A y e A t o n

Sun Ra - nd
In t e r i o r sa
Space,
rs. rcva
Exterio
Sound and Vis ion
Glenn Ligon
Lookthe part , be the part, moth erfucker.
- Proposition Joe, Th e Wire.
Season one , episode nine.
Mygrand father wore a tie everyday. Well into
his eighties, confined by age and tempera-
ment.t o an upsta irs bedroom in the house
he had purchased with savings from a job
as a railroad porte r, he would bathe, shave
and dress in a white sh irt , t ie, suspen ders
and a pair of sharply pressed trousers , only
t o spend the day in an armcha ir with a quilt
over his knees, listening t o radio evangelists
or reading the da ily papers. He had left a
sharecropper's plot in Bishopville, Sout h
Carolina in the mid-forties for Wash ingt on,
D.C., his clothes and whatnot stuffed into
a few cardboard suitcases. St aying with
re latives unti l he got establis hed, he wou ld
soon send for th e wife and eight children
he left beh ind. I have a photograph of my
grandfather from that time posing in a white
suit, wide brimmed hat and patterned tie
against a painted backdrop of a suburban
house .The photograph was taken long before
he actually had a house to stand in front of,
but for him it was an image of the future he
had arrived in and somet hing t o send back to
the folks at home t o say, "I made it, I'm here,
I'm doing okay." For my grand fathe r and an
estimated six million other black peo ple, it
became clear th at there were no prospects for
them in the segregated South , and between
World War I and the beginning of t he 1970S
they fled for, as the author Richard Wr ight
would put it, "t he warmth of othe r suns ." The
lifet o come was in Washi ngto n, D.C. , or New
Yo rk, or Detro it, or Oakland , or Chicago. It
did n't matter much that , in t he end , those
utopias never lived up to their promise. Wha t
matte red was that black life and black possi-
bility was not as brutally suppressed in those
spaces as it was inthe south . My grandfather's
portrait , with its opt imist ically painted scene
of middle class America n life, was an image of
a fut ure he had willed into reality.
Sun Ra was also part of t he great
migrati on, leaving Bi rmingham, Alabama
in 1945 for a futu re he was going to create.
Although my grandfather wouldn 't have
recog nized that futu re, a place whe re t ime
trave l. inte rstellar transport and communion
with one's Egyptia n ancestors was possible ,
he would have recognized the desire to exist
in it. Eq ual Right s? Justice? Freedom? "It will
happen, just give it time."
Sun Ra's music is sound against waiting. Why
wait when you can go to t he future or oute r
space or even to the past to claim that which
you shouldn't have to ask for in the first place?
Ra'sgoldtone headdresses, ankhs and flowing
robes, like mygrandfather's suit and tie, were
garments for the life to come, a life whose
arrival he had decided to haste n by "looking
the part."
"Come with me if you want to live,"
says the Terminator to a petrified Sarah
Connor in the second movie ofthe franchise .
If she doesn 't go she will not see the future.
a future she has, ironically. already seen, a
vision that resulted in her confinement to a
ment al institution. Ifshe stays, t he future - in
the form of the next model cyborg. T-1000-
will kill her. Every Terminator is terrifying.
Chicago, for the masses of black people who
settled there during the great migration.
was the future , but they knew there must be
another one, one that did not confine them
to overpriced housing and low paying jobs .
Aye Aton was the ir Terminator. His murals,
with their images of blazing suns, pyramids,
comets and planetary bodies painted on the
walls of black homes all over the South Side.
were about a future t hat he, byway of Sun Ra,
was reaching his hand out to take them t o.
Commissioned from the early 1960s th rough
t he beginning ofthe 1970s. the murals were
backdrop to house parties, birth days, heated
arguments. fucking. heartache and life. They
were the album sleeve art for Afrocen t ric
and Afrofuturist philosophies that helped a
generation reimagine itself. Odd ly, desp ite
their placement in domestic space's, the
photos of the mura ls are devoid of people.
Perhaps Aton-or whoever shot them-was
too focused on documenting the walls of t he
houses he painted in to be bothered with
their inhab itants. Indee d, the shots have a
peculiar floating quality to them, as if taken
while in mid-air, or as if an extra-terrestrial
had happened upon the art of some long dead
civilization. Perhaps the owne rs were just
out of the frame watching him work, beers
in hand, proud ofthe rootedness , arrival and
factness that interior decoration implied.
Aton's murals a confirmation of the world
they had already imagined for themselves. Or
perhaps they had just left Aton alone while he
documented his handiwork:too busy living in
the fut ure he had painted to pose in front of it .
 Space, Interiors and Ext eriors
John Corbett

Ra house,
\ from th e Sun
ra
of /\ton mu . irca ' 972.·
Photograph Penns~\"an\a , c
Germantown,

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Among Sun Ha's many powers was an ability
to address different people in an intimate and
intense way. so that they understood their
relationship with the musician, composer,
bandleader, and mysticto be primary. pivotal.
essential. Ra was a commanding and mes-
meric presence with irons in numerous fires .
