SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU

WINTER, 2015

VOLUME ONE NUMBER ONE

MILES DAVIS

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

ANTHONY BRAXTON
November 1-7

CECIL TAYLOR
November 8-14

STEVIE WONDER
November 15-21

JIMI HENDRIX
November 22-28

GERI ALLEN
November 29-December 5

HERBIE HANCOCK
December 6-12

SONNY ROLLINS
December 13-19

JANELLE MONÀE
December 20-26

GARY CLARK, JR.
December 27-January 2

NINA SIMONE
January 3-January 9

ORNETTE COLEMAN
January 10-January 16

WAYNE SHORTER
January 17-23

*[Special bonus feature: A celebration of the centennial year of musician, composer, orchestra leader, and philosopher SUN RA, 1914-1993]
January 24-30

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/05/tribute-to-sun-ra-1914-1993-iconic-and.html

Friday, May 23, 2014

Tribute To Sun Ra, 1914-1993: Iconic And Innovative Composer, Musician, Philosopher, Orchestra Leader, And Poet In Celebration Of His Centennial Year

"It's after the end of the world. Don't you know that yet?"

--Sun Ra

"Space is the Place"

--Sun Ra

All,

MAY 22, 2014 MARKS THE EARTHBOUND CENTENNIAL BIRTHDATE OF SUN RA (1914-1993) WORLD CLASS COMPOSER, MUSICIAN, ORCHESTRA LEADER, POET, PHILOSOPHER, CULTURAL AVATAR, AND NATIVE SON OF THE PLANET SATURN WHOSE COSMIC VISIT TO OUR PLANET ALLOWED HIM TO SPEND 79 HIGHLY CREATIVE YEARS IN OUR REALM OF EXISTENCE PRODUCING SOME OF THE MOST PROFOUND, TRANSFORMATIVE, AND ORIGINAL MUSIC OF THE 20TH CENTURY.

THUS IN CELEBRATION AND DEEP APPRECIATION OF HIS EXTRAORDINARY AND INSPIRING SIX DECADE CAREER AS A GIANT OF THE ART WE CALL "JAZZ" WE PAY THE FOLLOWING GLORIOUS TRIBUTE TO HIS ART AND LIVES...ENJOY...

Kofi

http://www.arteidolia.com/amiri-baraka-speaks-olson-sun-ra/

"Sun Ra's consistent statement, musically and spoken, is that this is a primitive world. Its practices, beliefs, religions, are uneducated, unenlightened, savage, destructive, already in the past...That's why Sun Ra returned only to say he left. Into the Future. Into Space."

--Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka discusses Charles Olson and Sun Ra at the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Mass, October 19, 2013. By Ferrini Productions:

PART ONE OF BARAKA'S LECTURE ON CHARLES OLSON AND SUN RA:

PART TWO:

http://www.timeout.com/newyork/music/travel-the-spaceways-with-two-sun-ra-centennial-celebrations

Few artists have left a more daunting sonic paper trail than Sun Ra. The late multimedia enigma—born (or as he liked to say, "arrived") in Birmingham, Alabama as Herman Poole Blount—explored the full spectrum of jazz, from classic big-band swing to the wooliest psychedelic improvisation imaginable. That exploration is documented on dozens of full-length albums, as well as innumerable compilations and live recordings.

The late Ra would've turned 100 this Thursday, May 22, so now's the perfect time to take a guided tour of his sprawling sound world, courtesy of two centennial celebrations. First, tune in to WKCR, Columbia's venerable noncommercial, student-run station—surely the finest jazz radio outlet in NYC, and probably the world—for a week of Sun Ra–centric programming. (Listen to 89.9 FM or online at wkcr.org.) The series starts with Intro to Ra, three afternoons of Ra essentials plus archived interviews with the man himself, running from noon to 3pm today through Wednesday. Then the broadcast enters marathon mode, running around the clock on Thursday and Friday, and concluding with several focused programs on Sunday. Go here for the complete schedule.

If you like what you hear, click on over to iTunes, where you'll find a series of 21 newly remastered Sun Ra reissues, helpfully arranged into categories ("Key Albums," "New York Years (1961–68)," etc.), as well as newly assembled samplers. Lots to choose from here—we'll see you up in space!

http://sunraarkestra.com/

In some far off place
Many light years in space
I'll wait for you
Where human feet have never trod
Where human eyes have never seen
I'll build a world of abstract dreams
And wait for you

--Sun Ra "I'll Wait for You"

There's a 29 minute interview with Sun Ra
(Detroit TV, 1981):

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/sun_ra_on_detroit_tv_1981/

http://thesmartset.com/article/article04291401.aspx

PERTINENT & IMPERTINENT
A Cosmic Centennial

Celebrating the 100th birthday (the first of several) of Sun Ra, the self-proclaimed visitor from Saturn and prolific composer.

SUN RA
by Stefany Anne Goldberg

In the Egyptian section of the Penn Museum stands a man. He is next to a 12-ton sphinx and is wearing a multicolored dreamcoat. His beret shimmers; a red cape hangs about his shoulders. "Planet Earth can’t even be sufficient without the rain, it doesn’t produce rain, you know," he tells the camera. "Sunshine…it doesn’t produce the sun. The wind, it doesn’t produce the wind. All planet Earth produces is the dead bodies of humanity. That’s its only creation." The man pauses and slides his hand across the sphinx. "Everything else comes from outer space. From unknown regions. Humanity’s life depends on the unknown. Knowledge is laughable when attributed to a human being."

The birth of Herman Poole Blount on May 22, 1914 was, for him, the least significant of all his births. Blount begat Bhlount and Bhlount begat Ra and Herman begat Sonny and Sonny begat Sun. Sun Ra left Alabama for Chicago and Chicago for Saturn, until he never quite understood how he got to planet Earth in the first place. The name ‘Ra’ — the Egyptian god of the sun — brought him closer to the cosmos. Each rebirth erased the one before it, until Sun Ra’s past became a lost road that trailed off into nothingness. The past was passed, dead. History is his story, he said, it’s not my story. My story, said Sun Ra, is mystery. Sun Ra lived life between ancient time and the future, in something like the eternal now. He told people he had no family and lived on the other side of time. Rebirth might not be the right word for the journey that Sun Ra took. Awakening is more precise, like how the ancient Egyptians were awakened. As Jan Assaman wrote in Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, to be a person in ancient Egypt meant to exercise self-control. In sleep, a person is dissociated from the self. The sleeping person, then, is powerlessness, like a dead person. But the awakened one is a person risen.

A great one is awakened, a great one wakes,
Osiris has raised himself onto his side;
he who hates sleep and loves not weariness,
the god gains power…

Sun Ra believed that the whole of humanity was in need of waking up. He wanted to slough off old ideas and habits, brush off sleepy clothing and shake off drowsy food. Because present time mattered little to Sun Ra, they say he rarely slept. Even as a child, he would spend all his time playing the piano or composing. "I loved music beyond the state of liking it," he once said. Sun Ra was just as obsessed with books — you couldn’t see the walls of his room for the books. Books contained words and the words held a secret code that, if unraveled, revealed truths about human existence. He read the ancient texts of Egyptians and Africans and Greeks, the works of Madame Helena P. Blavatsky (with whom he shared the initials H.P.B), Rudolph Steiner, P.D. Ouspensky, James Joyce, C.F. Volney, Booker T. Washington. He read about the lost history of the American Negro and studied the origins of language. Sun Ra knew Biblical scripture better than any preacher, read Kabbalah concepts and Rosicrucian manifestos. Through these texts Sun Ra learned it was possible for the chaos of human knowledge to be ordered. Theosophy, relativity, mathematics, physics, history, music, magic, science fiction, Egyptology, technology — all were keys to a unified existence. Ideas and music carried a reclusive black boy from Birmingham and transported him into outer space. But the most important idea Sun Ra learned from all his reading, from all the knowledge he acquired, is how puny knowledge is in the face of the unknown. We need the unknown, Sun Ra said, in order to survive.

Sun Ra abolished sleep from his "so-called life", wrote biographer John Szwed, "just as he had come to do without the distractions of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, women." Sun Ra didn’t want to be sidetracked by time like so many Earthly humans, spending half their lives in a stupor of slumber. In Gurdjieff, Sun Ra read that man exists in habit, but could be awakened from his slumber with sacred songs and dances. Sun Ra vowed to live every moment in anticipation, and he would do so through jazz. Jazz was the music of the restless, the awakened. Anybody could play music on the downbeat and think, "Everything is beautiful, ’cause I’m going to heaven when I die." But peace is not an option for the fiery awakened. "Play some fire on it," Sun Ra would tell his musicians. "If you’re not mad at the world, you don’t have what it takes."

In jazz, unity could emerge — even as individual notes seemed in disarray and rhythms seemed uncountable. Jazz demanded discipline and precision, but also an open mind. "A lot of things that some men do… come from somewhere else," Sun Ra said, "or they’re inspired by something that’s not of this planet. And jazz was most definitely inspired, because it wasn’t here before." Jazz was the road to a mystical experience, a sort of reasoned ecstasy. It was the music of elsewhere.

"I didn’t find being black in America to be a very pleasant experience," said Sun Ra, "but I had to have something, and that something was creating something that nobody owned but us." African-Americans had always been a secret society within greater American society, with their own music, their own language, their own rituals. This secret history could be an asset for African-Americans in the Space Age to come. African-Americans could re-invent their past and create a futurist Utopia, perhaps on a planet other than Earth, which seemed to Sun Ra unbearably steeped in chaos and confusion.

•

Sun Ra called his band the Arkestra, though it went far beyond the limits of a band. The Arkestra was Sun Ra’s grand Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work that crossed the boundaries of art and life for Sun Ra and his musicians. It was Sun Ra’s little Utopia. The name Arkestra itself was an allusion to the Ark of the Covenant. "A covenant of Arkestra," said Sun Ra, "it’s like a selective service of God. Picking out some people. Arkestra has a ‘ra’ at the beginning and the end. Ra can be written as ‘Ar’ or ‘Ra,’ and on both ends of the word it is an equation: the first and the last are equal…. In the middle there is ‘kest,’ which equals ‘kist,’ as in ‘Sunkist’…I read that in Sanskrit ‘kist’ means ‘sun’s gleam.’ This is why I called my orchestra ‘Arkestra.’”

"Besides," Sun Ra once said, "that’s the way black people say ‘orchestra.'"

Arkestra performances were music, theatre, dance, philosophy. They combined the ancient and the radical future, African rhythms played with fists and synthesizers played with the elbows. Arkestra musicians followed Sun Ra’s style, wearing Egyptian headdresses and African robes and Mardi Gras beads. Onstage, they laughed and danced and walked arm in arm. Sun Ra wanted to show his audiences an expression of pure possibility. And yet the Arkestra was more for the musicians than the audience. Musicians lived together (for a long while in a building Sun Ra bought on Morton Street, in the Germantown area of Philadelphia) worked together, thought together. When they weren’t onstage, they were rehearsing. They played music in place of social activities, in place of sleep. The Arkestra breathed music together, abandoned themselves to it, like one single enlightened organism with Sun Ra as their guide.

Sun Ra’s compositions were famously difficult, even for the most talented instrumentalists. Arkestra musicians tell stories of being baffled sometimes for months before they could hear music in the written notes. The intervals were mad, impossible. Sun Ra was patient though, often choosing musicians who were more intuitive than knowledgeable, who could be developed (intuitive people had more space in their minds). One could imagine the Morton Street building like a monastery, and Arkestra rehearsals akin to liturgical chant, with Arkestra players embodying the music through repetition until playing was an ecstatic experience. "Discipline and precision were nature’s ways, the ways in which the planets spun through space, by which the birds flew; and precision rather than confusion was the answer, discipline rather than freedom," writes Szwed. Sun Ra once told an interviewer that his very reason for being on Earth (not being of Earth) was to be a teacher. People are free to think what they want, he said. They got their own minds. God just lets them go on and on and on. But people, he said, they don’t ask no questions.

"If teenagers are lost," Sun Ra told another interviewer, "it is because they have been fed upon the word freedom, not discipline."

In the documentary A Joyful Noise Arkestra musician James Jacson tells the story of his drum. There was a tree, Jacson says, right across the street from 5626 Morton Street. And one day this tree got hit by lightening. I had been needing a drum, Jacson says. Sun Ra suggested Jacson use some of the wood from this downed tree before the city carted it away. Jacson spent an entire summer working with the stump, hollowing it out, crafting it into a musical instrument. He carved a bas relief on the side, a verse out of the "Book of the Reawakening" (what Sun Ra called the Egyptian Book of the Dead). "I didn’t really know a lot about drumming," Jacson says to the camera, "but Sun Ra, of course, showed me a whole ’nother idea about drumming." Sun Ra named Jacson’s drum the Ancient Infinity Lightening Wood Drum. It was a sacred object of the simplest kind, carved from an accident of nature, by a man who came to understand its possibilities just by being with it.

