# How Sun Ra Taught Us to Believe in the Impossible? Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2021/07/14/how-sun-ra-taught-us-to-believe-in-the-impossible-video-photos/
- Published: 2021-07-14T15:04:48+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The visionary jazz artist sketched an “Astro-Black mythology” that aligned ancient
Egyptian history with a future human exodus “beyond the stars.”**

When the aliens came for Sun Ra, they explained that he had been selected for his“
perfect discipline.” Not every human was fit for space travel, but he, with his 
expert control over his mind and body, could survive the journey. According to Ra,
this encounter happened in the nineteen-thirties, when he was enrolled in a teachers’-
training course at a college in Huntsville, Alabama.

The aliens, who had little antennas growing above their eyes and on their ears, 
recognized in Ra a kindred spirit. They beamed him to Saturn and told him that a
more meaningful path than teaching awaited him. They shared knowledge with him that
freed him from the limits of the human imagination. They instructed him to wait 
until life on Earth seemed most hopeless; then he could finally speak, imparting
to the world the “equations” for transcending human reality.

This instruction guided Ra for the rest of his life as a musician and a thinker.
By the fifties, the signs of hopelessness were everywhere: racism, the threat of
nuclear war, social movements that sought political freedom but not cosmic enlightenment.
In response, during the next four decades—until his death, in 1993—Ra released more
than a hundred albums of visionary jazz. Some consisted of anarchic, noisy “space
music.” Others featured lush, whimsical takes on Gershwin or Disney classics. All
were intended as dance music, even if few people knew the steps.

Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, to a supportive,
religious family. He was named after Black Herman, a magician who claimed to be 
from the “dark jungles of Africa” and who infused his death-defying escape acts 
with hoodoo mysticism. Early on, Ra showed a prodigious talent for piano playing
and music composition. After his purported alien visitation, he left college and
eventually moved to Chicago, where he played in strip clubs, accompanied local blues
singers, and found a place in a big band.

During Ra’s childhood, archeologists had discovered the intact tomb of the pharaoh
Tutankhamun. The news inspired many African Americans to draw pride from the Egyptian
roots of human civilization. Chicago exposed Ra to new interpretations of Scripture
by Black Muslims and Black Israelites, as well as to suppressed histories of Black
struggle and works of science fiction. These influences soon permeated his playing.
In 1952, he changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra—Sun Ra for short—after the Egyptian
god of the sun. On Chicago’s South Side, he circulated mimeographed broadsheets 
with titles like “_the bible was not written for negroes_!!!!!!!”

Ra formed a band, later known as the Arkestra, which featured the saxophonists Marshall
Allen, John Gilmore, and Pat Patrick. Rather than employing tight swings and ostentatious
solos, they played in a ragged, exploratory style, with squiggles of electronic 
keyboard and off-kilter horns. In the early sixties, Ra and his bandmates moved 
to New York, and became known for wearing elaborate, colorful costumes that felt
both ancient and futuristic.

In his album notes and interviews, Ra began sketching out an “Astro-Black mythology,”
a way of aligning the history of ancient Egypt with a vision of a future human exodus“
beyond the stars.” The specifics of Ra’s vision remained hazy, but he seemed to 
believe that the traumas of history—most notably of American slavery—had made life
on Earth untenable. Humanity needed to break from it and travel to a technological
paradise light-years away. “It’s after the end of the world / Don’t you know that
yet?” the singer June Tyson asks in the 1974 film “Space Is the Place.” Ra referred
to his teachings as “myths”—they were stories about the future, meant to guide us.

“The impossible attracts me,” he later explained, “because everything possible has
been done and the world didn’t change.” He gave instruments new names, like the “
space-dimension mellophone,” the “cosmic tone organ,” and the “sunharp.” One band
member remembered that, if you played something wrong, everyone else had to follow
along, incorporating the mistake into the song. For Ra, the Arkestra weren’t musicians
at all; they were “tone scientists.” A 1967 album is titled “Cosmic Tones for Mental
Therapy.”