Tosome. Ra's intrigue was primarily
musical. John Gilmore would have been a
hard-bop saxophon ist -probably one of
the greatest-if not for his encounter with
Ha's tune "Saturn "; magnetized by t he song.
Gilmore went on to dedicate his life and
careerto Ra, inthe process expanding his own
playingexponentially. Forsome, Ra 's science-
fictive , philosophical . and futuristic precepts
were primary draw s; they were nurtured on
his sly humor and mind-widening view of the
heliocentric world and its greater omniverse.
For others, the sense of community offered
in Ha's circle was a powerful attraction ; t he
prospect of participating in a grassroots
intellectual enclave like the one found at the
Sun Ra house in Germantown , Pennsy lvania,
in northwest Philadelph ia, drew folks into
the fold.
Robert Underwood never met Ra
in Chicago, but he was entranced by the
charismatic figure from afar. Underwood-
who would at a later date change his name to
Aye Aton-was born in 1940 , and he relocat-
ed from New York to Chicago in 1960. Ayear
later. Ra and core members of his band the
Arkestra would make the reverse tr ip, landing
in NewYo rk for a six-year stretch , afte rwhich
they set up shop in Philadelphia . Meanwh ile,
fresh to the city. Aton was busy spend ing
time with a study group made up of older men
who played checke rs in Washing ton Par k on
Chicago's South Side. He was an inqu isitive
young man, asking deep questions about all
manners of obscure topics, and several mem-
bers of the study group told him abou t their
go-to guy for such queries , a fellow they knew
as Sunny Ray, who had recently left town but
was best equipped to help Aton on his quest
for knowledge.
Ra was no stranger to Was hington
Park. From the mid-1950S until he left
Chicago in 1961, he was a regular presence
in the area , street-corner 'preaching and
handing out leaflets exploring a range of
unus ual ideas-some biblical. some social.
some mystical. some musical. but all at the
radical fringe of esoteric African American
thought. Although he never used the term,
Ra was at the forefront ofwhat would later be
called Afrofuturism. Aspecies ofthoughtthat
blurs material history by means of mytho- po-
et ic revisionism, afrofuturism draws anc ient
Egypt into close proximity with an imagined
future, in Ra's case boarding a biblical. time-
t raveling spaceship fueled by jazz . Str iking
an exceptional pose, like an unhinged rever-
end Ra implored black people to pay close
attent ion to the power of words , to strive for
wisdom and beauty, and t o seek immort alit y. and he spoke almost daily. Their conversat ion
No doubt it was in t his context -and proba- amounted to an informal mentors hip: Ragave
bly not t hat of Ra's own such assembly, known Ato n inst ruct ions, guided him, and discussed
as Thmei Researc h- th at the mem ber s of his research with t he bud ding visual artist.
the Wash ingto n Park study group ca me into And over t he cou rse of t hat t ime, a decade
cont act with t he pianist and his extraordinary in th e making, a re marka ble and am bitious
discourse. collabo rative effort was mounted in Chi-
Obta ining Ra's number, Aton cago, heretofore known only t o a few privat e
phoned New York. Ra was immed iately re- citizens .
ceptive, and for the next eleven years , Aton Starting shortly aft er his first
convers ations with Ra, Aton began painti ng
murals. Wo rking most ly in peop le's homes
. ns Out:
f ExteoS'O . VA /. II.
on t he South Side, he made custom room
f ront cover 0 ble EquO llon.
T he Irnrneo
suro paint ings, following Ra's the matic sugges -
t ions, which pushed him towards Egypt ian
and cosm ic motifs, sometimes explosively
colored abstractions , and , as time went on,
distinctive outer-space imagery."Space be-
came very important to people," Aton says,
from his current home in Baton Rouge, Loui-
siana . The possibilit ies of unusua l pigments ,
new to the market in the early 1960s, opened
up vibrant and jarring areas of investigation:
"Awhole room offluorescent paint-you can
imagine how that looks!"
By his own recollect ion, Aton
paint ed murals in dozen s of homes, and also
outside , on the sides of buildings, antic ipat ing
the significant Chicago muralist movement
of the 1980s. His reperto ire, as he moved
through the psychedelic 1960s, included
black-light paints ; somet imes he would posi-
, I . ,,"IMMEASURABLE EQUATION" }.. s"" R<t t ion a black-light bulb as part of a wall mural,
its long, bluish tube casting selective illumi-
nat ion on an interstellar scene .