In her novel The Grey World, written ten years before the birth of Sun Ra, Anglo-Catholic mystic Evelyn Underhill wrote, "It seems so much easier in these days to live morally than to live beautifully. Lots of us manage to exist for years without ever sinning against society, but we sin against loveliness every hour of the day."

This observation reminds me of Sun Ra (who, perhaps, had read this book, having read nearly every book on mystical and occultish things printed in the English language). There was no dearth of ideas in the hundred-odd years that spanned the mid-19th to the mid-20th century for how to improve the lot of African-Americans, how to lift them up and give them purpose with strong leadership and values, a new moral code. Sun Ra’s thoughts about the necessity for discipline and reason in African-American society were shared by a number of American intellectuals and spiritual leaders, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Elijah Muhammad. But discipline alone lacked, for Sun Ra, creative energy, vitality. When morality expressed itself in beauty, daily life had a little more of that mysterious, mystical quality to it, a quality Sun Ra was always searching for to conquer the "unpleasant" aspects of what it was to be human on Earth. Morality could make life sensible but beauty made life happy. Why wear only a black suit and tie when we have available to us all the colors of the rainbow?

"All of my compositions are meant to depict happiness combined with beauty in a free manner," Sun Ra wrote in The Aim of My Compositions. "Happiness, as well as pleasure and beauty, has many degrees of existence; my aim is to express these degrees in sounds which can be understood by the entire world…. The mental impression I intend to convey is that of being alive, vitally alive. The real aim of this music is to coordinate the minds of peoples into an intelligent reach for a better world, and an intelligent approach to the living future."

Where Washington and Du Bois, for instance, were products of the Enlightenment, Sun Ra was a Romantic, finding order in the laws of nature and the patterns of ancient history. Sun Ra’s intelligent romantic method, his intelligent reach for a better world, could have been expressed by Dostoevsky, who wrote in Notes From Underground:

The characteristics of our romantics are to understand everything, to see everything and to see it often incomparably more clearly than our most realistic minds see it; to refuse to accept anyone or anything, but at the same time not to despise anything; to give way, to yield, from policy; never to lose sight of a useful practical object … to keep their eye on that object through all the enthusiasms and volumes of lyrical poems, and at the same time to preserve "the sublime and the beautiful" inviolate within them to the hour of their death, and to preserve themselves also, incidentally, like some precious jewel wrapped in cotton wool if only for the benefit of "the sublime and the beautiful." … The romantic is always intelligent…

What better way to preserve the sublime and the beautiful in a useful practical object than by creating a drum from a forgotten tree stump? Only in beauty could Sun Ra’s ideas resolve themselves, the way mathematics can only eventually resolve into song when it is part of everyday life.
In 1979 the Arkestra put out an album called "Sleeping Beauty." The first track on the album has the title "Springtime Again." Sleep, for Sun Ra, was like a little death, just as it was for Sleeping Beauty. And yet Sleeping Beauty was never actually dead; she was just waiting to see the spring again. "I have to be like a little child," he said. "I have to be totally sincere — to put my music out there and say take it or leave it." Life, for Sun Ra, was not only a morality tale, but a fairytale too.

TEXT FROM A 1989 PRESS KIT BY A & M

Eclectic, outrageous, sometimes mystifying but always imbued with a powerful jazz consciousness, the music of Sun Ra has withstood its skeptics and detractors for nearly three generations. And well it should, since Sun Ra has been both apart of and ahead of the jazz tradition during that time. Like Duke Ellington and swing-era pioneer Fletcher Henderson, Sun Ra learned early on to write music in an arranged form that showcased the specific talents of his individual Arkestra members, and he has retained the services of some of these musicians to this day: John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, and Julian Priester for example since they first joined in the 1950's. On the other hand, Sun Ra was the first jazz musician to perform on electronic keyboards (56), the first to pursue full-scale collective improvisation in a big band setting, and his preoccupation with space travel as a compositional subject predated bands like Weather Report by about 15 years.All this from someone who refuses to even cite the earth as his home planet and prefers to have arrived from Saturn. As Sun Ra once explained it, "I never wanted to be a part of planet Earth, but I am compelled to be here, so anything I do for this planet is because the Master-Creator of the Universe is making me do it. I am of another dimension. I am on this planet because people need me".

Equally as mystifying is the fact that Sun Ra has no legal birth certificate. The Library of Congress claims that he arrived in Alabama, U.S.A., and his passport states that his legal name is Le Sony'r Ra, thus making all other names such as Sonny Lee, Sunni Bhlount, Armand Ra, and H. Sonne Bhlount merely pseudonyms.

In the 1940's Sun Ra became the house arranger for stage shows at the famous Chicago night spot, the Club DeLisa and played for the band led by Fletcher Henderson. Henderson was the arranger for the Benny Goodman Orquestra as well as his own and was a great inspiration to Ra who encouraged him to continue writing. In the early 50's, Ra's more radical compositions and arrangements found their way into his own groups which featured exotic costumes and unusual instruments.

By 1955 while in Chicago, Le Sony'r Ra had become "Le Sun Ra" or Sun Ra, leader of the Solar Arkestra which has also been known by many other names such as the Myth-Science Arkestra, the Solar Myth Arkestra, and the Omniverse Arkestra. In addition to saxophonists Gilmore and Allen, the band boasted a number of musicians who have contributed much to jazz, including bassist Richard Davis, trombonist Julian Priester, drummer Clifford Jarvis, and reedman James Spaulding. The Arkestra itself started as what was thought to be a hard-bop big band at the Grand Terrace and Birdland night clubs - a rare enough item - but soon was incorporating free improvisation. As such, it was a major influence on the emerging avant-garde jazz musicians in Chicago, such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

From its inception, the Arkestra's music was infused with Sun Ra's unique philosophy, an unexpected hybrid of space-age science fiction and ancient Egyptian cosmo religious trappings. This philosophy gained a visual manifestation in the colorful robes, mock-metallic capes, and space headgear worn by the band (it's the only jazz orchestra that brings a tailor on tour), and in a stage presentation that usually features several dancers, a number of group chants ("We travel the spaceways/From planet to planet"), and at least one instance of the entire band juking its way, single-file, through the audience.

In 1960, Sun Ra moved his earthbound base of operations to New York, then in 1968 settled in Philadelphia. In both cities, as in Chicago, the band lived and worked as a sort of collective, with the hard-core nucleus sharing living quarters with the leader and assuming the role of cosmo-friends to the master. Throughout the 60's Sun Ra continued to record for his own deliberately poorly distributed Saturn Records label, and also on various European labels, while touring widely and continuing to spread the fame of his live performances. In recent years Sun Ra has steadily returned to the music of the near past - the standards and jazz classics he grew up with - although it is all filtered through his delighfully off center perspective.

In an interview with Jazziz magazine, Sun Ra recalled, "They really thought I was some kind of kook with all my talk about outer space and the planets. I'm still talking about it, but governments are spending billions of dollars to go to Venus, Mars, and other planets, so it's no longer kooky to talk about space". For Sun Ra, though, it has never been a matter of mere oddness. When he talks of his Saturnian origins, of observing the planets and travelling the spaceways, and of "going into space", it is really a lavishly elaborated metaphor, or so it seems to those who are not aware of the spiritual side of things. Sun Ra's music transcends earthbound limitations by riding the flights of imagination, and his message is that all of us are free to ride those flights with him if we have the precision and discipline to do so.

Stefany Anne Golberg is an artist, writer, musician, and professional dilettante. She's a founding member of the arts collective Flux Factory. She can be reached at stefanyanne@gmail.com.

The Differences
Sometimes in the amazing ignorance
I hear things and see things
I never knew I saw and heard before
Sometimes in the ignorance
I feel the meaning
Invincible invisible wisdom,
And I commune with intuitive instinct
With the force that made life be
And since it made life be
It is greater than life
And since it let extinction be
It is greater than extinction.
I commune with feelings more than
prayer
For there is nothing else to ask for
That companionship is
And it is superior to any other is.
Sometimes in my amazing ignorance
Others see me only as they care to see
I am to them as they think
According the standard I should not be
And that is the difference between I and them
Because I see them as they are to is
And not the seeming isness of the was.

--Sun Ra

http://necmusic.edu/sun-ra-centennial

Did you miss this concert? Were you there and would like to hear it again—because once is not enough? You're in luck—NEC has made it available at InstantEncore. To play or download the performances, click here—there are no fees involved. You will need to have or create an account to complete the process. Your account will also allow you to receive notifications of future concerts.
This season at New England Conservatory, 30+ concerts demonstrate just how vital music is to human struggle, and what revolution in artistic expression sounds like. Programs range from roots music to Beethoven, fight songs to anti-war anthems. Join our year-long exploration of how music speaks truth to power!

"Some call me Mister Ra.
Some call me Mister Re.
But you can call me Mister Mystery."
—Sun Ra, in the film A Joyful Noise

Ken Schaphorst leads the NEC Jazz Orchestra in a celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Sun Ra’s arrival day on this planet.

Ken Schaphorst talks about Sun Ra in this podcast.

Who was Sun Ra? Was he Herman Blount, born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, who came in to Fletcher Henderson's big band as a pianist and arranger just after WWII? That persona had disappeared by the 1950s, when—as Sun Ra—he was already leading a big band of his own, soon to be called the Arkestra, and was claiming to have come from Saturn, with connections to the Egyptian gods.

This persona represented the ultimate liberation from space and time, and gave Sun Ra the freedom to create an immersive experience that built on classic big band chops to go deep into collective improvisation and multimedia performance. All of this was rooted in a communal living situation where the band could focus on their sound, look, and ideas with a minimum of interference from mundane associations.

Sun Ra's unfettered, joyful music is summed up by the exhortation to join him and the Arkestra as We Travel the Spaceways. Other signature songs that will guide your journey tonight are Space Is the Place, A Call for All Demons, Brainville, Planet Earth, Saturn, El Is the Sound of Joy, Enlightenment, Love in Outer Space, Satellites Are Spinning, Shadow World, and Outer Spaceways Incorporated. This music will be performed in Ken Schaphorst's arrangements.

"We must live for the future of music. Many musicians think that most people are destined to be musically ignorant, but I know that there is a spark in every person which will respond and glow to the touch of beauty. Because I know this, I am going to continue presenting beauty to the world until I ignite that spark in people’s hearts."—Sun Ra

NEC Jazz Orchestra

Ken Schaphorst, director

Saxophones, Woodwinds

Richard Garcia, alto saxophone, flute
Lihi Haruvi, alto and soprano saxophones
Wyatt Palmer, tenor saxophone
Jacob Sieckman, tenor saxophone
Austin Yancey, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet

Trumpets

Kai Sandoval
Aaron Bahr
David Adewumi
Jeffrey Cox
Trombones
Dan Gabel
Michael Prentky
Blake Manternach
Joe Ricard
Rhythm Section
Nikolaos Anadolis, piano, Fender Rhodes
Xiongguan Zhang, guitar
Daniel Raney, bass
Carl Pillot, drums

Guests

Allan Chase, baritone saxophone
Nedelka Prescod, Sami Stevens, Farayi Sumbureru, vocals
Kazemde George, Harrison Honor, percussion

Date: April 17, 2014 - 8:00:PM

Price: Free

Location: NEC’s Jordan Hall

http://beansouptimes.com/chicago-jazz-festival-sun-ra-centennial-celebrations/

Chicago Jazz Festival Sun Ra Centennial Celebrations

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary of The Birth of Sun Ra, The Chicago Jazz Festival Will Be Celebrating His Work Through Movie Screenings, Panel Discussions and A Performances by The Sun Ra Arkestra, Under The Direction of Marshall Allen, To Close Out The Festival.

About Sun Ra:
With roots in Chicago that would eventually take his music to the world, the prolific Sun Ra regaled the music world with his colorful combination of cosmic philosophy, new jazz sounds and beguiling stagecraft, which included dance and costumes. This musical and cultural impact of Sun Ra’s work has been so profound that the centennial of his birth is an event that will pervade many of the events at this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival.

Chicago Jazz Festival Upcoming & Closing Events:
Friday, August 22nd, 8 P.M. -An outdoor screening of the Sun Ra film, Space is the Place The Comfort Station is located at 2579 N. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, Illinois.

Monday, August 25th and Tuesday, August 26th, 6 PM – Claudia Cassidy Theater of the Chicago Cultural Center – There will be screenings of the Sun Ra Films Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise and Mystery Mr. Ra. On one of the evenings, there will be a discussion with Robert Mugge, director of A Joyful Noise. There will be screenings of both films, on both nights. The Claudia Cassidy Theater is located at 78 E. Washington Ave, Chicago, Illinois.

Thursday, August 28th, 4 PM – Ganz Hall at Roosevelt University – There will be a panel discussion which will include moderator Will Faber with panelists including the famed Sun Ra biographer John Szwed, Arkestra leader Marshall Allen, Chicago jazz writer John Corbett, and trumpet legend and former Arkestra member Art Hoyle. The discussion will be preceded by a rare, short solo set by Marshall Allen. Ganz Hall is located at 430 S. Michigan, 7th fl, Chicago, Illinois.

