Sun Ra--Master of the Futuristic Space Sound; Creator of Space and Place through Music

Sun Ra aka Sonny Blount aka Herman Poole Blount made a mark on the world with his unique twisted, inverted, astral traveled, magical identity. Sun Ra was a moving, breathing, living piece of art, who manipulated language and music in order to create his own universe on planet earth (and possibly beyond it). His words spoke a vision, and his music enabled others to escape with him to a reality beyond that of normal human comprehension. His music was of a spiritual aura, a music that came from an indefinable source, something above the music, above the man. His music could be seen as what Ahmen Abdullah calls a music of the spirit:We define music of the spirit as an art form that defies time, genre and culture…It Comes from within, this music of the spirit, and it likewise enters into the listener; it is complex in its simplicity and simple in its complexity, a music that can be described as an enigma wrapped in a paradox (Pg. 1)Sun Ra’s experimental, at times incomprehensible art and music defied and destructed social constructions. It came from a source out of this world, and yet the paradox, the enigma is, that he could connect to this spirit world, and display its supernatural essence on planet earth.Escape for him was a way of life, an expression of the inner workings of the mind and body, the purest form of identity. Even his name was an escape from the established form of human tradition; a name that matched the creativity and alien being of the man who wore it. Sun Ra to me represents all the knowledge and magic that humans possess but keep away deep in their psyche. Sun Ra let all his energy, feelings, and thoughts flow freely through his art and music. Amiri Baraka said of Sun Ra in his essay Jazzmen:The Weirdness, Outness, Way Outness, Otherness was immediate. Some space metaphysical philosophical surrealistic bop funk. Some blue pyramid home nigger southern different color meaning of hip shit. Ra. Sun Ra…Then they put on weird clothes, space helmets, robes, flowing capes. They did rituals played in rituals, evoked lost civilizations, used strangeness to teach us open feelings as intelligence.Barakas encounter perfectly captures the power and energy that Sun emits. He infects listeners with strange sensations and brings them to his planet. A spiritual planet of improvisation, experimentation, and random intertconnectiveness. A planet that so out there and random; a planet that makes no sense, an illogical planet but built on logical patterns of thought.