Few musicians have ever been more shrouded in mystery than Sun Ra. This month’s PBS premiere of Sun Ra: Do the Impossible shed fresh insight on the intergalactic artist’s earthly journey, as we explored on a recent episode of The Late Set.
The first major study of Sun Ra’s cultural impact landed almost 30 years ago, in the form of John Szwed’s Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. More than an exemplary biography, it opened a pathway to understanding one of our wiliest shapeshifters, and helped reset the conversation around his music.
So for this installment of our series Let Freedom Ring, we asked Szwed — a longtime Philadelphian, and also the author of books about Miles Davis, Alan Lomax, Billie Holiday and Harry Smith — to offer new reflections on the artist known as Sun Ra. — Ed.
At first glance, Sun Ra might have appeared to be a little-known eccentric figure. Not just in the usual meaning of one who acts in strange or unusual ways, but in the sense of those “who puzzle the critics, who refuse to go in with the herd.” Virginia Woolf, outlining that notion in a 1926 essay, continued: “They stand obstinately across the boundary lines, and do a greater service by enlarging and fertilizing and influencing than by their actual achievement, which, indeed, is often too eccentric to be satisfactory.”
But of course, Sun Ra did achieve a great deal. He produced some 200 albums of music, with more still being discovered. He wrote books of poetry and essays; was the first to introduce electronic keyboards and synthesizers into jazz; and composed over 1,000 songs. He toured every kind of venue — from free concerts in parks, to festivals with thousands in attendance, to small gatherings in Mongolia, or Sardinia. He’s credited as the godfather of Afrofuturism (though, given that he built his futurist plans up from ancient history, it might have been better named Afro-Retro-Futurism).
Sun Ra was also a poet, painter, philosopher, stage producer, pacifist, visionary, teacher, linguist, record producer, album designer, and self-described survivor of an alien abduction. Just who and what he was depended on the venue and the zeitgeist. He would disappear and then be discovered repeatedly, each time gathering new audiences who found something fresh in his works.
He was on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1969 and, 20 years later, on the stage of Saturday Night Live. He was featured on MTV and the BBC, and in numerous other countries’ media. He influenced or was admired by the likes of Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, NRBQ, Paul McCartney, Trey Anastasio, Flying Lotus, and Solange Knowles. Lady Gaga has sampled him. On the other hand, he had neighbors a few blocks from his house who had never heard of him. And there is still no Sun Ra plaque on the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame.
What complicated matters further was that Sun Ra and his Arkestra often changed their identities. The Arkestra itself had well over 50 names, but calling them the Transmolecular Arkestra or the Space Jet- Set Arkestra did little to reveal what they were about. Sun Ra declared himself at times to be a Black man, an angel, a myth, or an ancient Egyptian from outer space. He denied being born, even denied being human. Several costume changes during an evening’s performance didn’t make it any clearer. Their uniforms changed with Sun Ra’s mind: ancient Egyptians, of course, but also B-movie space men, and the Archers of Arboria from old Buck Rogers movies. “You could be something by dressing up,” said a member of the band. “You could be a myth. And yet we became uniform in the abstractness of what we were.”
Much of what Sun Ra claimed or professed, he eventually changed or reversed. He was a master of the metaphor:
- Though he seemed to insist that he was from Saturn, he never denied that he was from Birmingham and named some songs after the city. “Your ancestors didn’t enter this country legally. Your ancestors didn’t leave Africa legally. That is why you have no legal status here. Might as well say you are from Saturn. Who can prove that you are not. Who can prove that your ancestors didn’t come from Mars, Venus, Neptune and Pluto, too — let them prove you aren’t from outer space.”
- He sometimes claimed his abduction into space may have occurred in Huntsville, Alabama. Sometimes he said it happened in Chicago.
- Some of his most serious statements were delivered in an amused, bantering manner. Imagine a joking Jeremiah.
- When he jettisoned his identity as a Black man, he declared himself as an angel. “Angels are all around us. The reason we didn’t know them is that they didn’t enter the United States from Ellis Island. They came in through the Commerce Department.”
- Asked if his real name was Sun Ra, he replied, “My mother always called me Son.”
- Sun Ra talked of Earth not being his home, as inhospitable to him, and of escaping to a distant planet and establishing a colony there. But it seemed more a threat than a plan. In his accounts of abduction in a spaceship, he said his captors asked him to join them in changing Earth’s destructive ways. However, he turned them down and was returned to Earth. Doomed though the planet might be, he was sticking with it, lecturing, warning humans, playing music.
What was he trying to communicate? The great Black bands of the 1930s and ‘40s, with their discipline and creativity, were his model for confronting segregation and the lack of freedom. He warned his listeners of his goals when he spelled them out in a record liner note and concluded by saying he had “disguised them as jazz.” A group of Black teenagers who questioned his identity were told that he was a myth, as were they, and he urged them to become their own myth. “We’d tried to do the possible and failed, so now it was time to try the impossible.”
Amiri Baraka summed him up, for African American Review: “Sun Ra’s consistent statement, musically and spoken, is that this is a primitive world. Its practices, beliefs, religions are uneducated, unenlightened, savage, destructive, already in the past. That’s why Ra left and returned only to say he left. Into the future. Into space.”
There are those who found the Sun Ra backstory and his declarations too weird or silly to take seriously. One such is the artist and filmmaker Martine Syms, who in 2013 formulated a Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto that sought to create a different set of values with which to reimagine the future. It said that Black people were not aliens and argued that outer space will not save them from injustice. It called for examining supernatural elements and hackneyed tropes like “Jive-talking aliens,” “Magical Negroes,” “Reference to Sun Ra,” “Reference to Parliament Funkadelic and/or George Clinton,” and “Egyptian mythology and iconography.” Syms admitted that it wasn’t necessary to follow any of her rules, as they were just there to crystallize ideas, and doubted if she would ever follow any of them. And yet that sounds more like Sun Ra.
When Sun Ra passed away in 1993, many thought his spaceship had been designed to disintegrate. The show was over. Surprisingly, Marshall Allen, the quietest member of the band, kept the Arkestra together and added some of his own music to its repertoire. Without Sun Ra, the grandiose and sometimes frightening elements of his music have disappeared. His pronouncements have often become detached from his music and performances. Curiously, some too young to have known his volatility and seriousness imagine Sun Ra as an avuncular Mr. Rogers in an outer space neighborhood, while others pay more thoughtful attention to what he said than what he expressed in music.
Today, amid global crises, there are others who also see Earth as doomed, and are planning to colonize other planets for themselves. But unlike the British East India Company of the 17th century who smuggled and dealt in spices, tea and opium, maintained its own army, and occupied others’ lands, our moment’s space-besotted billionaires feel free to create a new frontier without interference from indigenous peoples. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel left South Africa, and they’re now looking to Mars. Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson aim at the moon as a robotic-served paradise. If Sun Ra was still with us, he would surely be wondering why they would pick a used satellite and a tacky planet like Mars instead of the cool abstraction of Saturn.