Marshall Allen interview: “The space age is here to stay, there’s no place you can run away”

Speaking to Marshall Allen on the phone from his home in Philadelphia, I make the observation that it’s been a long time since he first started playing the music of Sun Ra. “Yeah man!” he laughs with a throaty rumble. “1958, and still at it! I ain’t going nowhere!”

This seems to be the incontrovertible truth. On 25 May, Allen celebrates 100 years of living on Planet Earth. It’s an astonishing achievement, for sure, but what’s perhaps even more amazing is that he has spent nearly 70 of those years as a member – and, more recently, leader – of the Sun Ra Arkestra. During that time, he’s been a loyal trooper under Ra’s cosmic guidance. He’s been a vital, if under-sung, stylist on alto saxophone and a growing arsenal of instruments. And he’s been the indefatigable figurehead of the Arkestra’s reinvigorated 21st century incarnation. If he’s not going anywhere, it also seems like he’s always been here.

But there was a beginning to his journey into the music, starting way back in the 1940s. During World War II, he was stationed in Paris with the 92nd Infantry – one of the so-called ‘Buffalo Soldier’ regiments of primarily African- Americans – and played clarinet and alto sax in the 17th Division Army band. Come peacetime, he remained in Paris, studying clarinet at the Paris Conservatory of Music on the GI Bill, and touring with expatriate saxophonist, James Moody. In 1951, he returned to the States and spent a few years “jamming around Chicago,” he says. “I was just going to jam sessions and stuff like that. Until I heard Sun Ra’s music.”

This was in 1957, by which time Sun Ra had been leading the Arkestra for a couple of years, earning a reputation as a galvanising (if somewhat outlandish) figure on the local scene with his band of musicians clad in Egyptian and space-aged costumes. Ra had also already recorded two albums, Jazz by Sun Ra and Super-Sonic Jazz, both released that year. Allen still vividly recalls the jolt he experienced on first hearing the latter.

“I had a job at a camera company, polishing lenses. One day, I got off work and bought that album. I took it home and listened to it and I was like ‘Boy, what’s that band?’ The stuff they were doing, I’d never heard that before. It was far out and [had] different kinds of melodies. So, I went back and asked the guy I bought the record off, ‘Where’s this band? This is a real band!’ He said, ‘Well, they’re right up there near you, about six blocks from where you live. They practise every night up there.’ So, I went and found ’em. I heard the band, and they sound so good, I ran back and bring my horn! ‘Course, I was late for work the next day. I’d stayed up all night with Sun Ra because, after he got through rehearsing, we went over to hear a saxophone player in a club and then we went out to eat and, the next thing you know, it was four or five in the morning, and I went to work all late and sleepy and everything. That was when I met him. And he asked me to come to rehearsals.”

Straight away, Allen was determined to join the Arkestra: “I tried to get into the band and then I was lucky because some of the mainstay guys was moving to New York. In ’58, he finally let me in.” From then on, he threw in his lot with the Arkestra. “It was the sound!” he enthuses. “Who else was playing the stuff like he’s playing? A lot of guys were playing real good, but that was a band and I wanted to be in the band. I wanted to be in that band!”

Allen quickly became a key member of the Arkestra, joining the frontline alongside other loyal acolytes including tenorist John Gilmore and baritone player Pat Patrick. Wherever Ra went, the Arkestra would follow, which is how, after 10 years in Chicago, Allen ended up moving to New York in 1961. “We played a gig in Montreal,” he recalls. “On the way back, we said we’re going to stop in New York and see some of the fellas who was in the band who had moved to New York. When we got there, a taxi cab hit our car, so we were stuck there until they paid for the car. We had to find a place to stay, and we ended up just staying there, we got an apartment, we had a gig or two. And we never did get back to Chicago!”

