The Formative Years

Sun Ra

There are few musical genres that I enjoy more than jazz when it comes to unwinding and blowing the cobwebs out. While it was not certainly not love at first sight and had to be steadily cultivated, listening to jazz and experimental music has become a nurturing and gratifying experience.

One of the protagonist’s that blew my mind and significantly broadened my horizons from an early age on, was one Herman Poole Blount, i.e. the entity known as Sun Ra and his “Arkestra”, as with his theatrical and philosophical approach, it accumulated to so much more than mere music.

Blount perfectioned the alter ego approach by severing mundane and worldly ties early on by incarnating as an alien mythical persona with his focus set on preaching peace.

Claiming that Sun Ra’s output is both prolific and eclectic would be an understatement par excellence as he shaped an idiosyncratic mélange of nearly any genre known to man, informed by a core interest for jazz, a penchant for free improvisation and the usage and adaptation of synthesizers and keyboards as early as when they became publicly accessible.

Having recorded well over a thousand songs, one would be hard pressed to make any recommendations, as not matter how diverse and unique his recordings are, I have yet to come across one that I do not enjoy.

In many aspects, Sun Ra was a prodigious musical talent, a renaissance man and a prototype that was never considered for mass production, who left behind an unrivalled musical and philosophical legacy that kicked into full gear once the psychedelia and beat generation started to embrace and champion him.

Sun Ra claimed that in the 1930s he had an enlightening semi-religious experience with aliens that set him on the path to speak through music and the world would listen. 

And listen I should as I became infatuated with his unique piano playing technique, which was informed by many styles, lest influences of classical composers.

Sun Ra’s oeuvre is often subdivided into three phases, i.e. Chicago (seeing the evolution of big band swing into cosmic jazz), the New York phase (informed by an unbridled will to experiment, free improvisation, unusual instrumentation and the use of new technologies) and the more conventional Philadelphia swinging and energetic jazz based phase. I recommend checking out his emissions from each one of them.

With his mission to elevate humanity beyond their mundane earthbound state, which gave birth to Afrofuturism as a musical tradition of performing blackness that remains relevant as a counternarrative to the status quo today, Sun Ra occupies a unique space in the cultural cannon.