David Block talked to John Gilmore, tenor saxophone mainstay of Sun Ra’s orchestras from 1953 until the bandleader’s death in 1993.
ONE night John Gilmore and an old high school friend, drummer Robert Barry, went to Sheps Playhouse, located near the South Side of Chicago to have a good time. As they walked into the club, Barry said: “John, there’s someone I want you to meet. It’s Sun Ra.’ ‘Who?’ asked Gilmore. “You mean you don’t know who he is?’ ‘No.’
After Barry introduced the two musicians, Sun Ra told Gilmore he needed a tenor saxophone player and gave him an audition. Sun Ra liked the Gilmore sound and invited him to join the Arkestra. Gilmore accepted.
John Gilmore believes that this happened in 1953, but he is not absolutely sure. He was in his early twenties and was trying to gain recognition as a musician. Gilmore had no idea that he would perform with Sun Ra until Ra’s death on May 30, 1993.
‘Sun Ra made me a better person,’ said Gilmore. Before he met Sun Ra, Gilmore never thought of studying philosophy or of contemplating the significance of outer space. Gilmore remembers that his life was less meaningful before Sun Ra became part of it.
John Gilmore was born 1931 in Summit, Mississippi. Although his birth certificate says September 28, his mother insists that he was born October 29. Gilmore grew up in Chicago, and did not take an interest in music until his teenage years.
‘I was 14, ready to start my sophomore year of high school. My brother’s friend, Melvin Scott, had a saxophone. I used to walk by Melvin’s house and look in his window and watch him play this big golden saxophone. It was so big, pretty and shiny, so I told my mother “I got to have one of those horns”. She didn’t have the money to buy me one.” Instead, she bought him a clarinet, and to this day he wonders how she got the money.
From 1948 to 1951 Gilmore served in the air force. He preferred college, but he could not afford it. While in the air force, he bought a saxophone and played with the air force band.
After his discharge, he was faced with a serious problem. ‘I wanted to be a musician, but I was worried how I would support myself.’
Gilmore worked in a Chicago post office as a clerk for nine months. At that time, he wrestled with the decision of remaining a clerk or becoming a musician. It was a horrible predicament for Gilmore. Even though the post office paid a decent salary, he was too busy to practise the saxophone consistently. “The work was hard. During Christmas time, I had to carry so many bags that I’d go to sleep at night counting them. I hated pulling bags off the rack 11 hours a day. After nine months, I pulled out my horn and I couldn’t even play Bb-flat blues. My God, I sounded terrible.” Immediately, Gilmore resigned as postal clerk and devoted his life to the sax.
At first, he suffered financially. ‘I was staying with my sister, and I hated it. I was a drag and a dredge on her, especially when I’d go to the refrigerator and eat her food and not pay for it. I was a liability. Fortunately, I had a lady friend who took me in and she bought me a good quality saxophone.’
Gilmore spent the time between quitting the post office and meeting Sun Ra looking for musicians to play with. At that time, Gilmore was in contact with the guitar player George Eskridge, who helped him understand the rudiments of jazz and bebop. Eskridge also helped Charles Davis and Julian Priester.
During this period, Gilmore and Nicky Hill played at local Chicago clubs such as the Pershing Lounge and the Bee Hive where they felt privileged to play with greats like Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon.
Gilmore also played with Earl Hines. ‘I wasn’t sure that I would even get to play with Earl. One day I was in the Union Hall and someone shouted that Earl needed a saxophone player and before the people could choose one of their pets, I yelled “Give me the job. I want it”, and I got it.’
Gilmore’s next bandleader was Sun Ra. “When I first started playing with Sun Ra, I didn’t know much about him. At first, we were just playing standards and I was glad to have some work, but then I heard some of his Saturn arrangements and they were so beautiful. His sound was so different from any sound I ever heard.’ And that was one of Gilmore’s reasons for staying with Sun Ra until the end.
Their friendship was even a greater factor. “Sun Ra changed my life. I never would have read the Bible, but he got me to read it three times and he showed me so many ways to interpret the stories, words and letters. Ra and I studied Hebrew and Sanskrit. I never even imagined doing any of those things.’
Even though Gilmore stayed with Ra longer than anyone else, he never felt as if he were in Ra’s shadow. ‘I was independent, and I could play with whoever I wanted, whenever I wanted.’ One of the musicians he rehearsed with in the fifties was Miles Davis. Gilmore was uncertain of the exact year that he rehearsed with Miles. He met him through Miles’s brother Vernon, who was a friend of Sun Ra.