Sunday, August 31st, 8:30 PM – The Pritzker Pavillion – The Sun Ra Arkestra, under the direction of Marshall Allen, will be closing out the Chicago Jazz Festival.

For more information, visit www.jazzinchicago.org and www.chicagojazzfestival.us

Follow the Chicago Jazz Festival on Facebook and Twitter

Centennial Celebration Of Sun Ra - Video Results

16:42

Sun Ra Arkestra performs at Philly's United Jazz Fest
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1:23:43

Sun Ra Centennial Dream Arkestra - Estival Jazz Lugano 2014
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1:23:43

Sun Ra Centennial Dream Arkestra, 2014 07 11, Lugano ...
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9:55

Sun Ra Centennial Dream Arkestra

http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2014/08/29/celebrating-the-sun-ra-centennial

Celebrating the Sun Ra centennial

Posted By Peter Margasak on 08.29.14

May 22 was the official centennial of the birth of the brilliant bandleader, composer, and keyboardist Sun Ra, but I'm thankful that the entire year is being used to celebrate his memory and particular brand of visionary genius. Chicago, where Herman Poole Blount (a native of Birmingham, Alabama) assembled the earliest versions of his Arkestra in 1953, has gotten in on the act in numerous ways, but some of the most exciting events are happening this week. Yesterday, as part of the Chicago Jazz Festival, saxophonist Marshall Allen (who took the reins of Arkestra after the death of fellow saxophonist John Gilmore in 1995, two years after Ra passed away), trumpeter Art Hoyle (who played with the Arkestra in the 50s), writer and Columbia University professor John Szwed (who authored the authoritative Sun Ra biography Space Is the Place), and writer, gallerist, and Sun Ra scholar John Corbett engaged in a lively, discursive panel discussion on Ra's legacy at Roosevelt University's Ganz Hall. And on Sunday, Allen will lead the Arkestra in a performance that will close out this year's festival, with an 8:30 PM set at Pritzker Pavilion.

Ra and his Arkestra recorded and performed prolifically during its entire run, so it's no surprise that we've been showered with great reissues and previously unreleased material. One of the most satisfying documents—and a stellar example of what a primo Arkestra set was like during the band's final decade—is The Sun Ra Arkestra in Nickelsdorf 1984 (Trost), a whopping three-CD set that captures the entirety of a multiset performance in Austria. The group moves easily between standards like Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady," a raucous "Mack the Knife" (with what appears to be winds player James Jackson doing his best Louis Armstrong impersonation), and Fletcher Henderson's "Big John's Special" to originals like "Nuclear War" and "Fate in a Pleasant Mood" and disciplined but wild group improvisations—with especially excellent playing from Allen, John Gilmore, Danny Thompson, and the pianist himself. There's also a bounty of great call-and-response passages, with Ra improvising his lyrics and the Arkestra never missing a beat. The breadth, fluidity, and sense of fun are nothing less than breathtaking. I was lucky enough to see the Arkestra many times during the 80s and 90s, and I always came away from those performances certain I had just seen the greatest band on earth, and the most entertaining one too. Below you can listen to a typically charismatic, soulful take on another Arkestra classic, "Love in Outer Space."

<a href="http://trostrecords.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-nickelsdorf">Live in Nickelsdorf by THE SUN RA ARKESTRA</a>

With more than 100 albums in the Arkestra discography, it can be a rather daunting proposition for a Sun Ra novice to know where to begin, but a forthcoming two-CD set called In the Orbit of Ra (due out on September 23 from Strut Records) might be the best single introduction to the music yet released. The 20-track collection was curated by Allen in collaboration with Peter Dennett, who operates the terrific British label Art Yard, which exists solely to release archival Sun Ra material. While a few tracks come from Art Yard's catalog, most are taken from the vaults of Saturn—Ra's own imprint—spanning from the group's first recordings in Chicago (1957 or '58; the documentation of those early days is sometimes vague) through 1978, when the group was based in Philadelphia, including a few previously unreleased tracks. During this period the group focused on its own music—the practice of blending in standards, as reflected by the Nickesdorf set, was to come later. The liner notes for the set include a lengthy interview with Allen. Below you can hear the classic "Plutonian Nights," with Ra playing a Wurlitzer electric piano, from the 1960 album The Nubians of Plutonia—recorded in Chicago between 1958-'59:

https://soundcloud.com/strut/sun-ra-his-arkestra-plutonian-nights-original-tape-master

DURING SUN RA'S 65 YEAR CAREER IN MUSIC HE AND HIS ARKESTRA RECORDED OVER 200 ALBUMS...

Sun Ra--A Joyful Noise. A Film directed by Robert Mugge in 1980:

Space Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra
by John F. Szwed

Paperback: 496 pages
Publisher: Da Capo Press; 1st Da Capo Press ed edition (August 22, 1998)

Sun Ra, a.k.a. Herman Poole "Sonny" Blount (1914–1993), has been hailed as "one of the great big-band leaders, pianists, and surrealists of jazz" (New York Times) and as "the missing link between Duke Ellington and Public Enemy" (Rolling Stone). Composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn, Sun Ra led his "Intergalactic Arkestra" of thirty-plus musicians in a career that ranged from boogie-woogie and swing to be-bop, free jazz, fusion, and New Age music. This definitive biography reveals the life, philosophy, and musical growth of one of the twentieth century's greatest avant-garde musicians.

Editorial Reviews:
Born Herman Poole Blount in Alabama in 1914, he reinvented himself in the 1950s as Sun Ra, the great surrealist of jazz whose free-form performances with his Arkestra amply justified the description "'jspace music." His mystical beliefs were equally avant-garde; Yale professor John Szwed sympathetically explains some fairly far-out notions as "driven by a hunger for totality that only music could express." Szwed recovers the biographical facts Sun Ra was often at pains to obscure, without losing sight of the overriding role imagination played in this visionary life. --

This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
... Szwed has produced a rare jazz biography--one that takes full account of the history that shaped the music and its central personalities. An anthropologist, historian and musicologist who teaches at Yale, Szwed brings an impressive array of skills to this job. He needs them all to track down a subject whose every word seems intended to protect him from scrutiny. -- The New York Times Book Review, Brent Staples

One of America's most prolific and daring musicians, Sun Ra located himself in outer space, beyond both the geographical limits of the United States and the ideological limits of Jim Crow and the Cold War. Such views, spliced with a homegrown Egyptology, earned Sun Ra a reputation as an Afro-eccentric charlatan-genius in the tradition of Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad, and kept his"Arkestra" below the radar of concert halls and record companies. This biography charts Sun Ra's career, showing how he defied critics' periodization schemes, pioneering free jazz and electronic music in the 1940s and reviving big bands in the 1970s. Szwed presents Sun Ra's neoplatonic philosophizing as serious scholarship, however, rather than the charismatic myth-making and -unmaking that it clearly was. The book's treatment of his music--a joyful noise authorized by biblical prophecy, rooted in his native Birmingham's African-American fraternal, club, and society dance orchestras of the 1930s, and branching out into the heavenly spheres--suffers by comparison. Perhaps this late romantic jazz totalist, who shunned sex and drugs, rejected modern notions of race and nation, and took his merry band of"tone scientists" on shoestring-and-bootstrap world tours, will never be brought down to earth.

Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

Always riveting, Space Is the Place is the definitive biography of "one of the great big-band leaders, pianists, and surrealists of jazz" (New York Times)--unparalleled for his purposeful outlandishness, a man who exerted a powerful influence over a vast array of artists.

Sun Ra--a/k/a Herman Poole "Sonny Blount--was born in Alabama on May 22, 1914. But like Father Divine and Elijah Muhammad, he made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early life. After years as a rehearsal pianist for nightclub revues and in blues and swing bands, including Wynonie Harris's and Fletcher Henderson's, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to find a way to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters through the various incarnations of the Intergalactic Arkestra. His repertoire ranging from boogie-woogie, swing, and bebop to free form, fusion, and whatever, Sun Ra was above all a paragon of contradictions: profundity and vaudeville; technical pianistic virtuosity and irony; assiduous attention to arrangements and encouragement of collective improvisation; respect for tradition and celebration of the fresh.

Some might have been bemused by his Afro-Platonic neo-hermeticism; others might have laughed at his egregious excesses. But Sun Ra was at once one of the great avant-gardists of the latter half of the twentieth century and a black cultural nationalist who extended Afrocentrism from ancient Egypt to the heavens. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

John F. Szwed is Musser Professor of Anthropology, African-American Studies, Music, and American Studies at Yale University. He has written about music for The Village Voice, Vibe, the Boston Phoenix, and other publications. He lives in Connecticut.

http://arts.duke.edu/artsjournal/sun_ra_mingus

DUKE UNIVERSITY ARTS JOURNAL

September 24, 2009

Sun Ra Meets Mingus in a Duke Double-Bill

An exhibition and musical performance featuring the Sun Ra Arkestra and the Mingus Big Band comes to Duke's Page Auditorium at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26.

The double bill in Duke's Page Auditorium on September 26 is split between two big bands with deep historical roots, though neither of the nominal leaders is with us anymore. The Charles Mingus Big Band takes the stage first, followed by the Arkestra created by Sun Ra, one of the few contemporaries who could make even Mingus seem conventional. Sun Ra is also the subject of an art installation hosted by the Durham Arts Guild, a public conversation at the John Hope Franklin center, and several other events. Despite his otherworldly focus, Sun Ra was caught up in some very worldly settings. First of all, Birmingham, AL, where he was called Herman Blount and raised by a grandmother and great-aunt. His prodigious musical talent was obvious at an early age, and as a young man in the 1930s he was immersed in as much of the city's musical life as he could be, given the strictures of Jim Crow. In the 60s he was a colorful fixture in the East Village in New York City and at an underground club called Slug's. From there his reputation spread far and wide, so although he was always a fringe figure, by the time he moved his base to Philadelphia he had an international following.

Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68, an exhibition presented by the Durham Art Guild, in partnership with the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies. On display through October 18, 2009 CCB Gallery, 120 Morris St., Durham

Talking About Sun Ra, a public conversation with Sun Ra band members Marshall Allen and Art Jenkins followed by a panel discussion with the curators of the exhibition. Friday, September 25, 2009, 2:00-6:00pm John Hope Franklin Center, room 240

Sun Ra Arkestra + Mingus Big Band Saturday, September 26, 2009, 7:00pm Page Auditorium

The Spectacle Procession makes its way through Central Park in downtown Durham.
(see the slide show).

The transformative decade in between is the subject of Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68, an exhibition that originated at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. By 1946 Herman Blount had done all there was to do in Birmingham, and when his great-aunt Ida died he headed north to Chicago. Before long he landed a gig with Fletcher Henderson, and for about nine months he was the on-stage and rehearsal pianist at the Club DeLisa, where he ruffled the feathers of the other musicians with his strange musical ideas and unfamiliar chord voicings. At the same time he was reading everything he could find about ancient Egypt, delving into theosophy and the occult, wrestling with the Bible, and debating all comers in Washington Park, a local hotbed of African American political and religious activism.

It was in 1952 that he filed papers to change his name to Le Sony'r Ra -- he'd long gone by the name "Sonny" in day-to-day life -- and formed a group he called the Space Trio. He found an ally in Alton Abraham, an entrepreneurial young neighbor with similar philosophical interests. By the mid-50s, with the support of a like-minded group that coalesced around him and Abraham, Sun Ra put together the first edition of his Arkestra. The band was radical enough that it needed its own record label, and given their space-age vision they called it "El Saturn Research." Pathways to Unknown Worlds is a collection of images and artifacts that were produced by this adventurous enterprise. Through them, "the do-it-yourself aspect of south-side creative life is brought vividly to light in the form of a matrix of artists, musicians, business people, writers and thinkers -- a genuine organic intellectual community in the heart of black postwar Chicago." The curators who brought it all together -- John Corbett, Anthony Elms, and Terri Kapsalis -- will participate in a panel discussion at the Franklin Center on September 25.

On August 8, to kick off the Sun Ra-inspired festivities, the local organizers brought that DIY spirit to Durham with a costume-making party at the Scrap Exchange, followed by a Spectacle Procession from Durham's Central Park to the Arts Council Building. This past weekend there was an eclectic jam session that started with the Savage Knights and ended with Duke's own John Brown. In between was some dance (Bellan Contemporary Dance Theatre), spoken word (Val Jones), and more music (Freeman Ledbetter & Generations). In her weekly radio show Creative Colorful People (Thursdays at noon on WCOM), Durham Art Guild president Valerie Whitted has done regular features on the exhibition. Here, in a compilation from two different shows, she and her cohost Karl Blake talk to Art Guild director Jennifer Collins about how it ended up in Durham, then they talk to Val Jones about the jam session and have her perform a piece inspired by Sun Ra's "Calling Planet Earth."