In 1972, all th is work came to a
startling culmination . Searching for im-
ages to use on the cover of the second book
of Sun Ra's poetry, Extensions Out: The
Immeasurable Equation, Vol. II, Ra and
his manager Alton Abraham thought of
using images of Aton's murals. A series of
snapshots of murals in several contexts
was produced, and in the end three images
were selected , all reproduced in black and
white, one on the cover and two on interior
pages . The original color images were col-
lected in a binder that Abraham held on
to ; many of them are now in the collection
ofthe Chicago Jazz Archive, at the University
of Chicago.
These photographs have their own
spec ial power. Boast ing the saturated colors
of commercially printed photographs of the
1970s, Aton's compositions are pushed into
a supercharged state, pulsing little windows
into a fabulous, alien world secreted away
in a living room or bedroom or dining room .
Certain images are completely disorienting ,
the only up-down marker being the date
stamped on the photo's edge. Other images
have subtle hints at architecture : a corner
where walls meet ceiling. And some find the
domestic scene intrud ing in a charming , sur-
real way: a chandelier dipping down infront of
a mystical goat's head , a light switch mapping
a rectangle onto a green abstraction, or a
doo rway leading through one mural int o a
closet, where another mural lurks amid some
one's clothes.
1972 was important for Aton in
other ways also related to Ra. Parallel to
his artistic activities, Aton was working as a
musician , encouraged and advised remotely
by Ra. In the mid-s. as Robert Underwood,
he played percussion with Association for
the Advancement of Creative Musicians
members such as Fred Anderson and Joseph
Jarman . Aton saw Ra in a concert at Chicago's
Brown Shoe, told him he was ready to join
the band , and surprised him by showing up
in Philly the following week. He rehearsed,
toured, and recorded with the Arkestra in the
banner years of 1972-74.
. A pivotal year for Ra's international
reputation, 1972 found the band recording
what would ultimately become its best-
known record , Space Is the Place (Blue
Thumb) , along with the crucial Saturn LP
Discipline 27-11. It was the same year in
which the ABC-Impulse! deal was struck,
issuing forth a dozen LPs on a major label
with the best distribution the music had yet
experienced . A year prior , early in 1971, Ra
had been artist-in-residence at the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, where he taught a
course titled "The Black Man in the Cosmos."
Ra's presentation was sh ifting dramati-
cally at that point in history; recogniz ing the
potentially international reach of his music
and message , he red ressed the thematic
bala nce in his stage show , emphasizing the
cosmic and int erplanet ary, t on ing down
the previously dominant biblical revision -
ism. Whe reas the latter made sense for the
primar ily African American venues he played
in Chicago -a client ele who already under-
stood the scr ipt ural referen ces and saw him
in relation to evangelical preachers and Na-
t ion of Islam ites -as he made his way onto
t he world's stage , Ra dev ised crafty ways to
fold those ideas int o galac tic spec tacle and
apocalyptic pageantry more access ible to a
gene ral audience. In , Abraha m and Ra were
desperately t rying to find gigs for the Arkes-
t ra in New York; th e Arkestra played its first
concer t s in Europe in 1970, and by 1972 they
had esta blished a regular bulkhead in France ,
England , and Germany.
Ret urning t o California in 1972 ,
Ra shot t he feature -length film Space is th e
Pla ce. Set in Oakland and direc ted by John
Coney, t he movie featu res Ra and company
in Egypt ian costumes borrowed from a local
Mason ic t e mple; a wonderfu lly bizarre mix
of blacksploitation biopic and philosophical
rant, it deftly refers t o Ra's growing visibility,
warily speculating on the possib ility of his
having "sold out:' On the set, the band and
the actors dotted the northern California
landscape even more vividly than the hip-
pies had a few years prior. In a parking lot ,
waiting to film, Ha's rainbow robes fluttered
in t he wind as an anonymous member of t he
entourage snapped cand id photos. For Ra,
there was no real division betwee n ons tage
and offstage persona . He was always on.
Proudly donni ng a preposte rously tall Egyp-
tian headp iece, per haps tuni ng into some
extrate rrestrial signal , Ra co mmande ered
t he parking lot, providing an image tha t would
don th e S pace is t he Pla ce and would prove
one of the most enduring shots of a figure
who was so outrageous that he cons iste ntly
found himselfi n t he came ra's lens.
The Spa ce is th e Pla ce soundtrack
features a full version of t he Arkestra with
Aye Aton on percussion . Aton lived in t he
Germantown house, to which he contrib-
uted several room murals: one in saxophonist
Mars hall Allen's room , one on t he ceiling in
John Gilmore's room, and a very spec ial one in
Ha 's room . He also painted backdrops forthe
Arkestra , which were used in various live per-
formance settings. In 1974 , Aton moved back
to Chicago, in sea rch of gainful employment .
He settled in Baton Rouge in 1983 , where he
cont inues to paint and play drums , his lengthy
secret dia logue with Sun Ra a persistent and
decisive part of his everyday life.