In 1968, Sun Ra and his bandmates moved into a house in Philadelphia. The group’s
communal ethos is a focus of “Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise,” a 1980 film by Robert Mugge.
For all his seeming eccentricity, Ra wasn’t a free spirit in his personal life. 
He had an ascetic vision, supposedly abstaining from alcohol, drugs, sex, even sleep.
He demanded that his band be available for practice at any hour of the day. Yet 
his mischievous side—he once referred to himself as “Earth’s jester”—also comes 
across in the film. At one point, he offers a riddle about his true identity: “Some
call me Mr. Ra. Others call me Mr. Re. You can call me Mr. Mystery.” In one practice
session, Tyson sings a sputtering, raucous song called “Astro Black,” and the band
members, who look as if they’re dressed for at least three different outer-space
movies, smile at the racket.

In 1969, _Esquire_ canvassed a range of celebrities, including Muhammad Ali, Ayn
Rand, and Leonard Nimoy, for suggestions about what Neil Armstrong should say as
he set foot on the moon. Most people provided grave warnings or made jokes. Sun 
Ra contributed a poem: “Reality has touched against myth / Humanity can move to 
achieve the impossible / Because when you’ve achieved one impossible others / Come
together to be with their brother, the first impossible / Borrowed from the rim 
of the myth / Happy Space Age to you . . .” Space exploration inspired Ra; it seemed
to be proof that humanity was destined to harness its technological potential.

Ra was far from obscure: in the late sixties, he graced the cover of _Rolling Stone_.
In the seventies, he taught at Berkeley, performed on “Saturday Night Live,” and
toured around the world. But by the time “Lanquidity” was released Ra was becoming
less optimistic about how much listeners had learned from his work. He was often
treated as an eccentric, and his theatrical dress frequently overshadowed his prowess
as a composer. In a lecture that he delivered in New York, he reiterated his lack
of interest in making music about “Earth things.” He riffed on Iran, the threat 
of nuclear warfare, the fact that young people seemed uninterested in cosmic salvation.“
For a long time, the world has dwelt on faith, beliefs, possibly dreams, and the
truth. And the kind of world you’ve got today is based on those particular things.
How do you like it?”

We are always rediscovering Sun Ra—though he would probably prefer that we spend
our time musing on the future rather than on the past. In 2020, Strut released a
compilation called “Egypt 1971” that explored the music Ra recorded while touring
there. Last spring, Duke University republished John Szwed’s definitive 1997 biography,“
Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra.” Last December, the first in 
a series of “Sun Ra Research” films was released. It was the culmination of decades
of work by two obsessive fans, Peter and John Hinds, who self-published a Ra-centric
zine in the nineties. The film is an absorbing collage of Arkestra performances 
interspersed with long, meandering interviews, and footage of Ra doing mundane things
like answering the phone or checking into a hotel. The Arkestra, which is now led
by Ra’s protégé Marshall Allen, who is ninety-seven, still goes on tour. Last year,
the group released a set of new recordings of Arkestra classics, titled “Swirling.”
During the pandemic, Allen and the Arkestra streamed a benefit concert hosted by
Total Luxury Spa, a Black-owned streetwear brand in Los Angeles, which has been 
influenced by Ra’s ideas and iconography.

Each time Ra is rediscovered, his reception reflects what his listeners crave. When
I was first introduced to Ra, in the early nineties, he was presented as an oddball
with a good backstory—a precursor to the “alternative” music of the day. Today, 
in the midst of overlapping global crises, Ra asks us to believe in the impossible.
This spring, the Chicago gallery and publisher Corbett vs. Dempsey reproduced a 
series of Sun Ra poetry booklets: “Jazz by Sun Ra,” “Jazz in Silhouette,” and “The
Immeasurable Equation.” As with his fifties broadsheets, these writings capture 
a rawness and directness distinct from his experimental music. In one poem, he implores
Black youth to never feel unloved: “I am your unknown friend.” He is always there,
in the past and in the future, ready to be found by his listeners. In another booklet,
originally published in 1957, he explains that his music is, at root, about “happiness.”
Maybe people don’t recognize these new forms of joy quite yet. But, he writes, “
eventually I will succeed.”

 

![How Sun Ra Taught Us to Believe in the Impossible | The New Yorker](https://i0.
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