At the turn of the 1960s, when free jazz was making its initial seismic impact, multi-instrumentalist Phil Cohran—he later added the name Kelan—was living in Chicago and playing trumpet for Sun Ra’s Arkestra. He contributed to crucial recordings by the band during his tenure, including We Travel the Space Ways, but Cohran was a restless autodidact who never stuck with any one project for long. He was an original member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in 1965, then departed shortly after its founding. Following the release of two excellent albums with his group Philip Cohran & the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, he shifted his focus in the ’70s and ’80s—studying the history of the African diaspora, astronomy, and various spiritual traditions, designing and building his own instruments, founding an educational workshop, and opening a health food store and performance space.
In 1993, Cohran was commissioned by the Adler Planetarium in Chicago—a devoted stargazer, he was already a member—to create the soundtrack for a show called “African Skies.” The searching and deeply atmospheric music he recorded with four musicians was released on LP in a small run in 2010 and quickly became a holy grail for collectors. It recently returned to vinyl via Stones Throw’s Listening Position imprint.
As a listening experience, African Skies is a mix of the familiar and the strange. It has a clear connection to the spiritual jazz that’s seen a major resurgence in the past 15 years or so, and the comforting presence of harp throughout (played by Cohran and Josefe Marie Verna) evokes artists like Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby. Though it’s a brief set—seven tracks, 37 minutes—it ranges widely, touching on sounds from across the titular continent and around the world. Yet it never feels academic: African Skies is so rich with circular rhythm and winding melody that its appeal is immediately apparent.
The general mood is meditative, focused, loose, and minimal; the gorgeous arrangements are slightly askew and rich with texture. On the opening “Theme,” the bassline stays on a single chord, drawing the ear to it as if it’s a monument jutting up into the sky, while the plucked strings, reeds, and vocals wrap around it like ribbons of color. Unusually, there’s not much percussion proper on the record—Cohran is credited with congas—but every instrument serves a rhythmic function first. A frequent anchor is Cohran’s handmade Frankiphon—an electrified device in the mbira family referred to as a “thumb piano.” It’s a pattern-based instrument designed for melodic rhythm, and Cohran’s technological modifications make the device sing like a harp welded to a drum.
Lead lines are often doubled on two instruments, as if to hear both sides of a story simultaneously. On the 10-minute centerpiece “White Nile,” a bowed bass and plucked harp braid together and push the tune along with insistent cycles of melody. Aquilla Sadalla’s wordless vocals, a gorgeous swell of howls and heaves, complement the arrangement without becoming the focal point. The same goes with a trumpet solo from Cohran, which begins with a single extended held note that dissolves into patient, careful phrasing that hovers between blues and modal scales.
Here and there, solos become the focus. On “Sahara,” a repeating plucked bass figure underpins a lengthy bowed solo that climbs and then falls with a horn-like articulation, commenting on and expanding the six-count bass figure and turning it inside out. It has an open-ended feel that invites improvisational conversation, and after the bowed bass, Cohran says his piece on a violin uke, a zither-like instrument with a sharp, gliding tone. On “Cohran Blues,” our travelogue leads to early 20th-century Chicago, with a squawking blues progression so elemental one could imagine King Oliver sitting in. On one hand, it’s quite a contrast with “White Nile,” a track that seems to float through space like a ghost. But African Skies is so singular you tend to hear connections between the pieces more than the differences.
In 1966, poet and critic Amiri Baraka wrote an essay called “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music).” It’s a sprawling piece that covers a lot of ground, and its essence is captured in its title, which is that wildly divergent Black music forms in America draw from the same historical roots. At the end of the piece, Baraka looks ahead, pondering how challenging free jazz might mingle with more accessible idioms: “That what will come will be a Unity Music. The Black Music which is jazz and blues, religious and secular. Which is New Thing and Rhythm and Blues. The consciousness of social reevaluation and rise, a social spiritualism. A mystical walk up the street to a new neighborhood where all the risen live.” With its blend of structural adventurousness and simple pleasure, African Skies feels like just such a place.
