Danny Ray Thompson, 72, Dies; Mainstay of Sun Ra’s Otherworldly Band

For the better part of five decades, he was the baritone saxophonist and linchpin of one of the most idiosyncratic and influential ensembles in jazz. Danny Ray Thompson, who spent the better part of five decades as the baritone saxophonist and linchpin of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, one of the most idiosyncratic and influential ensembles in jazz, died on March 12 in Philadelphia. He was 72. The saxophonist Marshall Allen, the current leader of the Arkestra, confirmed the death, at a hospice center.

He did not specify the cause but said that Mr. Thompson had been ill for some time. Mr. Thompson was barely 20 when Mr.

Allen introduced him to Sun Ra in New York in 1967. His first assignment was to watch the band’s house on the Lower East Side every Monday night, while the Arkestra played its weekly gig at Slugs’ Saloon nearby. Eventually he was promoted to band driver, before finally joining the ensemble as a saxophonist and flutist. He went on to serve for many years as the Arkestra’s manager, responsible for everything from distributing its self-released albums to organizing tours.

“Within a few years Thompson was to become one of the most trusted people in Sun Ra’s entourage, and, some even said, the heir apparent to the leader,” the music historian John Szwed wrote in “Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra” (1997). Mr. Thompson’s devotion to the group’s music — and its theatrically attired, cosmo-futurist performance ethic — sprang eternal. At one concert, Mr.

Szwed related, Mr. Thompson was locked in a three-saxophone melee of free improvisation when two of the keys became dislodged from his baritone saxophone and shot off into the audience. He used his fingers to plug the open holes and kept playing, aggressively. All of a sudden his hand got stuck in the horn, and even after the other saxophonists had grown tired and dropped out, he kept going, not knowing what else to do.

“You need to be creative like that,” Mr. Allen remembered Sun Ra telling him approvingly afterward. “He was so creative he tore the keys off; he was like that little Dutch boy and the dike!