The Sun Ra Arkestra’s Maestro Hits One Hundred

“Let’s sit here,” Allen said, finding a chair in the Arkestral Institute’s kitchen. A second seat was borrowed from the rehearsal room, where a bust of a pharaoh watched an old drum kit and an upright piano. Allen is lithe and sinewy and, in a Sun Ra T-shirt and cap, didn’t seem much changed from the guy on sax in the seventies or eighties, blowing and chanting and dancing. He reminisced about growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, where, in the nineteen-thirties, at a state institution for Black children, he was given an oboe. “I wanted the clarinet, but they’d run out,” he said.