A book on Sun Ra should begin in cacophony. That’s how he opened many, many shows: with a chaos of sounds that cleared the air for the music to come. Horns squeal, drums thump, the bass growls, and the piano piles chord on chord; a space opens for exploration, and music becomes a means of traveling to other worlds. Most Sun Ra fans come to love him and his formidable ensembles through the audacity of his music. It exhilarates, shocks, and complicates, making life feel better than it was before. Music, apparently, can change the world. This inscrutable possibility provided the driving force behind Sun Ra’s creativity. It’s the premise of this book, too. What makes Sun Ra important as a composer and an artist is his unwavering belief that music can take its players and listeners to better worlds—better, at least, by the measure of joyous sounds.
Music isn’t just music. It’s also a social event in a couple of senses. Music occurs as entertainment (a night out, a special occasion) but also as politics (a demonstration, an insurgence). This book approaches Sun Ra’s music as a social event in the latter sense. For all its pursuit of better worlds, his art arose in response to this one, in particular, the brutally segregated world of mid-twentieth-century America. Like most of his black contemporaries, Sun Ra experienced the brutalities of segregation, but his response to injustice was unusual—and unusually inspiring. Instead of pursuing a solution through traditional political means, he turned to culture—music and related forms of expression—to imagine and advance an alternative to an oppressive reality. He practiced a cultural politics of sound and, with the support of a loyal cadre of friends, used every available means of musical production and distribution to promote his message of a better life for black Americans and anyone else who had ears to hear.
This book’s emphasis falls, then, as much on the social conditions that inspired Sun Ra’s music as on the music itself. While the best possible result of reading these pages would be voraciously listening to the vast array of his available recordings, they sound better—more purposeful and canny—to ears tuned to social frequencies. Two such frequencies in particular throw Sun Ra’s music into bold political relief: the segregation of metropolitan Chicago and the popular culture of the Space Age. Brilliantly and with abandon, Sun Ra crossed the inner city with outer space to create music as progressive socially as it was aesthetically. As a response to a world preoccupied with the space race and oblivious to racial injustice, Sun Ra’s music announces not merely a demand for a better world but a program for building one. That’s what its cacophony is all about.
The chapters that follow examine influences often missing from assessments of Sun Ra’s music: occult wisdom, business strategy, the space race, Chicago’s black metropolis, and the popular culture of the Space Age. Sun Ra himself occasionally drifts pretty far back in the mix—a situation necessary to give the political dimension of his work a full hearing. His significant—and overlooked—achievement as a poet receives special attention. Sun Ra viewed his poems (he wrote many over the course of a long career) as a verbal equivalent to his music. Read in that light, they become a kind of user’s guide to infinity, offering instructions about listening to music meant to change the world. The poems may resemble little else in contemporary literature, but that’s what makes them original, important, and even beautiful. Sun Ra believed that beauty is necessary for survival and that creating and communicating it makes life better. However strange, his remarkable poetry contributes to that aim, enhancing the beauty of his music by translating its aspirations into words.
One measure of Sun Ra’s success in envisioning a better, more beautiful tomorrow lies in the number and talent of the musicians his work continues to inspire, a rich variety of creative heirs. Their kaleidoscopic musical adventures keep Sun Ra’s visionary purpose alive. His standing as the great forefather of Afrofuturism, a movement devoted to imagining new black futures, guarantees the longevity of his renown. Sun Ra took it upon himself and his music not to demand freedom and equality in this world but to create even greater possibilities, even better worlds to come. His fellow Afrofuturists adapt his example to new opportunities and terrains. They and the many other artists and activists he inspires embrace culture rather than the ballot or the church as the most effective means of improving the world. Together they travel the spaceways, from planet to imagined planet.
Readers interested in accompanying him should have some sense of what lies ahead. This book does not provide a full introduction to Sun Ra’s life. John Szwed’s biography, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, fulfills that task magisterially. It’s an indispensable guide to an incomparable life. Although biography provides a loose narrative arc to the chapters that follow, they are thematically focused and can productively be read in any order or disorder. A book on Sun Ra and his explosive music should eschew too tidy a linearity. This one shares with most others, even Szwed’s, a preoccupation with Sun Ra’s formative years in Chicago. Work needs to be done on the later years in Philadelphia, but that will have to wait for future hands—let’s hope not for long. Perhaps it’s clear that love and admiration for Sun Ra’s joyous music inform everything that follows. The greatest compliment we can pay that art is simply to listen and live with happiness.