Collection: Kelan Phil Cohran

Philip Cohran grew up in St. Louis, played trumpet with Jay McShann in the early 1950s and in a Navy band, and arrived in Chicago in 1958. John Gilmore introduced him to Sun Ra, and he spent two years inside the Arkestra, appearing on "Fate in a Pleasant Mood" and "Angels and Demons at Play," absorbing what he later described as the central education of his musical life. When Sun Ra moved the Arkestra to Montreal in 1961, Cohran stayed. In 1965 he was among the founders of the AACM alongside Muhal Richard Abrams and others, the organisation that would eventually produce Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Roscoe Mitchell. He opened the Afro-Arts Theater on the South Side, where a young Maurice White was among his students. He formed the Artistic Heritage Ensemble with Pete Cosey and future members of the Earth, Wind and Fire horn section. He invented the Frankiphone, an electrified kalimba he built by hand and played for the rest of his life. He received the honorific Kelan, meaning holy scripture, from Muslim scholars during a trip to China. His own recordings as a leader are few: the 1960s AACM documentation, a 1969 Malcolm X memorial album, and then "African Skies" (1993), commissioned by the Adler Planetarium as the soundtrack to a sky show about African astronomy, dedicated to Sun Ra who died weeks after it was recorded, and not released commercially until 2010. He died on June 28, 2017, aged 90.