In pre- and inter-performance comments, a plea pervaded pianist Sullivan Fortner’s Friday show at the University of Chicago: Can we be anywhere but here?

Thank goodness Sun Ra and his music mastered the art of spiritual teleportation. Born Herman “Sonny” Blount in 1914, the composer and pianist arrived on Chicago’s South Side — indeed, just blocks from the University of Chicago — in the 1940s. It was here that Ra embraced the moniker “Sun Ra” and founded his Arkestra band, developing its one-of-a-kind, extraterrestrial musical rhetoric.

Fortner, one of the brightest pianistic talents of his generation, couldn’t have known he would invoke Ra at such a fraught time for the icon’s former home. But Ra’s music has a way of touching down right as it’s most needed.

The “Galactic Friends,” as Fortner calls this septet, includes some Arkestra veterans — like trombonist Craig Harris, who co-led the band. Looking a bit Darth Vader in all-black and a reflective mask, Fortner also signaled to the ensemble from behind a fortress of grand piano, electric piano and Hammond organ.

Sometimes, Fortner and Harris’s co-leadership instilled more confusion than clarity. On a couple occasions, the two musicians, squinting at their charts, gave contradicting directions to the band — which, miraculously, stayed the course, if sometimes by the skin of its teeth. It also took some time for sound levels in the Logan Center Performance Hall to settle, Fortner’s plugged-in, throbbing keyboards at first overwhelming the band and the ear.

Though the wheels nearly came off the wagon during “Discipline 27-II,” they snapped back on, then rocketed us into interstellar space for the rest of the concert. Before a “Saturn” of subtle asymmetry, Fortner paced through a solo-piano collage of Ra’s catalog, his attack and touch on the keys uncannily similar to the late pianist’s own. And if co-bandleading and chopping it up on trombone tired Harris, he didn’t show it, least of all in a stunning marathon solo in “Discipline 27.”

The Friends’ setlist mixed B-sides composed or recorded in Chicago — like “Discipline 27,” which the Arkestra committed to disc in the 1970s — and beloved classics. It wouldn’t be an Arkestra tribute without “Space Is the Place,” which closed the concert; Harris and Frank Lacy set down their horns to sing and clap along.

When he wasn’t singing, Lacy traded his trombone for the mellower French horn, a hat-tip to Arkestra member and Chicagoan Vincent Chancey. Likewise, Scott Robinson, an adroit multi-instrumentalist, stuck to tenor saxophone — another sonic tie to the Arkestra, led by tenors John Gilmore after Ra’s death in 1993.

But no band member brought down the house quite like bassist Alex Blake, another Arkestra alum. He captivated in his strummed-and-sung solos in “Watusa” — or “Watusi” — and “Interstellar Low Ways.” Even his backing was enthralling, playing with pinwheeling strokes and deep-pocketed assurance.

Representing a younger guard of musicians, trumpeter Marquis Hill brought heart-melting lyricism to tunes like “Love in Outer Space.” When he wasn’t behind his horn, he was tapping out rhythmic additions on tiny percussion instruments — metal claves in “Discipline 27,” finger cymbals in “Love in Outer Space.”

Meanwhile, Kendrick Scott, also a junior Friend, anchored the band on kit. He proved to be a steady, good-humored presence through the show’s most MacGyvered moments. Plus, he knows how to build a show-stopping solo: His “Discipline 27” feature layered up bit by bit, Fortner sometimes leaning on the electric piano’s lowest note to inject a subwoofer effect.

Near the end of the show, Harris reminisced about his Arkestra days — alone an evening highlight. The Arkestra was Harris’s first gig out of college, and it was also his first exposure to the dazzling cloaks and headgear donned by band members. In those days, the sweaty garments would get stuffed in a trunk immediately post-gig.

“There was some funk in the trunk,” Harris said.

But Harris didn’t chose the Arkestra as much as it chose him. He recounted playing his first show with the band. It lasted four hours. “I left different,” he insisted.

The same could be said for those of us who heard the Galactic Friends.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/10/11/review-sullivan-fortner-jazz/