Seizing Our Future: The Revolutionary
​Music of Ellington, Mingus, 
Sun Ra and Bootsy

May 10-11th, 2025
Join us to celebrate the revolutionary music of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, and Bootsy Collins and reclaim the music's spirit of political commitment to the all-humanity struggle for freedom. 
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If you would like to make a contribution to support our event, please donate at the link below. 
“The people must prove to the people a better day is coming.”
- Curtis Mayfield

Arising from the ancient African village, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, plantation slavery, Civil War, Black Reconstruction, the Black Church and Revolution, Black music is at once the music of Black freedom and of humanity’s quest for freedom and democracy. It is everything African, everything modern and futuristic. It joins the rhythms, melodies and work songs of Africa with the folk and classical music of the world’s cultures. In the end it is everything African, everything human and thus All Humanity in its scope and essence. It is a companion to the new movement of world thought imitated by W.E.B. Du Bois at the start of the 20th century. It is a new music for the epoch of the rise of AfroAsia.

It is evidence of the complex, yet ever unfolding, history of Black folk and the history of their consciousness. During enslavement it merged Africa’s art, poetry and music to Black America’s struggle for freedom, producing Sorrow Songs (a rhythmic narrative of a disappointed people) which defined this new people, in this strange land. This new people in spite of everything created music, art, poetry and an unbending spiritual striving to be free. 
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A Symposium and Conversation to Reclaim the Revolutionary Possibilities of Music

Deploying this worldview and in organizing this symposium, the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation will examine compositional and performative legacies of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra and Bootsy Collins to investigate the democratic and revolutionary essence of their work and its meaning for this time of crisis. By taking seriously this great music and the four composers we will examine, we are taking Black people and the liberation of humanity from empire and imperialism seriously. We view this as a common reach for the future. In so doing we seek to reground the ideological and political struggles in the 21st century. We believe it is necessary that every current of past cultural and artistic revolutions be a part of, and be critical to, the thinking of all revolutionaries, democrats, socialists and fighters for peace in this time. This is at the same time a political and critical rejection of corporate pop culture and the efforts of the ruling elites to cognitively, morally, and culturally manipulate the U.S. and world peoples, especially young people and the poor. Corporate pop culture is artistically empty and in the end, antirevolutionary and antipeople.

Using videos of live performances and recordings of their most important work and discussion we will ask the question, Is this music still relevant, can it be reclaimed for this time of crisis and if so what must be done to guarantee it?
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In embracing the Great Sacrifice and the Moral Courage of Ellington, Mingus, Sun Ra and Bootsy Collins, we express our faith in the possibility of a new cultural and political Renaissance for this time.
Program
​Day 1: Duke Ellington & Charles Mingus
Saturday May 10th, 10am - 6pm
9:30am Doors Open

10:15am Introductory Remarks & Reading of Vision Statement

​10:45am Duke Ellington: The New World Movement of Thought

12:15pm Discussion

1:00pm Break 

2:00pm Duke Ellington: The Afro Asiatic Reconstitution of Humanity

3:00pm Charles Mingus: Freedom Now
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4:30pm Discussion

5:00pm Charles Mingus: The Revolutionary Transformation
Day 2: Sun Ra & Bootsy Collins
Sunday May 11th, 1pm - 6pm
12:30pm Doors Open

1:15pm Introductory Remarks

1:30pm Sun Ra: Along Came Ra

3:00pm Discussion

4:00pm Sun Ra: The Space Age and The End of The Color Line

5:00pm Bootsy Collins: One Nation Grooving To The Funk

6:00pm Dance Party to the Music of Sun Ra and Others​

Duke Ellington 
​(April 29, 1899 - May 24, 1974)

Left: Ellington listening to playback, captured by Gordon Parks in 1960

“My people — my people! Singing, dancing, praying. Thinking. Talking about freedom, working—building America into the most powerful nation in the world! Cotton. Sugar. Indigo. Iron, coal, peanuts, steel, railroad—you name it! The foundation of the United States rests on the sweat of my people. And in addition to working and sweating, don’t ever forget that my people fought and died in every war. Every enemy of the USA has had to face my people on the front line. And when Teddy Roosevelt led his rough riders up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American war, for the first time, my people returned home decorated heroes.” 

Black, Brown, and Beige:
“Black, Brown, and Beige was planned as a tone parallel to the history of the American Negro, and the first section, "Black," (Work Song, Light Come Sunday)  delved deeply into the Negro past… “Come Sunday,” the spiritual theme, was intended to depict the movement inside and outside the church, as seen by workers who stood outside, watched,  listened, but were not admitted. This is developed to the time when the workers have a church of their own. The section ends with promises. I felt that the kind of unfinished ending was in accordance with reality, that it could not be tied, boxed, and stored away when so much else remained to be done.
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The second section, "Brown," [West Indian Dance, Emancipation, the Blues] recognized the contribution made by the Negro to this country in blood… "Emancipation Celebration" described the mixture of joyfulness on the part of the young people as well as the bewilderment of the old on that "great gettin' up mornin'." After years of hard work, when they were maybe all set to rest for their remaining days, how did the old people feel that morning when somebody came along and told them they were free? Moving on to the Spanish-American War, we pictured the homecoming of the decorated heroes, and then that offspring of romantic triangles which was and is "The Blues."