Jennifer Collins and Val Jones interviewed on Creative Colorful People.

Along with the jam session there was a screening of Robert Mugge's 1980 documentary Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise. The film features a colorful pageant enacted by the band out on the roof of a skyscraper and Sun Ra expounding his philosophy as he wanders through a room full of monumental Egyptian antiquities. Fascinating and fun as all that is, it's the glimpse of life in the band's communal house that's more of a revelation, since that's a side of Sun Ra's world that got much less exposure. The camera drops in on Danny Thompson in the convenience store he was running, and he talks about provisioning the neighborhood while spreading the gospel of "discipline and precision" (those were watchwords for Sun Ra that represented the essence of big-band jazz). Another long-time band member, James Jacson, talks about the big drum Sun Ra instructed him to make out of a tree that was struck by lightning near their house. There's a sense of mission, for sure, but it's translated into a practical, matter-of-fact terms -- these aren't wild-eyed zealots.

"Cocktails for Two," from Mystery, Mr. Ra (1984).

The Arkestra's current roster includes a half dozen players who joined the group in the 1960s and a couple who started even earlier than that. One of them is the current director, Marshall Allen. Aside from appearing on stage, he and vocalist Art Jenkins will join English Department faculty member Fred Moten in conversation at the Franklin Center event this Friday. Allen started his career playing in Army dance bands in Europe at the end of World War II. After he was discharged he studied at the Paris Conservatoire for a few years. In 1958, intrigued by a recording he'd heard, he sought out Sun Ra. At first he was put to work on the flute, and it took a while before there was an opening in the saxophone section. Once he got the alto chair he never left it, and he became a ferocious squealer, on his own or in choreographed duels with other saxophonists. But Sun Ra moved through the musical landscape like a snowball, picking up new sounds and styles without shedding the old ones. For this loving rendition of "Cocktails for Two" he goes back to his swing-era roots, taking Allen back to the sweet sound he had when he joined the band -- it's a lot like Johnny Hodges except in the sudden spiky moment when it's totally not. (Maybe it was Spike Jones' wacky version of the song that inspired Sun Ra to play it with such tenderness).

John Szwed's 1997 biography Space Is The Place adds a great deal of depth to the outrageous impressions left by Sun Ra's colorful, raucous shows and gnomic pronouncements. In this clip from A Joyful Noise, which is as representative as any, he enumerates the limitations of our planet (“...all planet Earth produces is the dead bodies of humanity...”) and the shortcomings of its most exalted inhabitants (“Knowledge is laughable when attributed to a human being”).

From Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise

It's hard for the average rational earthling to imagine he could be serious about this stuff. The commonplace interpretation is that it was a reaction to racism, and no doubt that's true. Early in Szwed's book there's a revealing quote.

I've never been part of this planet. I've been isolated from a child away from it. Right in the midst of everything and not being part of it. Them troubles people got, prejudices and all that, I didn't know a thing about it, until I got to be about fourteen years old. It was as if I was somewhere else that imprinted this purity on my mind, another kind of world. That is my music playing the kind of world I know about. It's like someone else from another planet trying to find out what to do.

The core conviction isn't that he's from Saturn, it's that he can't possibly be from this benighted planet Earth. As Sun Ra he placed himself above and beyond the racist dynamic (and ultimately he was critical of the human beings on both sides of it). The earthly constructions he was able to elude by insisting he was from another planet don't start or end with racism, though. He managed to sidestep the antipathy that the bebop generation felt for the spectacle and showmanship of earlier jazz (think Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, or, for that matter, Fletcher Henderson at the Club DeLisa). And there was one spectacle, in particular, that he was able to reframe -- a man parading around the stage in a swirling diaphanous cape, a gaudy headdress, and a painted face. Not that the outer-space myth silenced all the doubters or all the rumors about his sexual orientation, but even when it didn't make converts it was a great distraction.

The myth was functional on a practical level, too. He was convinced from an early age that music had deep, transformative power and he came to see himself as the kind of teacher who opens eyes and broadens minds. Already in his Birmingham days he ran an open-ended rehearsal/salon in his great-aunt's house. As Sun Ra, he was able to gather a quasi-monastic group of men, always available when he wanted to rehearse or hold forth on music and the cosmos. What he offered in return was the chance to be more than just a horn player, to be a drummer and a showman and perhaps a craftsman (James Jacson) or an entrepreneur (Danny Thompson), to be part of something bigger than the music and maybe even help to redeem humanity.

Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus album cover

Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus album cover

In the late 1950s, when Sun Ra was wearing a "special space hat with a light on the top" and Arkestra was chanting "We Travel the Spaceways," Charles Mingus was speaking to more down-to-earth concerns. His 1957 composition "Fables of Faubus", dedicated to "the first or second or third all-American heel," has a sing-song chant. On the album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus it's call and response between Mingus and Dannie Richmond, the drummer:

Name me someone who's ridiculous, Dannie?
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won't permit us in his schools! (Then he's a fool!)

When that second question returns at the end, the answer has even more the cadence of a Sun Ra chant, but a completely different spirit:

Why are they so sick and ridiculous, Dannie?
Two, four, six, eight, they brainwash and teach you hate!

Jazz history loves it's lineages, so these two bandleaders make a great pair. There's a natural line going back from each of them to one of the great big-band pioneers -- Duke Ellington begets Mingus and Fletcher Henderson begets Sun Ra. But in many ways they're practically opposites. Mingus was an insider who met head-on the things Sun Ra eluded -- not only the social reality as it was experienced by the deluded human beings of America, but the cultural and commercial gatekeepers of artistic success. The record executives, for instance, who insisted that he leave out the vocals when he recorded "Fables" for Columbia Records, for the album Mingus Ah Um (that's the story, anyway -- apparently some doubts have been raised about it, but when Mingus recorded the piece with the words intact a year later, for Charles Mingus Presents, he called it "Original Faubus Fables").

The contrast is just as striking in the musical realm. As jazz compositions go, "Fables of Faubus" has a long and intricate form, but it's signposted all the way through by changes in rhythmic feel and by simple, distinctive rhythmic figures. The sardonic juxtaposition of rhythms leads to a moment of chaos during each of the improvised solos, so the political message is reflected at a structural level in the music. Mingus's expansive and eloquent control of musical form is still unsurpassed in the world of jazz, and that's partly because he approached it with such clarity and directness. Sun Ra reaches for the sky

Sun Ra's approach to form is typically much more vague and open-ended. He wrote so many different kinds of music that I'm sure there are exceptions, but there again the contrast between him and Mingus is stark. Mingus had plenty of stylistic range but across all of it the musical fingerprints are consistent and recognizable.
We won't be hearing either Sun Ra or Charles Mingus when the bands that carry their names take the stage this Saturday. What we'll hear, first and foremost, is a couple of dozen fine musicians, each with their own story and their own sound.

They share a set of assumptions about individuality and spontaneity and swing, both with each other and with the two historic iconoclasts who made the whole thing possible. But in ways that we should be able to both see and hear, the contributions of those two men represent radically different ways of living life and making art.
It should be a great show.

(Incidentally, there is an anecdote in Szwed's book involving these two jazz greats. When Sun Ra moved to New York Mingus was an early supporter. One night Mingus was working at the Five Spot, noticed Sun Ra in the audience, and asked what he was doing there. "'I come down to the Village a lot,' [Sun Ra] answered. 'No,' said Mingus, 'I mean what are you doing down here on Earth?'")

Links
Sun Ra

The Arkestra's web page is good -- it blasts you with audio but at least there's a big red stop button. A lot of the links on their Links page are broken. Two good ones are these substantial interviews with Sun Ra and Marshall Allen. The Wikipedia page is largely a digest of John Szwed's biography, and it has some useful links as well (there's an interesting interview with Szwed in Perfect Sound Forever).
There's no shortage of Sun Ra video clips out there in cyberspace. For some fairly recent clips, go to the Arkestra's multimedia page. There are a couple more clips (at least) from A Joyful Noise, and from any of them the "Related Videos" will give you plenty of fascinating choices. For example, a clip from the Disney movie Dumbo with the Arkestra playing "Pink Elephants" in place of the original soundtrack. One truly sad and beautiful artifact is this long clip from Edward O. Bland's film The Cry of Jazz. It's a grim and tendentious account of jazz improvisation with a straight-ahead bebop quintet led by Sun Ra on the soundtrack, showing how its done. The featured player is tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, and he's in very fine form.

Out of all the video clips I've found, this frenetic performance from 1986 is a highlight.

The Art Show

There are nice web pages from the Hyde Park Art Center, where the exhibition originated, and the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art, where it stopped between there and here. The New York Times had a write-up on the Pennsylvania show. The Durham Arts Guild has some material on its site, and we've put together a little slide show with a glimpse of the local festivities and the exhibition.

Mingus

For Mingus, the Wikipedia entry and the official web site are fine places to start. In a blog post earlier this year marking the 50th anniversary of the first recording of "Fables of Faubus," Marc Myers interviewed Sue Mingus and Nat Hentoff, producer of the Candid recording session that produced the "Original Faubus Fables." Hentoff's own reflections on Mingus are well worth a read, too.
There are several YouTube videos that use the "Original Faubus Fables" as a soundtrack for a video montage of civil rights photos. One of them is quite graphic -- it includes photos of lynchings -- and another, from a group of students at Brown, uses only the first 2 1/2 minutes, up to the first improvised solo. This one just shows a picture of Mingus while playing the textless version of "Fables" from Mingus Ah Um.

At Duke and in Durham

Go to Duke Performances to find out about the September 26 concert, the Franklin Humanities Institute to find out about the panels the day before that, and the Durham Arts Guild to find out about the exhibition.

-- Robert Zimmerman

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/05/tribute-to-sun-ra-1914-1993-iconic-and.html

All,

The following interview with Sun Ra took place in Detroit in 1981 on its award winning PBS program Detroit Black Journal. The interviewer is Deborah Ray who was the host, writer, and producer of the program from 1977-1983...

Kofi

INTERVIEW WITH SUN RA ON
DETROIT BLACK JOURNAL, 1981:

SUN RA
(b. May 22, 1914--d. May 30, 1993)

THE MUSIC OF SUN RA : AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. RA:

DURING SUN RA'S 65 YEAR CAREER IN MUSIC HE AND HIS ARKESTRA RECORDED OVER 200 ALBUMS...

A SAMPLING OF THE INTERSTELLAR MUSIC OF SUN RA AND HIS ARKESTRA ON VIDEO:

Sun Ra Arkestra: NPR Music Tink Desk Concer

Published on Nov 5, 2014

Sun Ra was a big-band innovator, a pioneer of recording and playing with electronics, a poet, a cosmic philosopher, a bandleader and a keyboard innovator who claimed to be from Saturn. Herman Poole Blount would have turned 100 in 2014 had he not left us more than 20 years ago. But his spirit lives on, and so does his long-running band.

On Halloween 2014, the Sun Ra Arkestra — complete with costumes inspired by Egyptian symbolism and science fiction — performed a rousing, out-of-this-world Tiny Desk Concert. The band was led by 91-year-old alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, who's been with the Arkestra since the early 1950s. All these years later, no one makes soul-stirring, spaced-out jazz quite like the Arkestra.

SET LIST
Along Came Ra/Zoom 0:23
Queer Notions 2:23
Angels And Demons At Play 8:17
Interplanetary Music 15:03

CREDITS
Producers: Bob Boilen, Mito Habe-Evans, Maggie Starbard; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Colin Marshall, Susan Hale Thomas, Maggie Starbard; Assistant Producer: Ryan Kellman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=84503534&x-yt-ts=1421914688&v=H1ToFXHW5pg

Sun Ra - 'Supersonic Jazz'--1958 [Full Album][HD]:

TRACKS:

01.India
02.Sunology (Part I)
03.Advice to Medics
04.Super Blonde
05.Soft Talk
06.Sunology (Part II)
07.Kingdom of Not
08.Portrait of the Living Sky
09.Blues at Midnight
10.El is a Sound of Joy
11.Springtime in Chicago
12.Medicine for a Nightmare

On "Springtime in Chicago", recorded at Balkan Studios, Chicago, April 13, 1956:

Sun Ra – Piano, Electric Piano
Art Hoyle – Trumpet, Percussion
Julian Priester – Trombone
James Scales – Alto Sax, Percussion
John Gilmore – Percussion
Pat Patrick – Baritone Sax, Percussion
Wilburn Green – Electric Bass
Robert Barry – Drums

On "Super Blonde", "Soft Talk", "Medicine for a Nightmare", and "Advice to Medics", recorded at RCA studios, possibly June 16, 1956:

Sun Ra – Piano, Electric Piano, 'Space Gong'
Art Hoyle – Trumpet
Julian Priester – Trombone
John Gilmore – Tenor Sax
Pat Patrick – Baritone Sax
Wilburn Green – Electric Bass
Robert Barry – Drums
Jim Herndon – Tympani, Percussion

On "Kingdom of Not", "Portrait of The Living Sky", "Blues at Midnight", "El Is A Sound of Joy", "India", and "Sunology" (both parts), probably recorded at Balkan Studios, Chicago, September or October 1956:

Sun Ra – Piano, Electric Piano, 'Space Gong'
Art Hoyle – Trumpet, Percussion
Pat Patrick – Alto Sax, Percussion
John Gilmore – Tenor Sax, Percussion
Charles Davis – Baritone Sax, Percussion
Victor Sproles – Bass
William Cochran – Drums
Jim Herndon – Tympani, Percussion

Sun Ra - 'Sleeping Beauty'-1979 [full album][HQ]:

Track list:

01. Springtime Again
02. The Door of the Cosmos
03. Sleeping Beauty

Sun Ra - 'Jazz In Silhouette'- 1958- [Full Album][HD]

TRACKS:

01.Enlightenment
02.Saturn
03.Velvet
04.Ancient Aiethopia
05.Hours After
06.Horoscope
07.Images
08.Blues at Midnight

Sun Ra-p, celeste; Hobart Dotson-tp; Bo Bailey-tb; James Spaulding-as, fl; Marshall Allen-as, fl; John Gilmore-ts; Pat Patrick-bs, fl; Charles Davis-bs; Ronnie Boykins-b; William Cochran-d. Studio recording, Chicago, late 1958.