Plunged into the crucible of New York’s nascent free-jazz scene, the Arkestra embraced a more abstract experimentalism, becoming essential architects of the New Thing. Allen met these new challenges with vigour, developing an urgent alto style full of abrasive honks and raw cries that put him on the cutting edge of the new avant-garde. Yet, like so many of Ra’s men, he largely resisted playing with other musicians, devoting almost all of his energies to Ra’s cosmic mission. In 1968, the Arkestra relocated en masse to Philadelphia, living communally in a house in Germantown, which was to remain Ra’s base until he left the planet in 1993. After Ra’s departure, John Gilmore led the Arkestra until his own death in 1995. Then, with the Arkestral spacecraft in need of another steady hand at the controls, the job naturally fell to Allen.

In the three decades since Allen took the helm, he’s been the driving force in consolidating the Arkestra’s reputation as a formidable and much-loved live act, touring tirelessly and widely. The group has welcomed a stable of younger players while also calling on the connection to the source provided by a couple of elders. Baritone saxophonist and flautist, Danny Ray Thompson – who first joined the Arkestra in 1967 – was a jovial presence until his death in 2020. Today, saxophonist, flautist and vocalist, Knoel Scott – on board since 1979 – functions as Allen’s unofficial deputy. Still sporting the sequinned capes and Pharaonic headgear that have been the Arkestra’s identity since the beginning, the current configuration puts on a heck of a show, faithfully keeping Ra’s repertoire alive and introducing new audiences to the full range of Arkestral moods – from jaunty swing tunes to deep modal vamps, wafting space ballads to furious free-jazz firestorms, and always peppered with snatches of Ra’s liberating Afro-Futurist mythology of freedom among the stars.

In 2020, the Arkestra released Swirling – their first studio album in over 20 years – presenting new recordings of a selection of Ra classics and fully establishing the current line-up as a vital working band under Allen’s directorship. The album was enormously well-received and was even nominated for a Grammy Award.

This was followed up by 2022’s Living Sky, which mixed some older material with brand new instrumental compositions by Allen: ‘Firefly’ is a tender ballad on which he pushes the alto into ecstatic fervour; ‘Marshall’s Groove’ is a crawling blues; on ‘Day Of The Living Sky’ he switches to West African kora, adding delicate plucks and strums over clopping hand percussion and lilting flutes.

Marshall’s alto technique has, inevitably, changed and evolved as he’s got older, moving towards shorter, punchier phrases that serve as punctuation, often signposting a switch in energies. In live performance, it’s usually Allen’s terse and peremptory pronunciations that act as the Arkestra’s cue to push the music even further out. These days, he’s also just as likely to play the Electronic Valve Instrument – or EVI – a kind of breath-controlled synthesizer, which can be played like a sax, but which offers a boundless palette of electronic sound. In Allen’s hands, it’s the key to unlocking a whole galaxy of sci-fi whooshes and cosmic sparkles. It also takes considerably less puff to play than the sax. “I had to get something because the saxophone was wearing me down,” Allen laughs, “I been playing it so long!”

After a staggering seven decades on the road, Allen has recently had to step away from international touring, on doctors’ orders. “They suggested that I don’t travel on planes on account I had a couple of problems. That’s why you haven’t seen me in Europe lately. But I still play and all that. I make it to New York or Washington or close by.” Today, Allen still lives in the Philadelphia house that has been Arkestra HQ ever since 1968. Though no longer the bustling commune and rehearsal space it once was (currently just four members of the Arkestra, including Allen, live there), it serves as a kind of living shrine to the Living Myth himself, Allen’s erstwhile employer and eternal inspiration, Sun Ra. There’s a very real sense that Allen represents the last link to Ra’s endlessly fascinating art and cosmology.

To wrap up our conversation, I ask him what he thinks is the most important message we can take from Sun Ra’s philosophy. “Well,” he says, preparing to recite some of Ra’s homespun cosmo-wisdom, “the space age is here to stay, there’s no place you can run away. Run to the rock to hide your face, rock cried out ‘no hiding place.’ So, wake your people up to the space age and now they know. They’re going from planet to planet, until they can find some place they can land and check it out. Space is here to stay.”

This interview originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today