Traveling the spaceways with Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra, who celebrated his 102nd birthday at the Ruba Club

It’s a Memorial Day weekend tradition in Philadelphia that happens with such regularity that music fans might be tempted take it for granted: Marshall Allen has celebrated another birthday.

This time, the Sun Ra Arkestra leader turned 102. The party happened Sunday night at the Ruba Club in Northern Liberties, where the indefatigable centenarian saxophonist was astonishingly spry and energetic, leading a group of dozen or so musicians that included Arkestra members and special guests.

Hosted by Allen’s son Ronnie Boyd and jazz and experimental music presenters Ars Nova Workshop, the show was not an official Arkestra gig. It took place in the upstairs, 170-capacity room at the Ruba — the 111 year old venue (even more aged than Allen!) whose name is an acronym for Russian United Beneficial Association.

After a birthday cake reception, Boyd welcomed the sold-out crowd to the annual celebration, which moved to the Ruba after being held last year at Solar Myth in South Philly, where OutKast rapper turned flautist and piano player André 3000 was a surprise guest.

Boyd hyped Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons, the 2025 live album recorded at Solar Myth released by Ars Nova and Otherly Love Records.

And he announced that In The Orbit Of Ra, a new Mural Arts Philadelphia artwork, will be unveiled June 13 at 6333 Greene St. in East Germantown. That’s not far from the Morton Street house where Sun Ra moved the Arkestra in 1968 and where Allen still resides.

The musicians then took the stage beneath the Ruba’s elegant proscenium arch in their Afrofuturist finery, with Allen looking particularly intergalactic in a glowing gold and brown ensemble and sparkly baseball cap.

» READ MORE: From Germantown to Saturn and back: a new Sun Ra documentary lands in Philly

The band began to blow, with trumpeter Michael Ray and trombonist Dick Griffin seated to Allen’s left and vocalist Tara Middleton standing to his right, as the evening kicked off with a poem by Sun Ra scholar Thomas Stanley.

“We’re here because the music has brought us together around this man and his life of serving a dream,” declaimed Stanley, author of a book with a mouthful of a title The Execution of Sun Ra: The Mysterious Tale of a Dark Body Sent to Earth to Usher in an Unprecedented Era of Cosmic Regeneration (Volume II).

“A dream of happiness, a dream of planetary harmony, a dream of people doing something beautiful together with discipline, with love, with courage, with solidarity,” Stanley continued.

With that, Stanley made an enthusiastic introduction: “Ladies and Gentlemen, in celebration of Marshall Allen’s 102nd birthday, the Sun Ra Arkestra!”

At which point, Arkestra member and guitarist DMHotep jumped up to grab the mic: “It’s not the Sun Ra Arkestra,” he clarified. “It’s the Arkestral associates of Marshall Allen.”

Whatever the proper name of the ensemble — which included saxophonist and longtime Arkestra member Knoel Scott and auxiliary players such as Elliott Levin (also on sax) and alt-rock star Kurt Vile, who sat in on guitar — the band was in spectacular form.

Allen has attended to the legacy of Sun Ra since the 1993 death of the visionary composer and “Godfather of Afro-Futurism” who was the subject of an American Masters documentary this year.

That vision is famously shaped by science fiction, with a forward-thinking free jazz spirit that encourages interstellar genre-splicing experimentation. “We Travel The Spaceways,” as Ra put in a 1960 song that Allen and band arrived at in a chanted, incantatory version toward the end of Sunday’s nearly two-hour performance.

But like Ra, Allen understands that you can’t make incandescent, “Interplanetary Music” without being grounded in earthly, old school discipline. On Sunday, the man they call “The Maestro” stood up in several instances and directed the band with hand gestures, leaving no doubt as to who was in charge of the joyous performance.

In addition to saxophone, Allen also frequently soloed on an EVI, or electronic valve instrument, with an otherworldly feel, and he also occasionally pulled out a pocket-sized VL-Tone mini keyboard to add playful embellishment to the band’s wondrously cacophonous sound.

All night long the band rode a steady, swaying groove that allowed for improvisational excursions from Allen and all corners, with Scott (who also played drums) bounding in from stage right to with energetic sax soloing, and Hotep’s guitar work especially expressive.

Vile hung in the background following Hotep’s lead and basking in the aura of Allen in his first time playing with the band. “I felt really calm up there,” Vile, whose new album Philadelphia’s Been Good To Me comes out Friday, said afterward. “I was playing spacey, bendy Sonic Youth-hybrid leads.”

Highlights included vocalist Middleton leading the way on Allen’s composition “Watch the Sunshine” and shouting out in celebration of his 102nd trip around the sun. The husky voiced vocalist also shone on Ra standards about escape from worldly troubles such as “Spaceways” and “Space Is the Place.”

And of course the one song that needed to be sung, which Boyd came on stage to lead in honor of his father: a full house singing “Happy Birthday,” with the undying life force star of the show who’s one of Philadelphia’s greatest musical treasures adding to the mirth, tooting along on his horn.