Courtesy of Michael Ray







Evidence

A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH MICHAEL RAY


Although people may rib Michael Ray for his time with Kool & the Gang, that means little to the Roadshow because anyone that would sacrifice fame and fortune to dedicate himself and be loyal to Sun Ra and his music, is an honorary Weekly Roadshow bus driver. Ray sat down with me from his home in the Bayou, to tell me about his many Sun Ra moments and the definitive impact Sun Ra has had on his life and musical direction, as always, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

MICHAEL RAY: Well, I came up in the rock and roll funk bands. I played with a lot of doo-wop groups, The Stylistics, Teddy Pendergrass, The Delfonics, coming out of Philly. Then, I met Sun Ra. He was basically my mentor. Between Sun Ra and the time I spent with Kool & the Gang, it is like a mixture of the two. So it is jazz that you've got to dance to. It is entertaining and very enlightening.


FJ: Let's touch on your years with Sun Ra.

MICHAEL RAY: Oh, man, Fred, this was in '78. I used to play with a big band, a twenty-one piece big band in Philadelphia and we did an outdoor festival where Sun Ra was on the bill and I got a chance to meet the trumpet players. One thing I noticed was that everybody in the band had suitcases full of music. At that time, they had like two drummers and fire eaters and so many conga players and dancers and they were running around "Space Is the Place."


FJ: What was your initial impression of all that?

MICHAEL RAY: I thought, "Man, this cat is out there!" But when the band played, it was so tight and so diverse. You really don't hear too many people still carrying on the big band tradition because he was playing all of Fletcher Henderson's charts and Jimmie Lunceford and Duke and then his own arrangements and standards. So then, I seen him on a trolley and I told him how I liked his show and he said, "Why don't you come to rehearsal?" So I went over to rehearse and I walked in the house and he has got all these Egyptian paintings and keyboards and amps and milk crates filled with music and tapes. These cats even had milk crates of music in the refrigerator. He is sitting in the middle of the room in all this confusion and chaos and he says, "I know everything you need to know about music." I was thinking, "Yeah, right." He said, "Do you know any standards?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "What about 'Lady Bird?'" I said, "Yeah, I know that." He said, "Well, 'Lady Bird' has the same changes as 'Half Nelson.'" John, we're talking about John Gilmore, he played "Lady Bird" and he told me to play "Half Nelson," and then we switched up. Now, we're playing in ¾. Now, we're playing it in 6/6. Now, we're playing in 5/4. He turned the song around so many times. We rehearsed for a couple of days and opened up in New York. And here come all these other musicians with suitcases filled with music like Archie Shepp and Leon Thomas and Danny Davis and Pat Patrick. So until I heard him play "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," on acoustic piano, I mean, it brought tears to my eyes, that I realized that he was a true jazz master. I just tried to stick close to him to get that music.


FJ: Sun Ra is rarely mentioned amongst the pantheon of big band leaders and composers.

MICHAEL RAY: Well, Sun Ra always said that he was playing the low profile. He was putting music out just for them to steal. Some of the most beautiful music that I have ever played or heard has been in rehearsals that we really never played for the world. It has a lot to do with marketing. He was one of the first jazz musicians to start an independent record label (Saturn). It is just the nature of things. America is just kind of waking up. Whereas before, we would go to Europe and there's a standing ovation and sold out amphitheaters. And we come back here and people don't even know who we are.


FJ: So how does one go from Sun Ra to Kool & the Gang?

MICHAEL RAY: Sun Ra always went out. I would get off the plane and take a limo to wherever he was and just be there for rehearsal. I gave up limos to catching a bus to make his rehearsals. Once you get there and start rehearsing, you rehearse until he falls asleep. He says that he has got to play it because the spirit of God is in the room and you have got to play it until he feels the spirit leave. And he would tailor make everyone's part depending on your vibration and your spirit, he would write a part specifically for you. When you rehearse and then maybe someone would come in late to rehearsal and then he would say, "Oh, I have got to change the arrangement now." So we would be there rehearsing for fifteen, twenty hours and that was a normal thing. I rehearsed with him for two and a half days once. He really never slept. He just took catnaps.


FJ: I know that the core members of Sun Ra's band, John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, Tyrone Hill, and yourself, played with him because of your firmness in your belief of the music, certainly not for fame, for that never came while he was living, at least not in this country, or for money, because there was none.

