Music is a plane of wisdom, because music is a universal language, it is a
language of honor, it is a noble precept, a gift of Airy
Kingdom, music is air, a universal existence…common to all the
living.
Music is existence, the key to the universal language.
Because it is the universal language.
Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Music
Sun Ra
I was trying to recall the first time I saw Sun Ra and his Arkestra, so I started digging through my various Sun Ra ephemera. I found this May 1990 ticket from a Koncepts Cultural Gallery show. This is probably one of the first Sun Ra concert I attended. It changed my life.
Besides the sheer spectacle of music and dancing, there were a few things that struck me that first time seeing the Arkestra. Of course, there was the awe of finally seeing Sun Ra, having been reading about him in The Wire for years. However, the real surprise was how struck I was by the spirits of John Gilmore and June Tyson.
The calm and quiet strength of John Gilmore was dramatic (I’ll cover John Gilmore a little later in our journey).
He worked with supreme confidence. I became an instant John Gilmore fan. Then, standing generally behind or close by Sun Ra, was the iconic June Tyson. All I can say, I had a crush on her for sure. The way she sang, danced and played her violin put me in a trance, of which I am still under.
As for the band back then, they were extremely tight. You could tell they were very well-rehearsed from months on tour. Their musical range was vast – from blues to Fletcher Henderson to frantic space jams. It was a wonder. However, things sadly changed very quickly.
I saw Sun Ra with his Arkestra at Koncepts again in February 1991. Another time that same year in November at a “Get-well Tribute/Benefit for Sun Ra”, I saw the Arkestra without their leader. Sun Ra did not make that trip after suffering a stroke. A year later, on 11 November 1992, June Tyson passed away. I saw Sun Ra only one more time - I think in California, but it might have been in Chicago by then - when he was in a wheel chair. Less than a year after June had passed, on 30 April 1993 Sun Ra passed away. The next time I saw the Arkesrta, John Gilmore was leading them. However, in 1995 on August 20th, my birthday, John Gilmore passed away. Now, every time I see the Arkestra without these three master musicians, there is a huge whole in my heart. Marshall Allen has done a terrific job carrying on the Sun Ra legacy; however, I really do miss the Arkestra of old….
Sweet Home Chicago
When I finally did find a job in Silicon Valley, I moved from Campbell up to Cupertino and worked a few jobs before I landed at Sequoia-Turner Corporation, a small family-owned business making hematology equipment. Not long after I worked there, Abbott Laboratories bought them, and I was transferred to headquarters in Abbott Park, Illinois. I lived in temporary housing for a while, until I was able buy a townhouse a few miles from work in Gurnee, a northern suburb of Chicago.
It didn’t take long before I started going downtown to all the used books and record stores and there were many good ones. Lenni Bukowski’s B-Side Records in Hyde park was a classic, but the granddaddy of them all was Bob Koester’s Jazz Record Mart. Although, the story of the Jazz Record Mart does not start with Bob Koester. It starts with Seymour Schwatrz.
Seymour Schwartz was born in Chicago in 1917. By the time he was 10, both his mother and father had died. He entered the Chicago Home for Jewish Orphans on the South Side of Chicago at South Drexel and East 62nd St, near the University of Chicago.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the only home for Jewish orphans in the Midwest was in Cleveland, Ohio. Given Chicago’s growing population of poor and immigrant Jews, a number of concerned Jewish women approached the United Hebrew Charities about starting an orphans home in Chicago. A home was organized in 1892. In 1899, the orphanage moved to the larger building at the Drexel and 62nd location, across the street from the Home for Aged Jews.
Seymour lived at the home and attended Hyde Park High School, where he played Cornet in the orphanage’s dance band. He eventually became the first cornetist in the University of Chicago concert band. Seymour’s first business venture was buying up used records from jukebox operators. He would go to the warehouse were the old 78s were stored and cull out all the collector’s records, like the Armstrongs and Goodmans, and sell the more commercial records to dimes store. By 1947, he was able to open up Seymour’s Record Mart. The store was located in a building on South Wabash Ave. under the El tracks by Roosevelt University. I love their record sleeve:
“The musicians play by ear, the feeling of the music comes from the heart, improvised as it goes along.” Seymour’s Record Mart was a real “American Jass Gem.”