At Carnegie Hall, I introduced the third section, "Beige," by referring to the common view of the people of Harlem, and the little Harlems around the U.S.A., as just singing, dancing, and responding to the tom-toms…Coming more up to date, we found the Negroes struggling for solidarity, and in the confusion of it all, just as we were beginning to get our teeth into the tissue, we discovered that our country was in deep trouble again. So, just as always before, the Black, Brown, and Beige were soon right in there for the Red, White, and Blue.” - Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress 
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CHARLES MINGUS
​(April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979)

Right: Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, and Johnny Coles (from left to right)

“As I was saying, each jazz musician is supposed to be a composer. Whether he is or not, I don't know.

Music was my life. Had I been born in a different country or had I been born white, I am sure I would have expressed my ideas long ago. Maybe they wouldn't have been as good because when people are born free-I can't imagine it, but I've got a feeling that if it's so easy for you, the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say.

I say, let my children have music… For God's sake, rid this society of some of the noise so that those who have ears will be able to use them some place listening to good music. When I say good I don't mean that today's music is bad because it is loud. I mean the structures have paid no attention to the past history of music... To me that's not spiritual music. It leaves the feeling and emotion out. It seems to me that it should come from the heart, even though it's composed.”
-- Mingus’s liner notes from "Let My Children Hear Music" also titled “What is a Jazz Composer?"

"... I wrote the music for dancing and listening. It is true music with much and many of my meanings. It is my living epitaph from birth til the day I first heard of Bird and Diz. Now it is me again. This music is only one little wave of styles and waves of little ideas my mind has encompassed through living in a society that calls itself sane, as long as you're not behind iron bars where there at least one can't be half as crazy as in most of the ventures our leaders take upon themselves to do and think for us, even to the day we should be blown up to preserve their idea of how life should be. Crazy? They'd never get out of the observation ward at Bellevue..." 
-- Mingus’s liner notes from "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady"​

SUN RA
​(May 22, 1914 - May 30, 1993)

Enlightenment 

The sound of joy
Is enlightenment 
Space, fire, truth
Is enlightenment 
Space fire, 
Sometimes it's music 
Strange mathematics, 
Rhythmic equations..

Enlightenment
Is my tomorrow
It has no planes
Of sorrow
Hereby, my invitation 
I do invite you
To be of my space world...

"Now my contribution is in the music. In the first place, I feel that people have got to know–they got to know what happens as is. Now, they’ve never really been happy on this planet because they didn’t ever have anything to be happy about. So then I show them in the music and give a feeling of happiness so they’ll know when they’re happy and when they’re sad. But I really don’t think people know the difference between good & evil and right & wrong on this planet. They simply don’t know… Now, to some people it seems like the music doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m talking about, but it does. Because music is a language and I’m speaking these things over in it. So in order to understand the music people will have to know some of the thoughts I’m thinking and what I really want, and they will have a better understanding…Now, my music is about a better place for people, not to have a place where they have to die to get there, I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about a place where they can live a method out–my equation is that it’s very bad to live and it’s very bad to die, because if you live you die, and if you die you live. . . because there's an equation set up that's fooling folks. Now, the same thing happens in music. There's a certain place a musician reaches where he bases what he's doing on."
- Sun Ra interview in the Ann Arbor Sun, April, 1967

​BOOTSY COLLINS (October 26, 1951- )

Right: Bootsy Collins playing the bass as part of James Brown and the JB's

"To everybody now, as it is, nothing's funny any more because everyone's trying to get paid, everybody's trying to get a hit, you know? When I was coming up, we weren't trying to get a hit or get paid, we were just trying to do our thing. The only thing we were really trying to do was to be recognized for our originality. It was more about that than anything else. In the end, that paid off because then we started getting paid! (laughs) When I started out with George, he didn't have us up on the billboard list. We were just doing the show to be doing it, just letting the fans see us and in doing that, the fans wanted "Bootsy". They started hollering "we want Bootsy" and that's where we got that from. I don't know, but I think it's a different mindset now. When you're used to playing with people, when you're in a band, then you're used to playing with each other. People nowadays aren't used to playing with each other because they don't have to. All they need is a sampler and a record and a voice to put on and then they got a smash record. So they're not used to dealing with each other. Plus the mentality of the world is different now, it's "I can do it myself, 'F' you, I don't need you". We didn't come up that way. We needed each other and we knew it. It's a farmer's mentality. You have to get up and plant the seed and see if it grows, but you can't just wait around, you have to water it and take care of it. Nobody has time for that today. Everybody wanna plant the seed and "OK I want you to grow now. I want you right now. And if you don't come up out the ground right now I'm gonna shoot you!" (laughs) That's pretty much what's going on today and it's being spread by, I mean, TV is full of it and you can't fault TV because it's just a reflection of what's going on in the world. Nothing's funny to people no more and that's what makes me keep my original point focused. To me, that is what's funny. I try to bring it across on my record, in my dress, in what I do and what I say because to me humor is important. You should have a dose of that and I guess giving it is what I'm here for." - Interview of Bootsy Collins