Sun Ra Arkestra - "Face the Music" / "Space is the Place"

Live performance on NBC TV program 'Night Music'

Sun Ra Arkestra - "Retrospekt"

Live performance on NBC TV program 'Night Music'

Sun Ra Arkestra-- "Shadow World"--Live performance in West Berlin:

["The Shadow World" by Sun Ra And His Cosmo Discipline Arkestra]

'Lanquidity' | Sun Ra | 1978 | Full Album

1. Lanquidity 0:00
2. Where Pathways Meet 8:17
3. That's How I Feel 14:47
4. Twin Stars of Thence 22:50
5. There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You of) 32:23

Sun Ra - 'Disco 3000'--full album (1978):

Sun Ra - 'The Night of the Purple Moon'(1970):
Sun Ra: Roksichord, Mini-Moog, Wurlitzer electric piano, Celeste
Danny Davis: as, cl, fl, perc, d
John Gilmore: ts, drums
Stafford James: b

Recorded 1970, New York

Sun Ra - 'The Magic City' (1965)

Ra-clavioline, p; Walter Miller-tp; Ali Hassan-tb; Marshall Allen-as, fl, picc; Danny Davis-as, fl; Harry Spencer-as; John Gilmore-ts; Pat Patrick-bs, fl; Robert Cummings-bcl; Ronnie Boykins-b; Roger Blank-d; James Jacson-perc.

Rehearsal, New York City, around Sept. 24 1965

John Cage & Sun Ra - 'John Cage Meets Sun Ra'

John Cage and Sun Ra performed together in 1986 at Coney Island, New York:

Sun Ra - 'Space is the Place'

Sun Ra - 'Angels and Demons at Play'

Sun Ra Interview (Helsinki, 1971):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ra

Sun Ra

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sun Ra
Sun Ra at the New England Conservatory of Music, February 27, 1992
Background information
Birth name	Herman Poole Blount
Also known as	Sun Ra, Le Sony'r Ra
Born	May 22, 1914
Origin	Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Died	May 30, 1993 (aged 79)
Genres	Avant-garde jazz, hard bop, swing, free jazz, doo wop, jazz fusion, electronic, experimental
Occupation(s)	Bandleader, composer, arranger, artist, poet
Instruments	Piano, organ, keyboards, Minimoog, celesta, percussion, vocals
Years active	1934–1993
Labels	El Saturn Records, Thoth Intergalactic, Impulse!, MPS, ESP-Disk, Black Saint, A&M, Leo, Rounder
Associated acts	Arkestra

Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, legal name Le Sony'r Ra;^[1] May 22, 1914 – May 30, 1993) was a prolific jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, poet and philosopher known for his "cosmic philosophy," musical compositions, and performances. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1979.

Controversial^[2] because of his eclectic music and unorthodox lifestyle, and claiming that he was of the "Angel Race", and not from Earth but from Saturn, Sun Ra developed a complex persona, using "cosmic" philosophies and lyrical poetry that made him a pioneer of afrofuturism. He preached awareness and peace above all. He abandoned his birth name and took on the name and persona of Sun Ra (Ra being the Egyptian God of the Sun), and used several other names throughout his career, including Le Sonra and Sonny Lee.^[3] Sun Ra denied any connection with his birth name, saying "That's an imaginary person, never existed... Any name that I use other than Ra is a pseudonym."^[4]

From the mid-1950s to his death, Sun Ra led "The Arkestra" (a deliberate re-spelling of "orchestra"), an ensemble with an ever-changing name and flexible line-up, although certain core members remained with the group through its various incarnations (Marshal Allen, John Gilmore, June Tyson, and others). It was by turns called "The Solar Myth Arkestra", "His Cosmo Discipline Arkestra", the "Blue Universe Arkestra", "Myth Science Arkestra", "The Jet Set Omniverse Arkestra", and many other variations. Sun Ra asserted that the ever-changing name of his ensemble reflected the ever-changing nature of his music. His mainstream success was limited, but Sun Ra was a prolific recording artist and frequent live performer. His music ranged from keyboard solos to big bands of over 30 musicians and touched on virtually the entire history of jazz, from ragtime to swing music, from bebop to free jazz. He also used free improvisation and was one of the early musicians to make extensive use of electronic keyboards.^[5]

Biography

Early life

He was born Herman Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama, as discovered by his biographer, John F. Szwed, and published in his 1998 book. He was named after the popular vaudeville stage magician Black Herman, who had deeply impressed his mother. He was nicknamed "Sonny" from his childhood, had an older sister and half-brother, and was doted upon by his mother and grandmother.

For decades, very little was known about Sun Ra's early life, and he contributed to its obscurity. As a self-invented person, he routinely gave evasive, contradictory or seemingly nonsensical answers to personal questions, and denied his birth name. He speculated, only half in jest, that he was distantly related to Elijah Poole, later famous as Elijah Muhammed, leader of the Nation of Islam. His birthday for years remained unknown, as he claimed it for years ranging from 1910 to 1918. Only a few years before his death, the date of Sun Ra's birth was still a mystery. Jim Macnie's notes for Blue Delight (1989) said that Sun Ra was believed to be about 75 years old. But Szwed was able to uncover a wealth of information about his early life and confirmed a birth date of May 22, 1914.

As a child, Herman was a skilled pianist. By the age of 11 or 12 years old, he was composing ^[6] and sight reading music. Birmingham was an important stop for touring musicians. He saw famous musicians such as Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Fats Waller, along with others who were quite talented but never made the big time. Sun Ra once said, "[T]he world let down a lot of good musicians".^[7]

In his teenage years, Blount demonstrated prodigious musical talent: many times, according to acquaintances, he would see big band performances and produce full transcriptions of the bands' songs from memory. By his mid-teens, Blount was performing semi-professionally as a solo pianist, or as a member of various ad hoc jazz and R&B groups. He attended Birmingham's segregated Industrial High School (now known as Parker High School), where he studied under music teacher John T. "Fess" Whatley, a demanding disciplinarian who was widely respected and whose classes produced many professional musicians.

Though deeply religious, his family was not formally associated with any Christian church or sect. Blount had few or no close friends in high school but was remembered as kind-natured and quiet, an honor roll student, and a voracious reader. He took advantage of the Black Masonic Lodge as one of the few places in Birmingham where African Americans had unlimited access to books. Its collection on Freemasonry and other esoteric concepts made a strong impression on him.

By his teens, Blount suffered from cryptorchidism,^[8] a chronic testicular hernia. It left him with a nearly constant discomfort that sometimes flared into severe pain. Szwed suggests that Blount felt shame about it and the condition contributed to his isolation.

Early professional career and college

In 1934 Blount was offered his first full-time musical job by Ethel Harper, his biology teacher from the high school, who organized a band to pursue a career as a singer. Blount joined a musicians' trade union and toured with Harper's group through the US Southeast and Midwest. When Harper left the group mid-tour to move to New York (she later was a member of the modestly successful singing group the Ginger Snaps), Blount took over leadership of the group, renaming it the Sonny Blount Orchestra. They continued touring for several months before dissolving it as unprofitable. Though the first edition of the Sonny Blount Orchestra was not financially successful, they earned positive notice from fans and other musicians. Blount afterward found steady employment as a musician in Birmingham.

The clubs of Birmingham often featured exotic trappings, such as vivid lighting and murals with tropical or oasis scenes. These were believed to have influenced the elements Sun Ra incorporated in his later stage shows. Playing for the big bands gave black musicians a sense of pride and togetherness; they were highly regarded in the black community. They were expected to be disciplined and presentable, and in the segregated South, black musicians had wide acceptance in white society. They often played for elite white society audiences (though they were typically forbidden from associating with members of the audience).

In 1936 Whatley's intercession led to Blount's being awarded a scholarship at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University. He was a music education major, studying composition, orchestration, and music theory, and dropped out after a year.

Trip to Saturn

Finances and his increasing sense of isolation are believed to have been factors in Sun Ra's leaving college. Perhaps more importantly, he claimed a visionary experience as a college student; it had a major, long-term influence on the young pianist. In 1936 or 1937, in the midst of deep religious concentration, Sun Ra claimed that a bright light appeared around him, and, as he later said:

my whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up... I wasn't in human form... I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn... they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools... the world was going into complete chaos... I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That's what they told me.^[9]

Sun Ra said that this experience occurred in 1936 or 1937. According to Szwed, the musician's closest associates cannot date the story any earlier than 1952. (Sun Ra also said that the incident occurred when he was living in Chicago, where he did not settle until the late 1940s). Sun Ra discussed the vision, with no substantive variation, to the end of his life. His trip to Saturn allegedly occurred a full decade before flying saucers entered public consciousness with the 1947 encounter of Kenneth Arnold. It was earlier than other public accounts: about 15 years before George Adamski wrote about contact with benevolent beings; and almost 20 years before the 1961 case of Barney and Betty Hill, who recounted sinister UFO abductions. Szwed says that, "even if this story is revisionist autobiography... Sonny was pulling together several strains of his life. He was both prophesizing his future and explaining his past with a single act of personal mythology."^[10]

New devotion to music (late 1930s)

After leaving college, Blount became known as the most singularly devoted musician in Birmingham. He rarely slept, citing Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, and Napoleon as fellow highly productive cat-nappers. He transformed the first floor of his family's home into a conservatory-workshop, where he wrote songs, transcribed recordings, rehearsed with the many musicians who were nearly constantly drifting in and out, and discussed Biblical and esoteric concepts with whomever was interested.^[11]

Blount became a regular at Birmingham's Forbes Piano Company, a white-owned company. Blount visited the Forbes building almost daily to play music, swap ideas with staff and customers, or copy sheet music into his notebooks.^[12] He formed a new band, and like his old teacher Whatley, insisted on rigorous daily rehearsals. The new Sonny Blount Orchestra earned a reputation as an impressive, disciplined band that could play in a wide variety of styles with equal skill.

Draft and wartime experiences

In October 1942 Blount received a selective service notification that he had been drafted into the Military of the United States. He quickly declared himself a conscientious objector, citing religious objections to war and killing, his financial support of his great-aunt Ida, and his chronic hernia. His case was rejected by the local draft board, and in his appeal to the national draft board, Blount wrote that the lack of black men on the draft appeal board "smacks of Hitlerism".^[13] His family was deeply embarrassed by Sonny's refusal to join the military; many relatives ostracized him. Although eventually approved for alternate service at Civilian Public Service camp in Pennsylvania, he did not appear at the camp as required on December 8, 1942. Shortly after, he was arrested in Alabama.

In court, Blount said that alternate service was unacceptable; he debated the judge on points of law and Biblical interpretation. Though sympathetic, the judge ruled that Blount was violating the law and was at risk for being drafted into the U.S. military. Blount responded that if inducted, he would use military weapons and training to kill the first high-ranking military officer possible. The judge sentenced Blount to jail (pending draft board and CPS rulings), and then said, "I've never seen a nigger like you before"; Blount replied, "No, and you never will again."^[14]

In January 1943 Blount wrote to the United States Marshals Service from the Walker County, Alabama jail in Jasper. He said he was facing a nervous breakdown from the stress of imprisonment, that he was suicidal, and that he was in constant fear of sexual assault. When his conscientious objector status was reaffirmed in February 1943, he was escorted to Pennsylvania. He did forestry work as assigned during the day and was allowed to play piano at night. Psychiatrists there described him as "a psychopathic personality [and] sexually perverted" but also as "a well-educated colored intellectual".^[15]

In March 1943, Blount was classified as 4-F because of his hernia, and returned to Birmingham, embittered and angered. He formed a new band and quickly was playing professionally. After his beloved great-aunt Ida died in 1945, Blount felt no reason to stay in Birmingham. He dissolved the band, and moved to Chicago, part of the Second Great Migration, southern African Americans who moved north during and after World War II.

