If you've ever listened to a Sun Ra record and wondered how all that chaos holds together, a lot of the answer is Pat Patrick. He played baritone sax — sometimes alto, sometimes flute — and he was there almost from the start, back in Chicago in the early 1950s before Sun Ra had even settled on the whole space-prophet persona. Patrick wasn't the guy doing the wild solos or making the pronouncements about Saturn. He was the guy keeping the low end locked down so the rest of the band could get weird on top of it.

What's easy to miss about Patrick is that he wasn't some outsider who stumbled into the avant-garde. He could play it straight. He worked with John Coltrane early on, did stints with James Moody and Mongo Santamaria, and later even played in Duke Ellington's orchestra. That's a guy who understood swing, bebop, and Latin rhythm just as well as he understood Sun Ra's free-floating arrangements. His baritone had weight and warmth — not the honking, aggressive style some baritone players favor, but something rounder, more patient.

He drifted in and out of the Arkestra for decades, which tells you something about both his loyalty and his restlessness. He'd leave to take other gigs, pay the bills, play more conventional dates, and then come back when Sun Ra needed him. You hear him on records like Jazz in Silhouette (1959) and plenty of the Saturn label sides, holding down arrangements that could have fallen apart without someone that steady underneath them. He wasn't flashy, but take him out of the mix and the whole thing gets thinner.

Patrick is also, for a lot of younger listeners, a name that connects to somewhere unexpected — he was the father of André Benjamin, better known as André 3000 of OutKast. It's a strange and kind of wonderful thread: a baritone player from the Sun Ra universe whose son grew up to reshape hip-hop. Patrick died in 1991, before OutKast had released a record, so he never got to see where that lineage went. But if you listen closely to his tone — patient, exploratory, never in a hurry to prove anything — you can hear a distant relative of the same sensibility.

He's not a household name, and he'd probably have been fine with that. Patrick was a sideman's sideman, the kind of musician whose value you only really understand once you've heard enough records to notice who's missing when he's not on them. Start with the Arkestra stuff, then go backward to his earlier sessions, and you'll get a picture of a guy who could do a little of everything and never needed credit for it.