Space Isn't Necessarily The Place

A few nights ago, I had the chance to see "Space Is The Place" -- a film conceived by Saturnian (late of Earth) and free jazz patriarch, Sun Ra. The plot of the movie itself is negligible - a polemic load of jumbled shit that amounts to a black good/white bad story dropped into an Egyptian-mythology-meets-science-fiction frame of people of African descent ascending to an outer space Eden by way of intergalactic ark - though the featured music is quite intense, ranging (like most of Ra's creative output) from bop to cosmic washes of joyous brass. Many of the songs performed in the movie feature vocal parts written by Sun Ra and delivered by Arkestra vocalist June Tyson.

My own relationship with Sun Ra's music has always been a mixed one. Instinctively, there has always been a spirit about that I really like, though there is also something that inherently bothers me about it a lot of it. Until recently, though, I was hard-pressed to figure out what. It's not the freeness of it. I don't mind chaos and noise. I think it's kinda neat, actually. I realized that, if anything, it was the opposite end of the spectrum that bothers me. The melodies that Sun Ra wrote were distinct and wonderful. Often times, though, he would put lyrics to them. This is where, I find, the trouble begins.

"Space Is The Place" is, in a sense, a visualization of Ra's lyrics. It expands upon the imagery he used throughout his work and derives a story from it. The screenplay, essentially an extemporization of some of the subjects Ra loved to use in his lyrics, simply sucks. When the Ra's lyrics begin to take on the form of something tangible - characters, spaceships - their weakness become apparent. For someone whose music, at times, is so mature in terms of leaving behind any remnants of concreteness, the words that accompany it often weigh it down incredibly.

Music, ideally, functions as a representation of something ambiguous, emotion in its purest and rawest form. The instrumentation and arrangement of a song allows for various means of expressing this ambiguity. Ambiguous, though, doesn't necessarily mean unclear. The best composers can create something that is simultaneously perfectly lucid and absolutely abstract. The purpose of lyrics is to expand upon that. Song lyrics are, in a sense, articulated and nuanced notes. A single note, played by an instrument, has musical content; the volume, the pitch, the timbre, etc.. However, if it is part of a lyric, it has - for lack of a better description - intellectual content as well.

A song's lyrics should, in some way, highlight the song's musical content. There are many ways to do this. It can match it in terms of mood. A successful version of this would be Bob Dylan's sly Ballad Of A Thin Man. It can provide a contrast; check out any bluegrass song - say, Dean Webb and Mitch Payne's Old Home Place - with unbelievably gloomy lyrics set to a sunny melody. Or, perhaps, it can go side-by-side in terms of unadulterated abstraction, like Robert Hunter's Dark Star.

Why is it that some lyrics work and others don't? Again, turning to visualizations might provide a clue. An almost impossibly easy route out would be to say that if music can be visualized then it has failed as a piece of music. However, that would undercut scores of music designed for visual accompaniment such as Tchaikovsky's Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairies or Philip Glass's "Koyaanisqatsi". However, these are both instrumental pieces. I can only really think of one piece where the song's melody, lyrics, and visualization all function in perfect concert: the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine".

The reason why "Yellow Submarine" is successful is because everything works on an equal plane. The melody, the words, and the film all have a fantastic simplicity to them. None of them outshine the other. The melody for the song is bright and, as the eminent philosopher Christopher Lowell might say, whimsical. The lyrics for the song (as well as almost all of the other songs featured on the soundtrack) match this. Finally, on top of it all, the images twist it all into a likable cartoon reality.

In the case of Sun Ra, the lyrics don't match the music. Ra's words of cosmic freedom are almost always placed atop his most traditional, and complex, of swing melodies. The lyrics can't decide which way to go, however. On one hand, they're somewhat simplistic. That certainly doesn't follow the melody. On the other hand, they're often space-related. That doesn't follow the feel of the pieces. Swinging jazz doesn't usually calls to mind outer space. If anything, it calls to mind the clubs where it's played; ebullient dancing and ecstatic finger snapping. Much of Sun Ra's music does put the listener into a deeply galactic locale. However, the music that does this is usually the most devoid of form, and most without need for lyrics.

In "Space Is The Place", this is the best music: dispatches from the darkest reaches of the galaxy; piercing shrills from Marshall Allen. However, the freer the music gets in the film, the less the filmmakers try to set it to action. By the time the music gets its furthest out, the filmmakers have resorted to simply showing a serious-minded Arkestra blowing their asses off. There's nothing wrong with this, but that alone should be proof that some music simply can't be solidified into anything more concrete than the disc it is issued on. Sometimes even then that is too much. Certainly, it often happens that music is successful vibrating air particles in the room where it's performed though, when it makes it to a recorded medium, it sounds hollow or empty.

Sun Ra was a great organizer of sound, of representations of abstract feelings. However, his success there did not transfer over to the written word or the silver screen. Through the years, many other fine musicians have tried their hands at medium-to-medium translation. Frank Zappa's "200 Motels" is another attempt - relatively contemporary to Sun Ra - of moving from a plastic disc to celluloid. Zappa's primary lyrical imagery was completely surreal obscenity. It translates with a cartoon-like swirl to film. It works on some levels, but fails on others -- mostly because Zappa lost control of the ideas. The film comes out cluttered, going dozens of directions at once. One possible reason for this is because there were too many other people to rely on for a successful execution of Zappa's schemes: cameramen, producers, technicians, editors... Zappa, like many musicians, worked best when he alone was in charge.

For another thing, Zappa's melodies were raunchy enough without lyrics. To make an example out of one his more well-known tunes, Willie The Pimp would've worked just as well without Captain Beefheart's grunted vocal contribution. The absolute rudeness of the song's melody, doubled by Zappa's guitar and Don "Sugar Cane" Harris's electric violin, did more to understate the filthiness of the music than Beefheart ever could. If the song was left without vocals, with title only, the whole thing would've been infinitely more suggestive and, as a result, all the more interesting. (1) Other tracks provide for more intriguing titles and, therefore, mysterious music: Son Of Mr. Green Genes, Little Umbrellas, and more. It's not that mysterious is necessarily better, but it lets the music speak for itself.

Both Sun Ra and Zappa were clearly visionaries. However, they were visionaries without visible visions. They were visions that no one - not even they - could see. Rather, they only existed in the guts of the creators and, eventually, the audience. They existed, and exist, only on some deeply intuitive level. Both Zappa and Ra's compositional styles are pretty easy to discern. They have respective qualities by which the listener can pretty quickly figure out who wrote the music. These qualities are usually elusive but simultaneously instantly identifiable; something squirming around in the listener's mind. That's really where the best music lives; never in one place but, rather, perpetually in transit.

(1) Coincidentally enough, a small line of text at the bottom of the liner notes for "Hot Rats", the LP on which Willie The Pimp appears as the only number with vocals, describes the album as "a movie for your ears... produced and directed by Frank Zappa".

CONTAINS: Jesse Jarnow, Hansen's Signature All Natural Orange Creme Soda (since 1935), the "Akira" set, some Stoned Wheat Thin, white Cracker Barrel sharp Vermont cheddar, and your mom.