Trumpet, Frankiphone and Composition | 1927-2017

Kelan Phil Cohran was born Philip Cohran in Oxford, Mississippi on May 8, 1927, grew up in St. Louis, played trumpet with Jay McShann's band and in a United States Navy band before arriving in Chicago in 1958. John Gilmore introduced him to Sun Ra that year, and he spent two years inside the Arkestra, appearing on "Fate in a Pleasant Mood" and "Angels and Demons at Play" and absorbing an approach to music, cosmology and African heritage that shaped everything he made afterwards. When Sun Ra moved the Arkestra to Montreal in 1961, Cohran declined to go. In 1965 he was among the founders of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians alongside Muhal Richard Abrams, a collective whose subsequent members would include Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Roscoe Mitchell. He opened the Afro-Arts Theater, taught long-tone technique and tone science to generations of South Side musicians including a young Maurice White, formed the Artistic Heritage Ensemble with Pete Cosey and future Earth Wind and Fire players, and invented the Frankiphone, an electrified kalimba he designed and built himself. Muslim scholars in China later bestowed on him the honorific Kelan, meaning holy scripture. His own recordings as a leader are rare. "African Skies" (1993), commissioned by Chicago's Adler Planetarium and dedicated to Sun Ra, who died weeks after the session, was not released commercially until 2010 and is regarded as a late masterpiece of cosmic jazz. Cohran died on June 28, 2017, aged 90.