SUN RA
Herman "Sonny" Blount's career take off in the early 50s, when he adopted the moniker "Le Sony'ra" and claimed he came from Saturn.
"I've been sent here to help people. My mission is to try and save this planet. Mission impossible."
Born in racially divided Birmingham, Ala., in 1914, Ra began to play the piano at an early age and had his own group by the time he was 20.
As a young pacifist engaged in a process of self-education in esoteric knowledge (he was infatuated with ancient Egypt, which was a black civilization - a fact ignored or denied for centuries by white academics), he endured a brief, painful stint in the army before moving to Chicago's South Side in 1946. In Chicago he joined Fletcher Henderson's big band. By 1956 Ra had assembled his first Arkestra and that year they made their recording debut for the tiny Transition label. When the label folded before a second session could be released, Ra set up his own record company, Saturn - one of the first artist-owned, independent jazz labels and certainly the longest-running. The commune he ran featured the city's finest upoming jazz players, a pool of virtuosity and curiosity. Their intriguing mix of bop, jazz, free jazz, and proto-electronic music was mostly released in hand-painted editions on Ra's own label El Saturn.
Sun Ra: The Heliocentric Worlds I & II
In the mid-60s John Coltrane, Archie Sheep, The Stooges and MC5 all got off on the Arkestra's mix of utopian inspiration and Technicolor theatrics. The titles pointed toward outer spaces and lost kingdoms, but bessages like
"It's after the end of the world,
don't you know that yet?"
were clearly directed at Ameica's black population and the planet's oppressed minorities.
[Read some linear notes by Urban Gwerder + some Sun Ra's poems
(from the Concert for the Comet Kohoutek CD)]
After a relocation to New York (1961), in 1968 Sun Ra moved to Philadelphia, where he continued recording (the 1980 Strange Celestial Road, for example, features an Arkestra 27 pieces strong, including tenor and alto legends John Gilmore and Marshall Allen, singer June Tyson, and trumpeter Michael Ray) and performing for a small but loyal cult of jazz and rock fans
until his death in May 1993.
"I looked at the condition of black people in America and I judged the tree by the fruit. They don't deal with culture, with progress - they back there in the past, a past that somebody manufactured for 'em. It's not their past, it's not their history. They don't see no fault with America, they want to be part of it. I ain't part of America, I ain't part of black people. They went another way. Black people are carefully supervised so they'll stay in a low position. But I'm not down there, yet I come from one of the most discriminating states in the whole world - Alabama. They don't know why I am what I am. And black folks know nothing about me, so they can't ask them.
"I left my family, I left my friends, I left for real. I left everything to be me, 'cause I knew I was not like them. Not like black or white, not like Americans. I'm not like nobody else. I'm alone on this planet."
Ra has been a trailblazer: a 50s pioneer of synthesizers and electronic instruments, of modal music and freeform improvisation; of looking to Africa for inspiration (and finding chants, raps, polyrhythmic percussion); of reasserting pride in black music and black culture (particularly through his championing of the big band tradition). His influence has seeped into every corner of modern music, from Funkadelic to Stockhausen to The Art Ensemble Of Chicago.
"It's an inner revelation that has come several times to me, that I have been educated on Sirius, that I come from Sirius." (Karlheinz Stockhausen)
