Book Review: Alternative Identities on New Shores

Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City

William Sites

University of Chicago Press

What is the music of the Great Lakes? Is it clear-sounding balladic odes to the trees and the water? Mournful shanties ringing with cold and rust? Is it rural, the sounds of logging camps and small towns and supper clubs and fish fries? Is it Germanic, is it Swedish, is it polka? Is it, imagined both broadly and narrowly, both for lack of a better word and absolutely precisely, white?

The question, which is also “what is the Great Lakes region?” dovetails with a broader question about the Midwest. These questions usually are answered with state-specific cartography (“is North Dakota in the Midwest?”) or are more vague and based in values, either stiflingly religious or more ecumenically Rockwellian. But they usually ignore the actual heart of the Midwest and the Great Lakes: the cities.

When you recognize that the cities shape the region, and that the lakes shape the cities, you see the region as much more diverse and wild and unpredictable. You understand that regions are made up of millions of people intersecting in strange ways, influencing each other unpredictably. You hear the sounds of the Great Lakes in a different way.

The Cleveland proto-punk scene is Great Lakes music. Motown is the sound of the Great Lakes. And even the strangest sounds of them all, that of Sun Ra and His Arkestra, the impossible-to-define primeval-cosmic oddball-transcendent jazz, is in many ways a product of Chicago, and the lake over which it looms.

The influence that the area had on the music of Sun Ra is explored by William Sites in Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City. This is both a biography of Sun Ra’s early years, a look at a community and intellectual heritage which isn’t often discussed, and the way that a culture and a milieu shaped one of the 20th century’s most idiosyncratic artists. The book serves both as a guide to music and a look at Chicago’s post-war Black community and its intellectual heritage, far woolier and more interesting than allowed for in normal histories.

Sun Ra, born Sonny Blount, grew up in Birmingham, and Sites takes us through his early years. Birmingham was a southern town marred by the violent grotesqueries of the early 20th-century. It was also a place with a vibrant Black community with a thriving business and music scene. These aren’t contradictions, and Sites doesn’t present them as such, calling it “a strange alchemy of modernity and mythology, of white supremacy and black autonomy.” Beauty can bloom in hemmed-in places, but there are rules, and looming threats at every sentence.

Sites shows the musical education of Blount, an oddball who, in the strictures of Birmingham, had not quite developed into an eccentric. For that, he’d have to follow the path of the Great Migration, and make it to Chicago.

Chicago in the 1940s was a city transformed by the migration of Black Americans from the south to the cities of the Midwest. It had been a little more than 20 years since the horrific “race riots” of 1919, started when white beachgoers drowned a Black teenager who had floated into the unofficial segregated zone of the 29th Street Beach on the south side.

The spasms of retaliatory violence killed dozens, and also exposed the ugliness of a city whose racial demography had been altered by the Migration. The south side was largely white, Irish and Polish and Bohemian, its citizens the characters that populate the works of James T. Farrell (who saw clearly how corrosive racism was to its victims and to the racists themselves). But it was changing, and by the time Sonny Blount got to Chicago in 1946, white flight was underway, and the Bronzeville neighborhood was a center of Black culture not just in the region but the country, a rival to Harlem.

Here the book starts to tackle three related but distinct ideas. One is the racial and political composition of Chicago’s south side, an always interesting subject. This is not the primary area of Sites’s concern, though it is vital to understanding the education of Blount.

The second is the jazz scene in Chicago and the broader region. Sites does a wonderful job of situating you in Blount’s position, getting gigs at the famous Club DeLisa, going around the region when work was dry. Sites paints an exciting, living picture of the Black nightlife corridor west of Washington Park, with many clubs and restaurants, an all-night strip for both celebrities and south side locals.

It’s not just the scene that Sites explores, but the music itself. Emerging from the Big Band era, the cool perfection of Duke Ellington mixed with more rustic, southern sounds, what Sites refers to as “Jim Crow nostalgia.” While there was tension between the two, new sounds started to come that encompassed more of the Black experience, bringing together different ideas. As a history of the Black south side, and as an ethnomusicographical tract, Sites work would be extremely valuable, both in and of itself and as a biography of Blount.