‘Miles wanted to see how I played, so when he came to Chicago, he phoned and asked me to come see him at his hotel. Miles brought out his charts, and told me to play. I didn’t miss a note. Miles said “John Gilmore, you can read your ass off’.’ Davis formed a group which included Gilmore, Wilbur Ware, Andrew Hill and Phil Thomas. They were supposed to open at the Strand Lounge in Chicago. But according to Gilmore, the group did not perform due to Davis’s inability to pay his hotel bill. Gilmore also said that Miles’s addiction to drugs was a hindrance to the band. Despite these shortcomings, Gilmore sums up his encounter with Miles Davis as a beautiful experience.
For the Arkestra, the fifties was the bebop era. In the same decade, Ra launched Saturn, his own record label.
Gilmore admired Ra’s initiative. ‘Sun Ra never let anyone have authority over him. He did not want anyone or any record company telling him who he could put in his band or the kind of music to play.’ Ra’s independence of record companies did not help him gain recognition. The only way that the Arkestra distributed its albums was by selling them at concerts. Sun Ra had made nearly 150 albums. Nineteen of them have become easily available since 1992 when Evidence Music, a record company in the Philadelphia area, began to reissue them. It did not bother Gilmore that the Arkestra had financial problems and were not as well known as musicians like Miles Davis. Gilmore regarded Sun Ra as very personable. ‘I liked how Ra was there with the Arkestra going through the same hardships as we were. Ra never took the plane while we took the train.’
One example of Ra travelling with the Arkestra was in 1961 when he, Gilmore, and Marshall Allen rode in bass player Ronnie Boykins’s car from Chicago to Montreal to perform at a club.Gilmore remembered how they arrived one hour before they were scheduled to play. But Boykins was so exhausted from driving that he fell on the bed and refused to move. The Arkestra’s music sounded strange to the club manager because there was no bass player. “He couldn’t hear the full scope of the music without the bass. He said “You guys are playing God’s music and I don’t want you here”.’
However, a few days later, the manager wanted to rehire the Arkestra because people came by in droves to see them perform, but he could not find them. The Arkestra was in such great demand in Montreal that they ended up performing on TV.
After staying in Montreal for several months, the Arkestra decided to leave in order to avoid the cold Canadian winter. They stopped at New York for a week, but when it was time for them to drive back to Chicago, Ronnie Boykins went out for a drive and wrecked the car. The Arkestra did not have money to travel back to Chicago and therefore they stayed in New York throughout the sixties. During that decade, Gilmore associated with John Coltrane and Art Blakey.
According to Gilmore, Coltrane first became acquainted with the Arkestra in the fifties when he came to Chicago with Miles Davis. Pat Patrick turned Coltrane onto Ra’s music. ‘Coltrane found it fascinating.’ Gilmore said that Patrick advised Coltrane not to play with Miles until Miles could control his drug habit. ‘Coltrane broke away from Miles and when I saw him in the sixties, he was a better person.’
One night in Birdland, Gilmore made a great impression on Coltrane. For about four months, Gilmore had gone to Birdland with the hope of performing with Willie Bobo’s band, but Bobo would not let him play. But one night, Pat Patrick persuaded Bobo to give Gilmore a chance. ‘At 3.40 am I finally had my chance to play, but I wasn’t used to playing with New York musicians. They sounded so stiff, so I played counterpoint to everything they played. This annoyed the band, but not Coltrane. He was in the back of the club and he ran up to me and yelled: “John Gilmore, you got the sound. You got the concept”.’ Coltrane asked Gilmore for a demonstration and Gilmore obliged.
Numerous writers have asserted that Gilmore influenced Coltrane, but Gilmore is modest about taking credit. ‘All I did was show him a few things that he hadn’t really thought of.’ But on the jacket of Sun Ra’s Sound Sun Pleasure album, which was reissued by Evidence Music, there is an excerpt from Frank Kofsky’s book,‘Sun Ra changed my life. I never would have read the Bible, but he got me to read it three times ...’. Black Nationalism And The Revolution In Music. Coltrane is quoted: ‘I listened to John Gilmore kind of closely before I made Chasin’ The Trane . . . Some of the things on there are a direct influence of listening to this cat.’
