Sun Ra (1914–1993)

1.1 Announcement By Robert Bass
1.2 Introductory Music
1.3 Discipline 27
1.4 Love In Outer Space
1.5 The Shadow World
1.6 Space Is The Place
1.7 Second Stop Jupiter
1.8 Discipline 27-11 / What Planet Is This
1.9 Images
1.10 It Is Forbidden
1.11 Watusi
Written-By – Pitts*, Sherrill*
1.12 Sun Ra And His Band From Outer Space
credits:
Alto Saxophone, Flute, Percussion – Danny Davis, Marshall Allen
Baritone Saxophone, Flute, Reeds [Libflecto], Percussion – Danny Ray Thompson
Bass – Reginald "Shoo-Be-Doo" Fields*
Bass Clarinet – Elo Omoe*
Bassoon, Drum [Infinity], Vocals – James Jacson
Congas – Atakatune [Stanley Morgan]*
Drums – Clifford Jarvis
Electric Guitar – Dale Williams (2)
Lead Vocals – June Tyson
Liner Notes, Producer – John Sinclair (2)
Photography By [Sun Ra's Front Cover And All Other Color Photos] – Leni Sinclair
Piano, Organ, Synthesizer, Lead Vocals – Sun Ra
Tenor Saxophone – John Gilmore
Trumpet – Kwame Hadi
Trumpet, Mellophone, Vocals – Akh Tal Ebah
Voice [Announcement] – Robert Bass
Voice [Space Ethnic Voices] – Cheryl Banks, Judith Holton
Written-By – Ra* (tracks: 1.2 to 1.10, 1.12)… (meer)

I grew up in Baltimore. Sun Ra was based in Philly during alotof of my adult yrs there. He played in Baltimore fairly often. There was a club on N Charles St called the Famous Ballroom. Sun Ra & the Arkestra played there. It was dark, w/ one of those "disco balls" - those multi-faceted things that spin & have light reflecting off them. It wasn't a big place but the stage cd manage to hold the Arkestra. I have a very fond memory (that must be around 30 yrs old by now) of sitting at the Ballroom at a round table witnessing the Arkestra playing in full force - w/ dancers & whatnot. At the end, Sun Ra came out into the audience (it was up-close & personal) leading a snake-dance & tilting a "rain-stick" by people's ears so they cd hear the sand pouring from one end to the other of the bamboo tube. He did it to me. If I didn't love him for 10 zillion other reasons I think I might just love him for that alone. They sold records at the concerts - white ones w/ hand-done covers of their more 'far-out' stuff & black ones of the more traditional stuff. Lardy knows I was dirt-poor in those days but I still managed to buy one of each - as I recall, they weren't that expensive. What an incredible person! What incredible music! What incredible philosophy! What incredible imagination! What incredible humor! When I think of all the sadness & trouble that the people I respect have gone thru it makes me ever so angry. Sun Ra, I wish there were a paradise for you to go to where yr immense creativity cd flourish even more than it did on this shithole of a human cesspit that some people have the audacity to call "society". If ever a person has deserved bliss in my bk, it's certainly you & yrs!!… (meer)

"His first UK performance... was one of the most spectacular concerts ever held in this country. Not spectacular so much in terms of effects, which were low on budget but high on strange atmosphere; spectacular in terms of presenting a complete world view, so occult, so other, to all of us in the audience that the only possible responses were outright dismissal or complete intuitive empathy with a man who had chosen to discard all possibilities of a normal life, even a normal jazz life, in favor of an unremitting alien identity." -David Toop

"Don't have nothin' to do with that. Stand your ground." -Sun Ra

Such an exciting, literate, well-researched and beautiful biography.… (meer)

Companion to Corbett's edited Pathways to Unknown Worlds, the emphasis in Wisdom of Sun-Ra is upon primary source material rather than the commentary and transcribed interviews in Pathways. Corbett provides a helpful and brief introduction, then sends the reader directly into Sonny Blount's obtuse but strangely compelling diatribes.

There are two versions of each broadsheet / sermon. In the first section are presented scans of the original manuscripts: closely typewritten pages with cramped margins, strikeouts, marginalia, and replete with idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, capitalization. The final section presents the transcripts, and though some of Sun Ra's stylings are retained, it's key to have reference to the scans.

It's clear that despite the obtuseness of some passages, Sun Ra had a vision and it is both sincere and serious. Having only the barest of exposure to his spaceways / freakout costumes and imagery, largely distilled through others such as Bootsy Collins, I now suspect these frames were selected precisely to dilute or temper the radical content he presented. (In fact it is Corbett who raises this possibility in his introduction, but it only strikes home after reading the broadsheets.) In short, while music was obviously a major concern of his, Sun Ra was equally focused on race relations, social re-engineering, a connection with the divine (if not the sacred), and exploding the myths of institution and personality which so dominate politics and social power. That he did this by counterposing his own myth is in hindsight brilliant: simultaneously public and private, available to any initiate taking the time and effort to uncover it.

Corbett writes: "[These manuscripts] offer an amazing, sometimes shocking view into the early uncut investigations of Sun Ra, his imaginative and angry reinterpretations of scripture, his scintillating and absurd etymologies, his beloved equations, his powerful analysis of racial epithets and black vernacularisms, and a few intimations of his later preoccupation with space." [6] Corbett suggests Sun Ra was a powerful influence on the Black Muslims: true or not, his viciously provocative exegeses turn Biblical passages inside out, and make the Black American the true descendant of Abraham. These sermons come across as serving the moment, though, as at times Jesus is an exemplar and at other times those following Jesus are characterized as duped and untrue to the Creator. Sun Ra delivers these ideas as barbs and insults to what can be supposed to be a black audience.

The broadsheets make dense reading, with concepts and turns of phrase surfacing among multiple broadsheets, at times explained pages after they are first introduced. I suspect these conversations were as much an intellectual exercise for Sun Ra as they were a message to be delivered on a Chicago street corner. The etymologies are especially reminiscent of word associations: not literally true, I'm not persuaded Sun Ra understood them as defensible etymologies so much as they are provocative collisions of meanings and sounds (God and Guard, for example, are "phonetics" in Black English, and he ran with the possibilities suggested by these 2 words). In that way, perhaps similar to how he thought of music and musical ideas.

There is nothing about Sun Ra's music or musical activities in this work, and Sun Ra refers to contemporary music in these sermons only rarely.… (meer)