But where the book really sings, so to speak, is showing how the non-music culture allowed Sonny Blount to turn into Sun Ra, the Egyptian-bedecked bandleader who took his listeners to space and was an Afrofuturist before that had a name.

Let’s go into Washington Park. This is a sprawling park that, in Blount’s time and today, separates the Black community from the University of Chicago. But the park is not a wall. It is a lively place filled with picnics and softball and couples holding hands and kids yelling and playing and growing and bursting, then and now. Farrell’s characters had football games and first kisses there, and the same happens now. And in Blount’s time, as in the past, it was the Bughouse Square, a place where people gave speeches, had arguments, exchanged ideas, and expanded minds.

And man, was Blount’s mind ready to expand. It was here he truly encountered the ideas of Black nationalism, of Marcus Garvey, of the Nation of Islam, and most importantly, of how Black futures can be built out of the diasporic experience.

An extremely admirable thing about Sites’s book is that he recognizes the understandable need for a teleology around Bronzeville, a straight line from the horrors of redlining and police violence and cruel slumlords in the Black Belt to the triumphs of the Civil Rights Era. He recognizes the story, but wants to let you know that things were weirder. Way weirder. You had people looking at Egyptian texts and creating whole diasporic myths, with occult digressions incomprehensible except to the initiated, and people like Blount grabbing the challenging past and flinging it into the stars.

Why? Because Chicago was a rough place, with the same racism as Birmingham but some more freedom. Different challenges and more opportunities hemmed in by the same cruelties. But these different outlines allowed for more variants of bloom, unexpected patterns, obscure beauties.

That’s how Sun Ra was born. Blount was charged with these ideas and transformed them into some of the strangest music the 20th-century produced. It’s not inherently challenging, his sounds are accessible, bringing in old traditions of fresh-sounding singers invoking dreamy slogans, tailing off into strange dreamscapes. He sounds like the old records being played on a spaceship. There’s something both comforting and disorienting about his music. It’s filled with humor but is dead-serious about his mission. He wants to harness the Black experience, grab the heroism borne from the inflicted horrors, and show that a better future was possible. A cosmic future. A revelation that the constellations were reflections of African kingdoms, ready to rise again.

It’s pretty impossible to sum up Ra’s music, though when you think about how he named his band the grandiose, galactic, genuflecting, and just plain goofy The Arkestra, you get a sense of it. Sites knows that no description can do it justice, and this review certainly won’t try.

What Sites does, as a great service, is show how this indescribable weirdness can come to be, and how a city and culture and how migration and and history and a million different experiences and interpretations and lives can mix and mingle to create a man who created beauty for which I am grateful.

The story of Chicago — the story of the region — is this amalgamation. Sites mentions that Blount took an apartment at the heart of the Black corridor, at 5414 S. Prairie, just west of Washington Park. On the other side of the park was my dad, not 10 years old, living at 955 E. 61st. You could cut through the park and be there in 20 minutes. Sun Ra and my preteen dad were practically neighbors, a realization I have with a kind of giddy joy.

And yet, unsurprisingly, neither Sun Ra nor his experiences nor the heart of Black nightlife ever came up in my dad’s stories of running around and causing mischief with his friends. My dad probably ran past the Bughouse Square prophets in Washington Park, and never heard a word they said.

Cities don’t have to be defined by their direct connections. They are made up of a million intersections. Sometimes they just bump into each other without measurable impact. And sometimes, like with Sonny Blount bouncing off the wild heresies of Chicago in the 40s and transforming into Sun Ra, they create something new and revolutionary.

Every city contains millions of stories. Every region has its contradictions. The Great Lakes have austere Swedish lumberjack worksongs and the Afrofuturistic cosmic voyages of Sun Ra. These aren’t contradictory. They aren’t in opposition. The tides complement. The vastness refuses to be defined. The sounds and the songs might not always be comprehensible, but in their cosmic humanity, they make a kind of beautiful sense.