Chicago years (1945–61)

In Chicago Blount quickly found work, notably with blues singer Wynonie Harris, with whom he made his recording debut on two 1946 singles, "Dig This Boogie"/"Lightning Struck the Poorhouse" and "My Baby's Barrelhouse"/"Drinking By Myself". "Dig This Boogie" was also Blount's first recorded piano solo. He performed with the locally successful Lil Green band and played bump-and-grind music for months in Calumet City strip clubs.

In August 1946, Blount earned a lengthy engagement at the Club DeLisa under bandleader and composer Fletcher Henderson. Blount had long admired Henderson, but Henderson's fortunes were fading (his band was now made of up middling musicians rather than the stars of earlier years) in large part because of his instability, due to Henderson's long term injuries from a car accident. Henderson hired Blount as pianist and arranger, replacing Marl Young. Ra's arrangements initially showed a degree of bebop influence, but the band members resisted the new music, despite Henderson's encouragement.

In 1948 Blount performed briefly in a trio with saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and violinist Stuff Smith, both preeminent swing-era musicians. There are no known recordings of this trio, but a home recording of a Blount-Smith duet from 1953 appears on Sound Sun Pleasure, and one of Sun Ra's final recordings was a rare sideman appearance on violinist Billy Bang's Tribute to Stuff Smith.

In addition to enabling professional advancement, what he encountered in Chicago changed Blount's personal outlook. The city was a center of African-American political activism and fringe movements, with Black Muslims, Black Hebrews, and others proselytizing, debating, and printing leaflets or books. Blount absorbed it all and was fascinated with the city's many ancient Egyptian-styled buildings and monuments. He read books such as George G.M. James's Stolen Legacy (which argued that classical Greek philosophy had its roots in ancient Egypt). Blount concluded that the accomplishments and history of Africans had been systematically suppressed and denied by European cultures.

By 1952 Blount was leading the Space Trio with drummer Tommy "Bugs" Hunter and saxophonist Pat Patrick, two of the most accomplished musicians he had known. They performed regularly, and Sun Ra began writing more advanced songs.

On October 20, 1952, Blount legally changed his name to Le Sony'r Ra. Sun Ra claimed^[16] to have always been uncomfortable with his birth name of Blount. He considered it a slave name, from a family that was not his. David Martinelli suggested that his change was similar to "Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali... [dropping] their slave names in the process of attaining a new self-awareness and self-esteem".^[17]

Patrick left the group to move to Florida with his new wife. His friend John Gilmore (tenor sax) joined the group, and Marshall Allen (alto sax) soon followed. Patrick was in and out of the group until the end of his life, but Allen and Gilmore were the two most devoted members of the Arkestra. Saxophonist James Spaulding and trombonist Julian Priester also recorded with Sun Ra in Chicago, and both went on to careers of their own. The Chicago tenor Von Freeman also did a short stint with the band of the early 1950s.^[18]

In Chicago, Blount met Alton Abraham, a precociously intelligent teenager and something of a kindred spirit. He became the Arkestra's biggest booster and one of Sun Ra's closest friends. The men both felt like outsiders and shared an interest in fringe esoterica. Abraham's strengths balanced Ra's shortcomings: though he was a disciplined bandleader, Sun Ra was somewhat introverted and lacked business sense (a trait that would haunt his entire career); Abraham was outgoing, well-connected, and practical. Though still a teenager, Abraham eventually became Sun Ra's de facto business manager: he booked performances, suggested musicians for the Arkestra, and introduced several popular songs into the group's repertoire. Ra, Abraham and others formed a sort of book club to trade ideas and discuss the offbeat topics that so intrigued them. This group printed a number of pamphlets and broadsides explaining their conclusions and ideas; some of these were collected by critic John Corbett and Anthony Elms as The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets (2006).

Sun Ra and Abraham also formed an independent record label in the mid-1950s; it was generally known as El Saturn Records. It had several variations of name. Initially focused on 45 rpm singles by Sun Ra and artists related to him, Saturn Records issued two full-length albums during the 1950s: Super-Sonic Jazz (1957) and Jazz In Silhouette (1959). Producer Tom Wilson was the first to release a Sun Ra album, through his independent label Transition Records in 1957, entitled Jazz by Sun Ra.^[19] During this era, Sun Ra recorded the first of dozens of singles as a band-for-hire backing a range of doo wop and R&B singers; several dozen of these were reissued in a two-CD set, The Singles, by Evidence Records.

During the late 1950s, Sun Ra and his band began wearing the outlandish, Egyptian-styled or science fiction-themed costumes and headdresses for which they would become known. These costumes had multiple purposes: they expressed Sun Ra's fascination with ancient Egypt and the space age; they provided a distinctive uniform for the Arkestra; they provided a new identity for the band onstage, as well as comic relief. (Sun Ra thought avant garde musicians typically took themselves far too seriously).

New York years (1961–68)

Sun Ra and some of his core musicians (Allen, Gilmore, and Boykins) left Chicago in July 1961, staying in Montreal through the end of September before settling in New York City. They initially had trouble finding performance venues and began living communally because of New York's higher cost of living. This frustration helped to fuel the drastic changes in the Arkestra's sound as Sun Ra's music underwent a free jazz-influenced experimental period.

In March 1966 the Arkestra secured a regular Monday night gig at Slug's Saloon. This proved to be a breakthrough to new audiences and recognition. Sun Ra's popularity reached an early peak during this period, as the beat generation and early followers of psychedelia embraced him. Regularly for the next year and a half (and intermittently for another half-decade afterwards), Sun Ra and company performed at Slug's for audiences that eventually came to include music critics and notable jazz musicians. Opinions of Sun Ra's music were divided (and hecklers were not uncommon), but high praise came from two of the architects of bebop: trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie offered encouragement, once stating, "Keep it up, Sonny, they tried to do the same shit to me",^[20] while pianist Thelonious Monk chided someone who said Sun Ra was "too far out" by responding, "Yeah, but it swings."^[21]

Philadelphia years (1968–93)

In 1968, when the New York building they were renting was put up for sale, Sun Ra and the Arkestra relocated to the Germantown section of Philadelphia. He got a house in Morton Street that became the Arkestra's base of operations until Sun Ra's death. Apart from occasional complaints about the noise of rehearsals, they were soon regarded as good neighbors because of their friendliness, drug-free living, and rapport with youngsters. The saxophonist Danny Thompson owned and operated the Pharaoh's Den, a convenience store in the neighborhood. When lightning struck a tree on their street, Sun Ra took it as a good omen. James Jacson fashioned the Cosmic Infinity Drum from the scorched tree trunk. They commuted via railroad to New York for the Monday night gig at Slug's and for other engagements.

In late 1968 Sun Ra and the Arkestra made their first tour of the US West Coast. Reactions were mixed; hippies accustomed to long-form psychedelia like the Grateful Dead were often bewildered by the Arkestra. By this time, the performance included 20–30 musicians, dancers, singers, fire-eaters, and elaborate lighting. John Burks of Rolling Stone wrote a positive review of a San Jose State College concert. Sun Ra was featured on the April 19, 1969 cover of the magazine, which introduced his inscrutable gaze to millions. During this tour, Damon Choice, then an art student at San Jose, joined the Arkestra and became its vibraphonist.

Starting with concerts in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom in 1970, the Arkestra began to tour internationally. They played to audiences who had known his music only through records. Sun Ra continued playing in Europe to nearly the end of his life. The saxophonist Danny Thompson became a de facto tour and business manager during this era, specializing in what he called "no bullshit C.O.D.",^[22] preferring to take cash before performing or delivering records.

In early 1971, Sun Ra was appointed as artist-in-residence at University of California, Berkeley, teaching a course called "The Black Man In the Cosmos".^[23] Few students enrolled, but his classes were often full of curious persons from the surrounding community. One half-hour of each class was devoted to a lecture (complete with handouts and homework assignments), the other half-hour to an Arkestra performance or Sun Ra keyboard solo. Reading lists included the works of Madame Blavatsky and Henry Dumas, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons, The Book of Oahspe and assorted volumes concerning Egyptian hieroglyphs, African American folklore, and other topics.

In 1971, Sun Ra traveled throughout Egypt with the Arkestra at the invitation of the drummer Salah Ragab. He returned to Egypt in 1983 and 1984, when he recorded with Ragab. Recordings made in Egypt were released as Live in Egypt, Nidhamu, Sun Ra Meets Salah Ragab, Egypt Strut and Horizon.^[24]^[25]^[26]

In 1972, San Francisco public TV station KQED producer John Coney, producer Jim Newman, and screen writer Joshua Smith worked with Sun Ra to produce an 85-minute feature film, entitled Space Is the Place, with Sun Ra's Arkestra and an ensemble of actors assembled by the production team. It was filmed in Oakland and San Francisco. On May 20, 1978, Sun Ra and the Arkestra appeared on the TV show, Saturday Night Live.

In the mid-1970s, the Arkestra sometimes played free Saturday afternoon concerts in a Germantown park near their home. At their mid-1970s shows in Philadelphia nightclubs, someone would stand at the back of the room, selling stacks of unmarked LPs in plain white sleeves, pressed from recordings of the band's live performances.

In New York City in the fall of 1979, Sun Ra and the Arkestra played as the "house band" at the Squat Theatre on 23rd Street, which was notorious as the performance venue of the avant-garde Hungarian theater troupe. Janos, their manager, transformed the theater into a nightclub while most of the troupe was away that season performing in Europe. Debbie Harry, "The Velvet Underground"'s John Cale and Nico (from Andy Warhol's Factory days), John Lurie and 'The Lounge Lizards', and other pop and avant-garde musicians were regulars.

Sun Ra was disciplined and drank only club soda at the gigs, but did not impose his strict code on his musicians. They respected his discipline and authority. Soft spoken and charismatic, Sun Ra turned Squat Theater into a universe of big band "space" jazz backed by a floor show of sexy Jupiterettes. He directed while playing three synthesizers at the same time. In those days, "Space Is The Place" was the space at Squat.

The Arkestra continued their touring and recording through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Sun Ra became a fixture in Philadelphia, appearing semi-regularly on WXPN radio, giving lectures to community groups, or visiting the city's libraries.

He had a stroke in 1990, but kept composing, performing, and leading the Arkestra. Late in his career, Sun Ra opened a few concerts for the New York–based rock group Sonic Youth. When too ill to perform and tour, Sun Ra appointed Gilmore to lead the Arkestra. (Gilmore was frail from emphysema; after his death, Allen took over leadership of the Arkestra.)

Sun Ra returned to Birmingham to see his sister, whom he had rarely seen in nearly 40 years. He contracted pneumonia and died in Birmingham on May 30, 1993. He was buried at the Elmwood Cemetery. According to the hospital, he had also been affected by circulatory system problems and numerous strokes shortly before his death.^[3] The small footstone reads "Herman Sonny Blount aka Le Sony'r Ra".^[27]^[28]

The Arkestra

Following Sun Ra's death, the Arkestra was led by tenor saxophonist John Gilmore. Following Gilmore's death in 1995, the group has performed under the direction of alto saxophonist Marshall Allen. A 1999 album led by Allen, Song for the Sun, featured Jimmy Hopps and Dick Griffin. In the summer of 2004 the Arkestra became the first American jazz band to perform in Tuva, in southern Siberia, where they played five sets at the Ustuu-Huree Festival.^[29]

As of May 2008, the Arkestra continues to tour and perform. In September 2008 they played for 7 days in a row at the ZXZW festival, each day emphasizing different aspects of the musical legacy of Sun Ra. In 2009, they performed at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art in conjunction with an exhibition that explored the intersection of the Arkestra's performing legacy and the practice of contemporary art.^[30] More recently they ventured to Australia for the first time, for the 2011 Melbourne International Jazz Festival and MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) in Tasmania.

Music

Sun Ra's piano technique touched on many styles: his youthful fascination with boogie woogie, stride piano and blues, a sometimes refined touch reminiscent of Count Basie or Ahmad Jamal, and angular phrases in the style of Thelonious Monk or brutal, percussive attacks like Cecil Taylor. Often overlooked is the range of influences from classical music – Sun Ra cited Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Schoenberg and Shostakovich as his favorite composers for the piano.^[31]

As a synthesizer and electric keyboard player, Sun Ra ranks among one of the earliest and most radical pioneers. By the mid-1950s, he used a variety of electric keyboards, and almost immediately, he exploited their potential perhaps more than anyone, sometimes modifying them himself to produce sounds rarely if ever heard before. His live albums from the late 1960s and early 1970s feature some of the noisiest, most bizarre keyboard work ever recorded.^{[citation needed]}

Sun Ra's music can be roughly divided into three phases, but his records and performances were full of surprises and the following categories should be regarded only as approximations.

