ensemble struck a buoyant, cloudy balance that lasted throughout the whole of the show: sublimely spiritualized and eerily tumbledown, often within mere breaths of each other or all at once. The rumbling “Are You Ready,” with Bruce Edwards’ fired-up guitars pushed high in the mix, propelled Allen to flights and heights of mad, blasting sax squawking—an improvisational search party where two angry men seem to seek each other out for a duel with a bloody finale. For all the ire conjured by “Are You Ready,” there were (barely) calmer moments such as the highlife sprays of “Boma” and the times when movement-artist/vocalist Ayana Wildgoose took the stage.
To end the set, singer Rochelle Thompson joined the mass for the super-elastic-bubble-plastic funk of New Dawn closer “Angels And Demons At Play.” It led the crowd and the ensemble deep into the recesses of the offshoots of Jupiter, proving, once again, that space is indeed the place where Marshall Allen breathes deepest.
—A.D. Amorosi; photos by Chris Sikich
