The Voyage of Phil Cohran
Kelan Phil Cohran, the former Sun Ra sideman and co-founder of the influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), has recently seen several of his dates as a leader from the 1960s reissued, including a couple on Portland's popular Mississippi Records. African Skies, the most recent album to come out under his name, has all the trappings of outré Chicago jazz from that era—flute, kalimba, mystical chanting—but the date of the session stands out. The record, released last year by Chicago's Captcha, is an unheard studio recording from 1993. It is Cohran's first album of new music since The Malcolm X Memorial (A Tribute in Music), which first came out in 1968.
Cohran (pronounced "co-RAHN"), a multi-instrumentalist known for his trumpet playing, was born in 1927 and grew up outside of Oxford, Mississippi in an area known to this day as "Coontown." The family moved to St. Louis when he was about ten. In 1958 Cohran joined Sun Ra's Arkestra in Chicago and became a lifelong devotee of the charismatic, eccentric bandleader who was either from Birmingham or Saturn, depending on who you asked. Cohran played cornet on some of the Arkestra's greatest records, including Interstellar Low Ways and Fate in a Pleasant Mood, and became so entangled in Sun Ra's strict regimen of practice, performance, and inculcation with esoteric ideas that he lost his wife and job. Cohran decided to stay in Chicago when the band moved to New York in 1961. But he remained under Sun Ra's spell, taking up the serious study of astronomy and helping form the AACM, another Afrocentric free-jazz collective, partly on the Arkestra's model.
In 1993, the year Sun Ra died, Cohran was volunteering at the Adler Planetarium on Lake Michigan. He was asked by the planetarium to contribute music for an exhibition called African Skies and what he came up with was a tribute to his recently deceased mentor. The music was performed once and set down in the studio but the recording was shelved.
Like many reissues, African Skies has a discovery narrative. In the early 2000s, Benjamin Funke of Captcha Records was regularly going to see Cohran perform, as Cohran still does, every Friday night for free at a restaurant called the Ethiopian Diamond. Cohran usually played solo. He's a "cult figure" in Chicago, Funke said. "I don't think there's anything you can compare him to." Funke gets emotional when describing the specialness of "Brother Phil" and the revelation of his new material. One night Cohran played a show at a venue called Elastic Arts. "It snowed crazy amounts in Chicago that night," Funke said, "and only seven or eight people showed up." Cohran performed and also did a "VH1 Storytellers–type thing," explaining the meaning of the songs. After the show, Cohran handed out CDs of African Skies to the audience. Funke listened to it at home and was blown away—it "demanded" to be released to wider public, he said.
The main reason why African Skies blends in with the recent spate of Cohran reissues is that it perfectly captures the spirit and range of the early Arkestra. In the late '50s, before Sun Ra switched from piano to synthesizer and a format centered on frenetic horns, the Arkestra played a classy blend of hard-bop melodies and orientalist orchestration that would have been well-suited for old Hollywood. The first track, "Theme," is a treatment of the Arkestra's cultic chants and lets the listener know he has landed squarely on Saturn. Several voices eerily sing,
Welcome to the skies of history,
Welcome to the skies of mystery,
Welcome to the skies of Africa today.
The plangent harp on "White Nile" serves as a springboard for traditional-sounding horn and bass solos, including one from a gorgeous bass clarinet, which echoes Sun Ra's characteristic use of the baritone sax in his early arrangements. "Cohran's Blues" and "The Sahara" showcase violin solos while "Kilimanjaro" manages to sound both like an Africanist's lost field recording and the music the Africanist would have heard in a Hyde Park lounge in the ’60s after returning from fieldwork to the University of Chicago.
In an interview for the Great Black Music Project conducted in 2008, Cohran described what it was like to go out on his own after his formative discipleship with Sun Ra. "As I walked the streets of Chicago and studied, my whole world opened up because of him," he said. "I studied the heavens. I watched them every night for three and a half years. I even took a job with the police department so that I could go on lunch on my midnight shift and study the heavens."
In the great tradition of Chicago rock labels paying tribute to local jazz legends, Funke took it upon himself to get the recording of African Skies mixed, mastered, and released in handsome packaging. When he finally showed Cohran the album, at a show at the Ethiopian Diamond, Funke said Cohran beamed: "He opened the LP gatefold and saw that the only thing inside was a photo of the African skies"—a picture Cohran took of the sky while in Africa—"and when he saw that he was like, 'This is the cosmos right here.' "
"Kilimanjaro" by Phil Cohran. From African Skies.
Photo courtesy of © LaMont Hamilton Photography.