Chicago phase

The first period occurred in the 1950s when Sun Ra's music evolved from big band swing into the outer-space-themed "cosmic jazz" for which he was best known. Music critics and jazz historians say some of his best work was recorded during this period and it is also some of his most accessible music. Sun Ra's music in this era was often tightly arranged and sometimes reminiscent of Duke Ellington's, Count Basie's, or other important swing music ensembles. However, there was a strong influence from post-swing styles like bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, and touches of the exotic and hints of the experimentalism that would dominate his later music. Notable Sun Ra albums from the 1950s include Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth, Interstellar Low Ways, Super-Sonic Jazz, We Travel the Space Ways, The Nubians of Plutonia and Jazz In Silhouette.

Ronnie Boykins, Sun Ra's bassist, has been described as "the pivot around which much of Sun Ra's music revolved for eight years". This is especially pronounced on the key recordings from 1965 (The Magic City, The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One, and The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume Two) where the intertwining lines of Boykins' bass and Ra's electronic keyboards provide cohesion.^{[citation needed]}

New York phase

After the move to New York, Sun Ra and company plunged headlong into the experimentalism that they had only hinted at in Chicago. The music was often extremely loud and the Arkestra grew to include multiple drummers and percussionists. Recordings of this era began to utilize new technological possibilities such as extensive use of tape delay systems to assemble spatial sound pieces which are far removed from earlier compositions such as "Saturn". Recordings and live performances often featured passages for unusual instrumental combinations and passages of collective playing which point towards free improvisation; in fact, it is often difficult to tell where the compositions end and the improvisations begin.

In this era Sun Ra began conducting using hand and body gestures. This system would inspire cornetist Butch Morris, who would later develop his own more highly refined way to conduct improvisers.

Though often associated with avant-garde jazz, Sun Ra did not believe his work could be classified as "free music": "I have to make sure that every note, every nuance, is correct... If you want to call it that, spell it p-h-r-e, because ph is a definite article and re is the name of the sun. So I play phre music – music of the sun."^[32]

Seeking to broaden his compositional possibilities, Sun Ra insisted all band members double on various percussion instruments – predating world music by drawing on various ethnic musical forms – and most saxophonists became multireedists, adding instruments such as flutes, oboes, or clarinets to their arsenals. In this era, Sun Ra was among the first of any musicians to make extensive and pioneering use of synthesizers and other various electronic keyboards; he was given a prototype Minimoog by its inventor, Robert Moog.

Notable titles from this period include The Magic City, Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, When Sun Comes Out, The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One, Atlantis, Secrets of the Sun and Other Planes of There.

Philadelphia phase

During their third period, beginning in the 1970s, Sun Ra and the Arkestra settled down into a relatively conventional sound, often incorporating swing standards, although their records and concerts were still highly eclectic and energetic, and typically included at least one lengthy, semi-improvised percussion jam. Sun Ra was explicitly asserting a continuity with the ignored jazz tradition: "They tried to fool you, now I got to school you, about jazz, all about jazz" he rapped, framing the inclusion of pieces by Fletcher Henderson and Jelly Roll Morton.^{[citation needed]}

In the 1970s Sun Ra took a liking to the films of Walt Disney. He incorporated smatterings of Disney musical numbers into many of his performances from then on. In the late 1980s the Arkestra performed a concert at Walt Disney World. The Arkestra's version of "Pink Elephants on Parade" is available on Stay Awake, a tribute album of Disney tunes played by various artists and produced by Hal Willner. A number of Sun Ra's 1970s concerts are available on CD, but none have received a wide release in comparison to his earlier music. The album Atlantis can be considered the landmark that led into his 1970s era.^{[citation needed]} In 1978–80 performances, Sun Ra added a large electronic creation, the Outerspace Visual Communicator, which produced images rather than sounds; this was performed at a keyboard by its inventor, Bill Sebastian. During concerts, the OVC usually was positioned at center stage behind the Arkestra while Sebastian sat on stage with the musicians.

Musicians

Certainly dozens of musicians – perhaps hundreds – passed through Sun Ra's bands over the years. Some stayed with him for decades, while others made only a few recordings or performances.

Sun Ra was personally responsible for the vast majority of the constant changes in the Arkestra's lineup. According to contrabassist Jiunie Booth, himself a member of the Arkestra, Sun Ra would not confront any musician whose performance he was unsatisfied with. Instead, Sun Ra would simply gather the entire Arkestra minus the offending musician, and skip town, leaving the fired musician stranded. After repeated instances of U.S. jazz musicians becoming stranded in foreign countries, Sun Ra's unique method of dismissal became a diplomatic liability for the United States. The U.S. State Department was compelled to tell Sun Ra to bring any fired musicians stateside rather than leaving them stranded.^{[citation needed]}

The following is a partial list of musical collaborators and the eras in which they played with Sun Ra and/or the Arkestra:

Yahya Abdul-Majid, tenor saxophone (1980–present)
Luqman Ali, drums
Marshall Allen, alto saxophone, flute, oboe (1957–present)
Ronnie Boykins, double bass (1957–1974)
Arthur "Jiunie" Booth, double bass
Darryl Brown, drums (1970–1972)
Owen "Fiidla" Brown, violin, dance, vocals (1987–1990s and later appearances)
Tony Bunn, electric bass (1976)
Francisco Mora Catlett, drums (1973–1980)
Don Cherry, pocket trumpet (1983–1990)
Damon Choice, vibraphone (late 1960s–1990s)
Phil Cohran, trumpet (1959–1961)
India Cooke, violin (1990s)
Danny Davis, alto saxophone, flute (1962–1977, 1985)
Joey DeStefano, alto saxophone (1968–1969)
Arthur Doyle, saxophone
Bruce Edwards guitar (1983–1993,)
Eddie Gale, trumpet (1960s)
John Gilmore, tenor saxophone, bass clarinet (1954–1964, 1965–1995)
Tommy "Bugs" Hunter, drums, sound engineer

James Jacson, bassoon, oboe, flute, Ancient Egyptian infinity drum
Clifford Jarvis, drums, (1961–76, 1983)
Donald Jones, drums (1973–1974)
Wayne Kramer, guitar (2006)^[33]
Bob Northern, french horn
Eloe Omoe, bass clarinet, oboe
John Ore, double bass
Taylor Richardson, guitar (1979–1983)
Pat Patrick, baritone saxophone, alto saxophone, clarinet, flute (1950–1959, 1961–1977, 1985–1988)
Julian Priester, trombone (1955–1956, 1980s–1990s)
Rollo Radford, bass
Buster Smith, drums
Marvin Bugalu Smith, drums
Michael Ray, trumpet (1978–present)
Pharoah Sanders, saxophone (1964–1965)
Bill Sebastian, outerspace visual communicator (1978–1980)
Talvin Singh, tablas^[34]
Alan Silva, double bass, cello, violin (early 1970s)
Tani Tabbal, drums
June Tyson, singer, violin

Outerspace Visual Communicator

The OVC is a sort of visual synthesizer that merges music with visual effects, which was often played by Sun Ra.^[35]

Philosophy

Sun Ra's world view was often described as a philosophy, but he rejected this term, describing his own manner as an "equation" – he claimed that while philosophy was based on theories and abstract reasoning, his method was based on logic and pragmatism. Many of the Arkestra cite Sun Ra's teachings as pivotal and for inspiring such long-term devotion to the music that they knew would never make them much money. His equation was rarely (if ever) explained as a whole; instead, it was related in bits and pieces over many years, leading some to think his world view was naïve or composed of nonsensical new-age platitudes.^{[citation needed]} However, Martinelli argues that, when considered as a whole, one can discern a unified world view that draws upon many sources, but is also unique to Sun Ra, writing:

Sun Ra presents a unified conception, incorporating music, myth, and performance into his multi-leveled equations. Every aspect of the Sun Ra experience, from business practices like Saturn Records to published collections of poetry to his 35-year career in music, is a manifestation of his equations. Sun Ra seeks to elevate humanity beyond their current earthbound state, tied to outmoded conceptions of life and death when the potential future of immortality awaits them. As Hall has put it, 'In this era of 'practical' things men ridicule even the existence of God. They scoff at goodness while they ponder with befuddled minds the phantasmagoria of materiality. They have forgotten the path which leads beyond the stars.'^[17]

He drew on sources as diverse as the Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, channeling, numerology, Freemasonry, Ancient Egyptian Mysticism, and black nationalism. Sun Ra's system had distinct Gnostic leanings,^[36] arguing that the god of most monotheistic religions was not the creator god, not the ultimate god, but a lesser, evil being. Sun Ra was wary of the Bible, knowing that it had been used to justify slavery. He would often re-arrange and re-word Biblical passages (along with re-working many other words, names or phrases) in an attempt to uncover "hidden" meanings. The most obvious evidence of this system was Ra's practice of renaming many of the musicians who played with him.

Bassoonist/multireedist James Jacson had studied Zen Buddhism before joining Sun Ra and identified strong similarities between Zen teachings and practices (particularly Zen koans) and Ra's use of non sequiturs and seemingly absurd replies to questions.^[37] Drummer Art Jenkins admitted that Sun Ra's "nonsense" sometimes troubled his thoughts for days until inspiring a sort of paradigm shift, or profound change in outlook.^[38] Drummer Andrew Cyrille said Sun Ra's comments were "very interesting stuff... whether you believed it or not. And a lot of times it was humorous, and a lot of times it was ridiculous, and a lot of times it was right on the money."^[39]

Some of Sun Ra's songs with words featured lyrics that although simple, were inspirational and philosophical. The most famous example was "Space Is the Place!" Another example was the song that went, "You made a mistake. You did something wrong. Make another mistake, and do something right!" Sometimes (typically at the end of a set) the entire Arkestra would snake out through the audience, playing and chanting something like this.^{[citation needed]}

Sun Ra and black culture

According to Szwed,^[40] Sun Ra's view of his relationship to black people and black cultures "changed drastically" over time. Initially, Sun Ra identified closely with broader struggles for black power, black political influence, and black identity, and saw his own music as a key element in educating and liberating blacks. But by the heyday of Black Power radicalism in the 1960s, Sun Ra was expressing disillusionment with these aims. He denied feeling closely connected to any race. In 1970 he said:

I couldn't approach black people with the truth because they like lies. They live lies... At one time I felt that white people were to blame for everything, but then I found out that they were just puppets and pawns of some greater force, which has been using them... Some force is having a good time [manipulating black and white people] and looking, enjoying itself up in a reserved seat, wondering, "I wonder when they're going to wake up."^[41]

Sun Ra is considered to be an early pioneer of the Afrofuturist movement due to his music, writings and other works.^[42]

The influence of Sun Ra can be seen throughout many aspects of black music. He grounded the practice of afrofuturism in a musical tradition of performing blackness that remains relevant today. Sun Ra lived out his beliefs of afrofuturism in his daily life by embodying the movement not only in his music, but also in his clothes and actions. This embodiment of the narrative allowed him to demonstrate black nationalism as a counter narrative to the present culture. It was in Chicago, as well, in the mid-fifties, that Ra began experimenting with extraterrestriality in his stage show, sometimes playing regular cocktail lounges dressed in space suits. By placing his band and performances in space and extraterrestrial environments Sun Ra built a world that was his own view of how the African diaspora connected.^[43]

Influence and legacy

Many of Sun Ra's innovations remain important and groundbreaking. Ra was one of the first jazz leaders to use two double basses, to employ the electric bass, to play electronic keyboards, to use extensive percussion and polyrhythms, to explore modal music and to pioneer solo and group freeform improvisations. In addition, he made his mark in the wider cultural context: he proclaimed the African origins of jazz, reaffirmed pride in black history and reasserted the spiritual and mystical dimensions of music, all important factors in the black cultural/political renaissance of the 1960s.^{[citation needed]}

George Clinton of P-funk drew inspiration from Sun Ra; see P-Funk mythology. He once declared in an interview, "Yeah, Sun Ra's out to lunch... same place I eat at!"^[44]

Detroit's MC5 played a handful of shows with Sun Ra and were influenced by his works immensely. One of their songs from their premiere album Kick Out the Jams featured a track called "Starship", which was based on a poem by Ra.^{[citation needed]}

Filmmaker and visual artist Cauleen Smith has heavily researched the life and legacy of Sun Ra. Her 2013 exhibition "17" "arises out of [her] research into the legacy of Sun Ra, who was himself a student of numerology and achieved a kind of cultural immortality the number 17 might be said to refer to." ^[45] Her project "The Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band" includes several components related to Sun Ra. "One component (2010) of the project is the production of five flash mob street performances involving a marching band inspired by Sun Ra's Arkestra. The second component of the project... is a full-length video that chronicles the urban legends of Sun Ra’s time in Chicago as well as the contemporary artists who live and work in this city."^[46]

Filmography

Sun Ra and his Arkestra were the subject of a few documentary films, including Robert Mugge's Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise (1980). It interspersed passages of performances and rehearsals with Sun Ra's commentary on various subjects ranging from today's youth to his own place in the cosmos. Space Is the Place (1974) is a feature-length film that stars Sun Ra and his band as themselves. The soundtrack, also by Sun Ra, is available on CD. The film follows Sun Ra after he returns to Chicago from many years of space travel with his Arkestra. In a meeting with "the Overseer" – a devil-like figure stationed in the desert – Sun Ra agrees to play a game of cards in order to "win" the black community. Sun Ra's goal is to transport the American black community to a new planet he discovered while on his journey, and that he hopes to use as a home for an entirely black population. The artist's mission is to "teleport the whole planet through music", but his attempts are often misunderstood by his supposed converts.^{[citation needed]}

More recently, Don Letts' Sun Ra – Brother from Another Planet (2005) incorporated some of Mugge's material, and includes some additional interviews.