MICHAEL RAY: Oh, yeah. When you can feel an entire band levitate and you hear people chant, "Ra, Ra," for two hours after the gig, because Sun Ra said that people are sometimes like children. You have got to have these nursery rhymes or like fairy tales or folk songs to get the melodies and harmonies. It is like he said, "That Cecil Taylor is a good piano player, but you can't remember one song he played." So he would always have this infectious type melody, chanting going on and then there would be a left turn and go right up into outer space and do something else. The diversity of our book was always a comforting thing to know that no matter who is on stage or on the bill, we're going to wipe them out.


FJ: Do you miss him?

MICHAEL RAY: Yeah, Fred. I miss the discipline. You sit there and rehearse and say, "Man, I would sure like to go to the movies or go out and get a date or go get some food." I was always trying to slip out of rehearsal. But when he wasn't there, I just really miss him.


FJ: Is that why you began the Cosmic Krewe?

MICHAEL RAY: Well, we did a residency at Dartmouth College and I got a chance to meet Don Glasgo, who is the band director for the Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble and Steve Ferraris is a percussionist up there and I said, "It would be great for me to come up here in August and get out of New Orleans and for you all to come down here to get out of winter." So it was like a New England, New Orleans concept that started. It is like playing for the Phish crowd or the leftover Medeski Martin and Wood crowd. We have been having some success. We have a toehold into the business. It is still just emerging. Even the record we put out, Funk If I Know, on Monkey Hill Records, the distributor went bankrupt, so even though it is a nice record, they won't buy it if they don't know about it. There have been some problems with that. And one of the first records we put out on Evidence Records, which is basically a catalog label, and Jerry Gordon, there was some stuff where he said, "Well, Mike, that is just really too funky." Personally, I had never heard of such a thing as being too funky. I have never heard it. So I had to fight for one song on there, "Echoes of Boat People," and there was some funk song on there that he didn't want. Sun Ra had another funky side. There is a whole book of songs that just deal with funk. When I first got with him in '78, we had something called "Disco 3000," that we recorded in Milan, Italy. There was a prototype computer organ from Japan that he was checking out. Even now, that stuff is way head of its time.


FJ: Sun Ra was one of the first to advocate the usage of electronics and violate the unspoken taboo of jazz.

MICHAEL RAY: Yeah, how about that.


FJ: And by that pushing of the envelope, Sun Ra is now beloved by college students.

MICHAEL RAY: Well, it is like a different generation. They are not afraid to go and get that music. It is like some kids, they are just victimized by what they hear on the radio. A lot of times, it is just like smooth jazz. I've heard some radio jockey say, "We play everything from Grover Washington to Kenny G."


FJ: That isn't much variety.

MICHAEL RAY: Yeah, but I think that is diversity when you hear a lot of sacred rhythms, rhythm upon rhythm and sound upon sound. It is special and it moves the spirit.


FJ: And the future?

MICHAEL RAY: Well, I just came back from Monte Carlo with Kool & the Gang. It was a long trip because we had to drive to Nice and fly to Frankfurt and fly to JFK and take a shuttle to Newark and fly home. I basically feel like I just climbed out from under a rock. And we did a TV show in Belgium and did a DVD in Chicago and did a lot of Germany dates. I have got another concept, the Cosmic Funk Quartet that has some stuff going in New York. The calendar is filling up. It is quite easy for me to play what people want to hear. Lately, I have been thinking about playing what they need to hear because there is a certain type of old school, or what I call pro-school grooves that they are not familiar with. From all the time I spent at the Apollo and Uptown, just the way a band approaches a show, because a lot of times you have musicians that play and they just stand there and the song is over and they go into a huddle by the drummer and then they come back and play and the interaction of the audience is one of the most important things about presenting a show. Sun Ra said, "People come to see you and hear you." You just can't be standing there, hands holding your horn. So that is one of the reasons that I put a little bit more entertainment edge on it. We just did two weeks in Italy and it was a great festival, but you have some of the top notch jazz musicians that just stand there and play those old songs. They sound good and they're playing their asses off, but when you are playing a Charlie Parker song, there ain't too much you can do to it. So I always put a cosmic twist on everything. I've actually played two or three songs at the same time because people's minds are ready to absorb that. Just remember, all space aliens are admitted free with ID.


Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and is one of the 17,000 objects that have dropped from the sky. Comments?  Email Fred.