Here is Bob Koester’s recollection of Seymour’s Record Mart:
Seymour's had filled a void left when the Session Record Shop closed in the mid-40's (Fall 1946, to be exact). They had live jazz sessions in the upstairs loft with traditional and bop alternating. Joe Segal (later famed for his Jazz Showcase productions) emceed the bop gigs with John Young, Kenny Mann, Lurlean Hunter, etc., and the traditional jazz dates featured George Zack's wonderful piano with various horns and rhythm that included appearances by Jimmy and Mama Yancey, Big Bill Broonzy, and others.
Here’s a great Gigi Gryce record (I’ll cover him a little further down the river) on the Signal label that has the old Seymour’s Record Mart stamp on it. Classic.
Bob Koester
A native of Wichita, Kansas, Koester was a 19-year-old Trad jazz, or Dixieland, devotee and college student at St.Louis University when he pressed up 400 red vinyl 10-inch copies of “Royal Garden Blues” by a local Trad jazz group, the Windy City Six. He stored the 78s in his dormitory room and named his label Delmar Records after Delmar Ave., the swingingest strip in St.Louis.
Although his passion was always jazz, Koester’s original plan was to get into film.
“I knew I had entrepreneurial tendencies and thought I ought to take some business courses, so I went to St. Louis University with the idea of getting into cinematography. My parents, who were ardent Catholics, told me I had to go to a Jesuit college. So rather than go to Loyola in New Orleans or Chicago I figured I’d go to St. Louis U since it was closer to home for the trips back and forth. I knew it wouldn’t have as much jazz as Chicago and New Orleans, but when I got to St. Louis I discovered that (former Basie alto saxophonist) Tab Smith was playing half a block east of the campus, the ragtime pianist Charles Thompson had a tavern a couple more blocks east from there, and just down the street from that was a black jazz joint where Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Johnny Hodges and Horace Silver and different name people would come. Then a block north of the campus was a place called the PinUp Room, which had switched its policy to Trad jazz. They had a group called the Windy City Six. So I spent my college years in those clubs, and I also spent a lot of time going to secondhand stores looking for old records. I was right in the middle of it all and this wonderful music just seduced me.”
In 1858, Bob Koester traveled to Chicago, after having some success selling and producing records in St. Louis. He began working out of an apartment on Chicago and Wabash. In March 1959, he made a big step and bought Seymour’s Record Mart, as Seymour wanted to devote more time to his trumpet music. Here is Koester in front of what would become the famed Jazz Record Mart’s initial location.
When I first went to the Jazz Record Mart, I think it was located at 7 West Grand. Then, in 1995, the store moved to 444 North Wabash, right off Michigan Avenue. But it was during one of my early visits at the Grand Ave. location that I hit the virtual Sun Ra jackpot.
As was my Bay Area Saturday morning habit of heading straight over to Logos Books store in Santa Cruz, I continued it in Chicago. Right after the stores opened, I went straight to the collectors bin. It wasn’t the first time, but one of the first times going though this routine at the Jazz Record Mart that I found five Sun Ra records right in the front. Boom. I was dumbfounded and just about fell over. Among them were both original Saturn volumes of My Brother the Wind and these two hand-made beauties:
I particularly like this hand-made Sleeping Beauty with the typed labels. Priceless.
The funny thing is, I didn’t even know the music or the records, I just knew they were Sun Ra and very hard to find. I snatched them up. Along with the four Sun Ra albums I bought at Amoeba Music in Berkeley, this brought my Sun Ra record collection up to nine. The rest is history - I was off to the planet Venus! I’ve been collecting Sun Ra records ever since.
Here, Gilles Peterson (from out Knights of the Turntable edition) really sums up why Sun Ra’s records have become so popular in recent years.
This is typical Sun Ra with a beautiful sax solo by the great and wonderful John Gilmore. So stop! Close your eyes and relax. Find a comfortable spot and just sit back for 12 minutes and, with your best headphones, listen to this masterpiece featuring the three masters themselves: Sun Ra, John Gilmore, and June Tyson. Lord have mercy.
I think, when you see and hear something as wonderful as this in a live performance, it alters your soul forever.
Finally, another of my favorites to close out this week’s Journey.
The world of Sun Ra is deep and wide. So next week, we’ll stay with Sun Ra as we travel on that Big River called Jazz - the next stop is Jupiter!
If you like what you’ve been reading and hearing so far on our journey, please share my newsletter with others - just hit the “Share” button at the bottom of the page.
Also, find my playlist on Spotify: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.
Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….
Keep on walking, Bill!
love the B6 reference! saw sun ra in 1987 or 1988? in new jersey but didn't appreciate the brilliance. thanks for bringing me up to speek.