From 1964-1965 Gilmore toured with Art Blakey and performed on Blakey’s album, ’S Make It (Limelight EXPR 1022). Gilmore said that Blakey brought out the best in him, but they lacked rapport. One night there was a misunderstanding between Blakey and the band. ‘Art cursed us out and called us all kind of names. I gave him a good tongue-lashing. I said things I won’t repeat. So when we got back to the United States, Blakey fired me.’ While Gilmore toured Japan with Blakey, he distributed two boxes of Sun Ra’s music to radio stations across the country.
Throughout the sixties, the Arkestra played a lot of free jazz. On stage, Sun Ra never told the band what the next number would be. They continued with this technique in the seventies, but with Duke Ellington’s death, Sun Ra also concentrated on swing to show his respect for one of the legendary giants.
In 1969, the Arkestra moved to Philadelphia. Marshall Allen’s father signed his house over to Sun Ra. ‘It was very convenient because we had a lot more space to rehearse.’ Yet the Arkestra suffered some jolts. Long-time Arkestra members such as Pat Patrick and Ronnie Boykins left Sun Ra because they felt that they were condemned to obscurity. Gilmore did not feel that way.
‘There was never a dull moment with Sun Ra,’ said Gilmore, and that was one of his many reasons for staying with him until the end. Even though the Arkestra was not making money, Gilmore appreciated just how much music Ra wrote. The Arkestra made about 150 albums, but Gilmore emphasizes that they never had a chance to play all of Ra’s music, most of which was never recorded.
Sun Ra had a lot going against him. His assertion of being from the planet Saturn caused him to be frequently lambasted by the press. Even as recently as May 1993, several weeks before Ra’s death, the cover of that month’s issue of Jazziz magazine asked: ‘Sun Ra: Visionary or Con Artist?’ Many jazz fans were upset that Sun Ra and the Arkestra performed in space costumes because it appeared that he was mocking jazz. It did not matter to Gilmore what people thought. Nor did it matter what Ra’s real name was. Ra was never keen on telling people his real name. After Ra died, his long time business partner, Alton Abraham, showed a Downbeat reporter a document stating that on October 20, 1952, Herman Poole Blount changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra. What mattered to Gilmore was what type of person Sun Ra was. He was devastated by Sun Ra’s death.
It is questionable whether the Arkestra can survive without Sun Ra. Gilmore is now the leader, but he is in poor health and says he no longer has the stamina to play the saxophone. It is also an issue of whether or not the Arkestra will keep its house in Philadelphia. Sun Ra left no will, so the house went to his sister, Mary Jenkins. Gilmore also says that the Arkestra might lose the house because of some debts owed to the IRS. Nevertheless, he concludes: ‘As long as I’m alive, I'll do what I can to keep the Arkestra going.’
Discographical postscript
Record producer Jerry Gordon of Evience Music has done the Arkestra a great service. In 1992 he began to reissue Sun Ra’s albums. For decades, Sun Ra fans were unable to obtain Arkestra records unless they attended his concerts. But when the Arkestra moved to Philadelphia, Gordon had a chance to see them perform. ‘Sun Ra became my musical hero,’ said Gordon. Gordon owned a record store, and Sun Ra allowed Gordon to sell his albums. Gordon was the only record store owner in the United States with this honour. Soon, he sold Ra’s music to record store owners across the country wholesale. And now some of Ra’s music is available for the first time to the general public. Among the material reissued, Gilmore’s favourite tune is Search Light Blues, from Bad And Beautiful. Gilmore says that it is often difficult for him to express himself and Search Light Blues was a rare time when he was able to do so. Because of Jerry Gordon, people can buy Ra’s music and develop some understanding of a musical giant and his tremendous contributions.
The recorded Evidence A list of albums now available through Evidence Music:
Sound Sun Pleasure; Holiday For Soul
Dance; Jazz In Silhouette; Supersonic
Jazz; Monorails And Satellites; Sun Ra
Visits Planet Earth/Interstellar Low Ways;
Other Planes Of There; My Brother The
Wind Part 2; Cosmic Tones For Mental
Therapy/Art Forms Of Dimensions
Tomorrow; We ‘Travel The Space
Ways/Bad And Beautiful; Angels &
Demons At Play/The Nubians Of
Plutonia; Fate In A Pleasant Mood/When
Sun Comes Out; Atlantis; Magic City;
Sound Track To Space Is The Place.
For further information write: Evidence
Music, 1100 E Hector St, Suite 392,
Conshohocken, PA 19428, USA.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Simon Adams for his assistance in the preparation of this article.
Ref : Jazz Journal International October 1994
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