Points on a Space Age (2009) is a documentary by Ephrahaim Asili.^[47]^[48] "It's a 60-minute doc along the lines of the talking-head-intercut-with performance clips style."^[47]

Bibliography

Sun Ra wrote an enormous number of songs and material regarding his spiritual beliefs and music. A magazine titled Sun Ra Research was published irregularly for many years, providing extensive documentation of Sun Ra's perspectives on many issues. Sun Ra's collected poetry and prose is available as a book, published May 2005, entitled Sun Ra, The Immeasurable Equation. Another book of over 260 of Sun Ra's poems, Sun Ra: Collected Works Vol. 1: Immeasurable Equation was published by Phaelos Books in November 2005. The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets, was published in book form in 2005, by WhiteWalls. A collection of Sun Ra's poetry, This Planet Is Doomed, was published by Kicks Books in 2011.

Discography

Main article: Sun Ra discography

Notes

Szwed, p. 83.

Yanow, Scott. "Sun Ra - Music Biography, Credits and Discography". AllMusic. Retrieved 2013-05-20.

Watrous, Peter (1993-05-31). "Sun Ra, 79, Versatile Jazz Artist; A Pioneer with a Surrealist Bent". The New York Times (The New York Times Company). Retrieved 2008-06-01.

Wilson, Nancy; et al. "Sun Ra: 'Cosmic Swing'" (radio). NPR Jazz Profiles. National Public Radio. Retrieved 2008-06-01.

Szwed (1999): according to author Norman Mailer writing in 1956, quoted on page 154: "a friend took me to hear a jazz musician named Sun Ra who played 'space music'." According to Sun Ra himself, also in 1956, quoted on page 384: "When I say space music, I'm dealing with the void, because that is of space too... So I leave the word space open, like space is supposed to be." On page 247, in an interview, Sun Ra stated "sometimes when I'm playing for a band, playing space music... I'm using ordinary instruments, but actually I'm using them in a manner... transforming certain ideas over into a language which the world can understand."

Szwed (1998), p. 12.

Szwed (1998), p. 17.

Szwed (1998), p. 10.

Szwed (1998), pp. 28–29.

Szwed (1998), pp. 30–31.

Szwed (1998), p. 33.

"Forbes Piano Company." www.bhamwiki.com. Retrieved September 2, 2014.

Szwed (1998), p. 43.

Szwed (1998), p. 44,

Szwed (1998), p. 46.

Szwed (1998), p. 4.

Martinelli, David A. (1991). "The Cosmic-Myth Equations of Sun Ra". UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology. Archived from the original on 2008-02-22. Retrieved 2008-05-30.

Litweiler, John (1984). The Freedom Principle: Jazz after 1958. Da Capo, p. 141. ISBN 0-306-80377-1

Campbell, Robert L., & Trent, Christopher. The Earthly Recordings of Run Ra (2nd edition). Redwood, NY: Cadence Jazz Books, 2000. ISBN 978-1-881993-35-3

Szwed (1998), p. 219.

Szwed (1998), p. 219; emphasis in original.

Szwed (1998), p. 273.

"Professor Sun Ra - Berkeley Lecture, 1971". Sensitiveskinmagazine.com. Retrieved 2013-05-20.

Westergaard, Sean. "Live in Egypt, Vol. 1 - Sun Ra : Songs, Reviews, Credits, Awards". AllMusic. Retrieved 2013-05-20.

Loewy, Steve. "Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt - Sun Ra : Songs, Reviews, Credits, Awards". AllMusic. Retrieved 2013-05-20.

Planer, Lindsay (1971-12-17). "Horizon - Sun Ra : Songs, Reviews, Credits, Awards". AllMusic. Retrieved 2013-05-20.

Szwed (1998), p. 382.

"findagrave.com". Retrieved 2014-03-03.

Schuman, Nicole (2004-10-14). "Scott balances careers as academic, musician". University at Buffalo Reporter (University at Buffalo, The State University of New York). Retrieved 2008-05-31.

"Pathways to Unknown Worlds". Icaphila.org.

Szwed (1998), p. 28.

Doerschuk, Bob (January 1987). "Sun Ra". Keyboard 13 (1): 65.

Kramer, Wayne (2006-10-23). "My Night as a Tone Scientist". The Kramer Report. Retrieved 2008-05-31.

Hodgkinson, Will (8 June 2001). "Home entertainment: Talvin Singh". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 September 2012.

Sullivan, James (2013-04-02). "Inventor brings 3-D vision to music". The Boston Globe.

Szwed (1998), p. 297.

Szwed (1998), p. 385.

Szwed (1998), p. 387.

Szwed (1998), pp. 386–87.

Szwed (1998), p. 311.

Szwed (1998), p. 313.

Taylor-Stone, Chardine (7 January 2014). "Afrofuturism: where space, pyramids and politics collide". Guardian. Retrieved 11 November 2014.

Corbett, John. "Brothers From Another Planet." Extended Play: Sounding off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. N. pag. Print.

Heron, W. Kim (2007-06-06). "Space is still the place". Metro Times. Retrieved 2008-05-30.

"Cauleen Smith: 17 - Exhibitions - Hyde Park Art Center". Hydeparkart.org. 2013-03-10. Retrieved 2013-05-20.

"The Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band is one component of a project being produced by Cauleen Smith as part of an artist-in-residence at threewalls Gallery, Chicago. | The Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band". Solarflareark.wordpress.com. 2012-01-12. Retrieved 2013-05-20.

DVD Review: Points on a Space Age (MVD video) | Side Shots Film Blog, Identity Theory blog, May 2009

Points on a Space Age at the Internet Movie Database

References

Raschka, Chris. (2014). The Cosmo-Biography of Sun Ra: the Sound of Joy is Enlightening. Candlewick Press. ISBN 978-0-7636-5806-9.
Szwed, John F. (August 21, 1998). Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80855-5.
Ra, Sun; Wolf, James L.; Geerken, Hartmut (September 1, 2006). Sun Ra: The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose. Waitawhile. ISBN 978-3-8334-2659-9.
Ra, Sun (August 1, 2006). Elms, Anthony; Corbett, John, ed. The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets. Chicago, Illinois: WhiteWalls. ISBN 978-0-945323-07-5.

External links

The Sun Ra Arkestra, Official site, under the direction of Marshall Allen

Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen perform at the Philadelphia ICA (July, 2009)

Space is the Place film, Outer Spaceways

1988 interview with Sun Ra

Sun Ra at Find a Grave

E.E. Forbes Piano Company

Welcome to Sound Projections

Saturday, January 24, 2015

SPECIAL BONUS FEATURE: Tribute To Sun Ra, 1914-1993: Iconic And Innovative Composer, Musician, Philosopher, Orchestra Leader, Music Theorist, And Poet In Celebration Of His Centennial Year

VOLUME ONE NUMBER ONE

Friday, May 23, 2014

Tribute To Sun Ra, 1914-1993: Iconic And Innovative Composer, Musician, Philosopher, Orchestra Leader, And Poet In Celebration Of His Centennial Year

Sun Ra Centennial

NEC Jazz Orchestra

Celebrating the Sun Ra centennial

Posted By Peter Margasak on 08.29.14

Sun Ra Meets Mingus in a Duke Double-Bill

Sun Ra Arkestra: NPR Music Tink Desk Concer

Sun Ra - 'Supersonic Jazz'--1958 [Full Album][HD]:

TRACKS:

01.India02.Sunology (Part I)03.Advice to Medics04.Super Blonde05.Soft Talk06.Sunology (Part II)07.Kingdom of Not08.Portrait of the Living Sky09.Blues at Midnight10.El is a Sound of Joy11.Springtime in Chicago12.Medicine for a Nightmare

On "Springtime in Chicago", recorded at Balkan Studios, Chicago, April 13, 1956:

Sun Ra – Piano, Electric PianoArt Hoyle – Trumpet, PercussionJulian Priester – TromboneJames Scales – Alto Sax, PercussionJohn Gilmore – PercussionPat Patrick – Baritone Sax, PercussionWilburn Green – Electric BassRobert Barry – Drums

Sun Ra - 'Sleeping Beauty'-1979 [full album][HQ]:

Track list:01. Springtime Again02. The Door of the Cosmos03. Sleeping Beauty

Sun Ra - 'Jazz In Silhouette'- 1958- [Full Album][HD]

TRACKS:

Sun Ra Arkestra - "Face the Music" / "Space is the Place"

Live performance on NBC TV program 'Night Music'

Sun Ra Arkestra - "Retrospekt"

Live performance on NBC TV program 'Night Music'

Sun Ra Arkestra-- "Shadow World"--Live performance in West Berlin:

["The Shadow World" by Sun Ra And His Cosmo Discipline Arkestra]

'Lanquidity' | Sun Ra | 1978 | Full Album

1. Lanquidity 0:002. Where Pathways Meet 8:173. That's How I Feel 14:474. Twin Stars of Thence 22:505. There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You of) 32:23

Sun Ra - 'Disco 3000'--full album (1978):

Sun Ra - 'The Night of the Purple Moon'(1970):Sun Ra: Roksichord, Mini-Moog, Wurlitzer electric piano, CelesteDanny Davis: as, cl, fl, perc, dJohn Gilmore: ts, drumsStafford James: bRecorded 1970, New York

Sun Ra - 'The Magic City' (1965)

Ra-clavioline, p; Walter Miller-tp; Ali Hassan-tb; Marshall Allen-as, fl, picc; Danny Davis-as, fl; Harry Spencer-as; John Gilmore-ts; Pat Patrick-bs, fl; Robert Cummings-bcl; Ronnie Boykins-b; Roger Blank-d; James Jacson-perc. Rehearsal, New York City, around Sept. 24 1965

John Cage & Sun Ra - 'John Cage Meets Sun Ra'

John Cage and Sun Ra performed together in 1986 at Coney Island, New York:

Sun Ra - 'Space is the Place'

Sun Ra - 'Angels and Demons at Play'

Sun Ra Interview (Helsinki, 1971):

Sun Ra

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

Biography

Early life

Early professional career and college

Trip to Saturn

New devotion to music (late 1930s)

Draft and wartime experiences

Chicago years (1945–61)

New York years (1961–68)

Philadelphia years (1968–93)

The Arkestra

Music

Chicago phase

New York phase

Philadelphia phase

Musicians

Outerspace Visual Communicator

Philosophy

Sun Ra and black culture

Influence and legacy

Filmography

Bibliography

Discography

Notes

References

External links

Editor's Bio

Blog Archive

Labels

01.India
02.Sunology (Part I)
03.Advice to Medics
04.Super Blonde
05.Soft Talk
06.Sunology (Part II)
07.Kingdom of Not
08.Portrait of the Living Sky
09.Blues at Midnight
10.El is a Sound of Joy
11.Springtime in Chicago
12.Medicine for a Nightmare

Sun Ra – Piano, Electric Piano
Art Hoyle – Trumpet, Percussion
Julian Priester – Trombone
James Scales – Alto Sax, Percussion
John Gilmore – Percussion
Pat Patrick – Baritone Sax, Percussion
Wilburn Green – Electric Bass
Robert Barry – Drums

Track list:

01. Springtime Again
02. The Door of the Cosmos
03. Sleeping Beauty

1. Lanquidity 0:00
2. Where Pathways Meet 8:17
3. That's How I Feel 14:47
4. Twin Stars of Thence 22:50
5. There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You of) 32:23

Sun Ra - 'The Night of the Purple Moon'(1970):
Sun Ra: Roksichord, Mini-Moog, Wurlitzer electric piano, Celeste
Danny Davis: as, cl, fl, perc, d
John Gilmore: ts, drums
Stafford James: b

Recorded 1970, New York

Ra-clavioline, p; Walter Miller-tp; Ali Hassan-tb; Marshall Allen-as, fl, picc; Danny Davis-as, fl; Harry Spencer-as; John Gilmore-ts; Pat Patrick-bs, fl; Robert Cummings-bcl; Ronnie Boykins-b; Roger Blank-d; James Jacson-perc.

Rehearsal, New York City, around Sept. 24 1965