Sun Ra's Calumet City Musical Apprenticeship

“It ain’t necessarily so that it ain’t necessarily so.” Sun Ra

I read “Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City” by William Sites, loaned to me by Ron Cohen, because legendary Gary trumpeter Art Hoyle, whom I interviewed shortly before his death, played in the visionary jazz composer’s band Arkestra. Born Herman Poole “Sonny” Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, during the 1930s the future Sun Ra had assembled a swing band playing fast-tempo “hot jazz” compositions that toured Southern cities in two Cadillacs hauling trailers carrying equipment. During his formative years between 1946 and 1961 Blount made his home in Chicago’s Black Belt, location of many swank nightclubs.

For nine years Sun Ra often honed his craft at seedy strip clubs located along or near State Street in Calumet City, a “wide open” area just west of the Illinois-Indiana state line. Approximately 150 bars, strip joints, gambling establishments and brothels, most controlled by the Chicago Mob, or “Outfit,” and many dating from Prohibition, operated freely and attracted industrial workers from nearby cities such as Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, Harvey, and Cicero, as well as Chicago thrill seekers and tourists. Clubs such as the Riptide, Top Hat, Playhouse, Zig-Zag, and Rondavoo hired mostly low-end exotic dancers (sometimes using names spelled almost exactly like well-known counterparts such as Lili St. Cyr, Blaze Starr or Gypsy Rose Lee) and B-Girls whose main purpose was to lure customers into buying them drinks. Rachel Shtier in “Striptease” wrote:

In Calumet City the cheap and tawdry strip acts verged on sex shows. In “The Devil and the Virgin” the virgin undressed, coerced by a devil in white tie and tails. A stripper named Roszina’s “Beauty and the Beast” number began with her wearing a gorilla costume on one side of her body and a strip outfit on the other. As the music got wilder, the gorilla would rip the strip costume off. The lights faded with the gorilla on top of the stripper.

In “Going All the Way” Dan Wakefield described the scene:

There was this main street lit up like a carnival with flashing neon signs and barkers trying to get you in the strip joints, all of them saying the main attraction was just coming on no matter what was actually happening. It was just a little country-town except that it was nothing but bars and strip joints and all that mothering neon glaring and blinking in the night, and behind it, in the sky, the reddish-orange glow from the steel mills, like the skyline of hell.

In 1949 fellow Chi-town musician Lonnie Fox, needing a pianist for his band who could sight-read, recruited Sun Ra to play at one such joint. The remuneration was paltry and the hours long, usually from 8 p.m. until 4 or 5 a.m., and the segregated atmosphere reminiscent, William Sites wrote, “of the Jim Crow South.” Drapes separated the musicians from the strippers and, often, the audience. Patronizing between musicians and the white dancers was strictly forbidden. One musician got thrown through a plate-glass window for messing with the women. Bugs Hunter remembered: “If you were a Black musician, you had to go in the back door, and get a sandwich, and you couldn’t stay.” Nat King Cole’s brother Freddy recalled: “You played a slow tempo when the stripper was fully clothed, a bounce tempo when she was half-clothed, and a fast tempo when she was down to her G-string and then finished nude.”

Despite the rough ambience, the Cal City clubs served as a musical apprenticeship for musicians like Sun Ra, then known as Sonny. He added many show tunes to his repertoire, such as “Rhapsody in Blue,” a favorite of numerous strippers. He recalled, “We were able to create. They didn’t restrict us in our playing. All they wanted us to do was swing.” He was able to tape record the band and perfect its timing. Even though the music was almost continuous during the shows, individual members could take breaks, and Sonny even found time to read books about Africa and outer space, sometimes while simultaneously performing. Most important, it was steady work and the pay “under the table” at a time when gigs at Bronzeville nightclubs were less certain.

Sun Ra pioneered the experimental blending of African drums and chants with innovative jazz, the purpose being to create, he claimed, an otherworldly, cosmic dimension. A utopian mystic, he decreed Saturn to be his home and the universe to be his ultimate audience. After he left Chicago for New York and then California, his reputation grew, and since his death in 1993, Sun Ra and his Arkestra became more widely known and respected than during his lifetime.