Stories
by Ed Wilcox
I'm going to tell you some stories about when I was lucky enough to play 4 or 5 tours of Europe with an ensemble called Cinema Soloriens, which featured Marshall Allen - fastest alto sax player ever, an influence on John Coltrane and the leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra. A remarkable, resilient man, he was in his late eighties when we were together - a living link to some of the earliest jazz music, he was always kind enough to open up to me off and on stage.
Of course, you all want to hear the Sun Ra dirt first, and I can give you a little bit. I'm getting this all strictly second and third hand, off the record now, and maybe not even true. There was the tour of Egypt, playing at the pyramids, when Marshall drank a bottle of whiskey, fell off his camel (the camel's name was Moses), lost his mind in the blazing sun, stole a boat and tried to row across the Nile until he was rescued by the Egyptian coast guard.
There's the gig at a little town in France when a couple of the bandmembers got caught feeling one of the hotel maids while another member was outside the hotel lobby entrance, on acid, in the snow, masturbating. So, there's a knock on the door and it was the mayor and the chief of police informing them politely "You have to leave. You have to leave now."
And the Arkestra's residency at a college in Montreal when Marshall got caught on the girl's dorm - with a girl - a white one. The penalty for this in Canada in 1961 was public caning. So they shoved him into a bass drum case (luckily he's a little guy), rolled him down the stairs - bumping and bouncing him as hard as they could - tied him to the top of a bus on a cold night - informed the authorities they had a gig in New York that weekend and got out of town !
My favorite story is when they toured Europe around 1970. Sunny wanted the band to feel really at home wherever they were, so he had the entire contents of the Sun Ra House (in Germantown, in Philly) packed up to bring along. Marshall said they were waiting around at LaGuardia airport and a UHaul truck pulls up. "They brought the trash cans with the trash still in them. I said - What the Hell's that smell !" Luckily, it was going to cost an extra $ 10,000 to ship all that furniture and laundry and forks, so they sent it all back.
I guess this leads me to more of my own stories. Marshall took a lot of the Sun Ra mythology with a grain of salt. Underground music, record collecting etc.. is one of the last frontiers for the armchair explorer. We want these guys to be the authentic Nubians from Plutonia, but in the time I spent with Marshall I found he was a hip old swing musician who revered Johnny Hodges and he was very very sane. You know, you can't be on the road for 70 years - think about it - 70 years - if you don't have your head together. Through days of insulting airport security checks, napping on planes and in vans, me driving a hundred miles an hour through rain and and snow from Antwerp to Vienna to Amsterdam eating endless jambon (jambone) sandwiches from Belgian truckstops - never a complaint, just "When are we getting some wet food ? Some goulash !"
I love love love the drums. The history of the drums, the way different cats approached being in the driver's seat - and given a choice of listening, I'll take swing music over anything. So it was just always delightful to talk with Marshall about the great drummers he had seen. He would impersonate little Chick Webb (the first concert he ever went to) grinning and trying to reach his cymbals, or the stately, authoritative Big Sid Catlett (his favorite) and told me the best he ever played with was birth of the cool hipster Denzil Best... Oh, and he played with Sidney Bechet and Charlie Parker (I'm just thinking Don't drop the horn !), that was back in the '40s when he was living in Paris and dating Eartha Kitt. His own little band back then featuring Art Simmons, Don Byas and James Moody. We had a little cry together when Moody died ( I once took my mom to see him play with Diz).
Of course we got drunk together a couple times and all that nonsense, but the way I knew we were getting along was when he became my accomplice in crime. I steal airline blankets. It's just not a successful flight unless I score three or four of them - stuffing them in my bag and down my pants, before long the band would be reassembling in some airline terminal and he'd wink and pull a blanket out of his shirt.
We spent almost a week once in Leeds, and the city arts council was generous enough to appoint a young lady to chaperone and herd us around town - we kind of hit it off. Probably would have gotten real close if the old guy wasn't grinning and kicking me under tables and slapping me on the back saying "Right On !" every time he noticed me and Sarah trying to share a moment. Leeds was where James Harrar of Cinema Soloriens had booked us a wonderful show at Symphony Hall. (Marshall looked up and said "There's a lot of gold in that ceiling"). The stage was so enormous that we could soundcheck at the same time as our opening act. I didn't even know who this guy was, a nice old English gentleman with a keyboard - I thought, this guy sure is ripping off my absolute front man idol hero, John Foxx of Ultravox... anyway, that's a story for another time.
But best of all was simply the shows. There were some funny times, like in Bristol - our show was an hour and a half long, all synchronized with films and lights - no breaks - we're about an hour and twenty minutes into it and I could see he was getting a little fidgety. I could see he wasn't going to make it. He up and runs off stage, come back out a minute or two later and finishes the set. After the gig I said to him "Old man, it's a good thing there was a bathroom back there." He laughed and said "There wasn't !"
But mainly it was just night after night when we'd sit across from each other - and he'd stare me down and we'd start shooting it out, matching these improvised quirky bebop runs until one of us blinked - and I'm proud to say neither of us ever blinked ! Often we would end shows by inviting local musicians to jam with us as an encore. Of course, every lunatic in town would climb on stage blaring away so they could brag they had "collaborated" with Marshall Allen. It was pretty damn tedious, but they would blow themselves out and then - sometimes - pure heaven. We'd close the show, just Marshall and I, playing some real nice music. He'd get to pretend he was Johnny Hodges and I'd get to pretend I was Kenny Clarke, and we'd get off stage and he'd say "Now Ed, that was charming." What a gift he gave me a lot of nights.
You know he knows about football ? He likes those Korean history soap operas with guys in armor hacking each other up - but he really knows football. We were sharing a hotel room by Heathrow Airport, dozing off while the Chargers played the Colts and he snaps to and hollers "Why does Norv Turner have Philip Rivers running a naked bootleg ? He's too damn fat !" and he's right.
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