INTERPLANETARY EXOTICA
Not technoscience but music would thrust Sun Ra into the future. His use of music as a medium for imagining tomorrow may seem eccentric, but it remained allied to powerful trends in popular culture. Science fiction movies of the fifties and sixties usually came with appropriately otherworldly or futuristic soundtracks. The Day the Earth Stood Still, for instance, splashes its title over images of stars and galaxies set to the music of a theremin, the electronic instrument patented by Léon Theremin in 1928, whose sound has since become a signature of outer space (as any Star Trek fan can attest). For technological newness and sonic frisson, electronics would define the sound of the future, especially in Hollywood. Case in point: Forbidden Planet (1956), the first movie to have a soundtrack produced entirely electronically.1
The soundtrack (including beeps, warfs, howls, and hums) provides a spare, spooky backdrop to a story set on the barren Altair IV, a world visited by the United Planets cruiser C-57D. The crew discovers it to be the home of the reclusive superscientist Dr. Morbius, who has only his daughter, Alta, to keep him company. Morbius devotes himself obsessively to mastering the stupendously advanced science of the vanished Krell (visionary roboticists, apparently, since their expertise inspires his creation of Robby the Robot). Unfortunately, Morbius has tapped into Krell technology that allows him to control matter with his mind, but he lacks any awareness that he harbors murderous subconscious impulses toward anyone who gets in his way. In this regard, it’s Frankenstein in outer space, a scenario deeply critical of the human costs of unchecked scientific ambition. Morbius must die so that his daughter can live, of course, but not before sharing with his visitors a recording by Krell musicians made some half-million years earlier. The music sounds futuristic even today: warm, lyrical, diaphanous—and completely electronic.
This mix of past and future, of primitive and sophisticated, characterizes a genre of fifties and sixties popular music that left a lasting mark on Sun Ra’s sound palette and the colors of his compositions: exotica. Looking “back” to the music of so-called primitive cultures for fresh rhythms, timbres, and instrumentations, exotica also looked forward in search of sounds in tune with the coming Space Age. The first recording of a theremin occurred in 1947 on Harry Revel’s Music Out of the Moon, arranged and conducted by Les Baxter, the popular progenitor of exotica.2 Although Sun Ra himself resisted the theremin (an unsuccessful encounter with one led him to conclude that “for black people, it ain’t gonna play”), its spacey, wavering croon probably intrigued him.3 Baxter achieved quick popular acclaim with the 1951 release of Ritual of the Savage (Le Sacre du Sauvage), a brazenly exotic record, and not necessarily in the best sense.4 Its cover sets the cultural agenda for the music it contains: colorful carved “African” masks and statues around a dancing couple, clearly from south of the border, she with a gardenia in her hair. Track titles reinforce the listener’s sense that this music comes from somewhere else, outside the bounds of the familiar West: “Sophisticated Savage,” “Jungle Flower,” “Quiet Village,” “Stone God,” “Kinkajou,” and “The Ritual,” to name a few. Primitive sounds for sophisticated listeners. Ritual of the Savage promotes the illusion of a living-room encounter with exotic others, or at least their rhythms and cries.
Baxter found a formula that would ignite a popular craving for exotic music. Winds over congas: Latin rhythms to gesture toward a dimly lit but palpable African past. Rattles and flutes: sudden shifts in instrumentation or dynamics to pique and sustain interest. Unctuous strings: sweet melodies to soothe savage ritual with something familiar. Chattering brass: sectional narration to tell little stories of the strange. Baxter aimed to evoke feelings of something foreign, outside the everyday, maybe even a little dangerous. Ritual of the Savage may seem pretty tame in this regard, but in a slew of records to come (The Passions [1954], Tamboo! [1956], Caribbean Moonlight [1956], Ports of Pleasure [1957], and African Jazz [1959]), he codified a pop genre that delivered ersatz otherness to consumers hungry for a taste of difference but unable to stomach it by any means other than easy listening. In a sense, exotica provides an American soundtrack to the historical drama of decolonization. Its visually seductive record jackets and socially stimulating sounds persuaded fans of that era that other cultures were alive and well (however regrettable the legacy of colonialism), easily worth the price of Baxter’s latest platter. Why not add the Caribbean to your collection? Dig those rhythms, Daddy? By the time Martin Denny recorded the album that gave the genre its name, Exotica (1957), it had settled into a stimulating mix of syncopated rhythms, extravagant dynamics, high-contrast arrangements, and (Denny’s signature) vocalized animal sounds.5
Perfect for cocktails! The space that exotica explored was largely domestic. As Francesco Adinolfi notes in Mondo Exotica, “All these records were responsible for transforming domestic spaces into dark lounges like the ones in which the bachelor had lingered the night before.”6 Think of the bachelor here as an ideal demographic target: single, employed, hip, and horny. Exotica (note the feminine ending) entered his life and living room by commercial design. It was music scored for scoring—a doubly imperial confection. But just as the living room turned into a tiki lounge, so too did the bachelor become a vector of more public desires, those associated with the national longing for political superiority and victory in space. Exotica inevitably developed into “space-age bachelor-pad music,” known more simply as “space-age pop,” all these phrases being coined much later for commercial music calibrated to the climate of the times. As America prepared to explore space, exotica opened to the stars. Harry Revel’s Music from out of Space (1955), with tracks titled “Jupiter Jumps,” “Vibrations from Venus,” and “Cosmic Capers,” mixes sentimental strings with signature vocal glissandi (no theremin this time) to create a feeling of lyrical openness that can swerve suddenly into swing. Space here is a pastiche of stylistic possibilities. It slides effortlessly into the more terrestrial intensities of Baxter’s Tamboo!, splicing and recombining to create a pop music for the Space Age that fuses highly textured lyricism with shifting rhythms and way-out sounds.
In the far background of this development stands musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer’s postwar experiments with found sounds intended to create a music of reality—except, of course, that the only thing real about the sounds of space in space-age pop was the money it took to buy them. There is, after all, no sound in space. Sound waves don’t propagate in a vacuum. It seems fitting, then, that the great progenitor of space-age sounds, Attilio Mineo, composed Man in Space with Sounds in 1951, almost a decade before anyone heard it. It remains a time-warped masterpiece of space pop. Recorded in 1959 and finally released as the soundtrack, so to speak, to the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, selections from Man in Space with Sounds played as ambient background on the famous Bubbleator, the fair’s huge transparent elevator that transported visitors on a virtual tour of outer space. “Our first stop,” the record’s voiceover intones authoritatively, is “the Gayway to Heaven, that spins you skyward on the great space wheel, the fabulous Gayway, where you guide your own rocket and taxi to tomorrow.”7 The “sounds” of Man in Space with Sounds feel much more adventuresome than those of much space-age pop, ahead of their time (if sounds of tomorrow can be ahead of their time) in 1951, however familiar they might eventually become. The reverberating thunk of “Welcome to Tomorrow,” the industrial grind of “Gayway to Heaven”: these are the kind of barely musical sonic expressions that Sun Ra would explore in recordings from the sixties.
Mineo’s long-silent masterpiece may not have given birth to space-age pop, but it should have. It reaches much further than did most commercial efforts to create a soundscape for the Space Age. That was the challenge, after all: to imagine and score a vacuum and then to persuade a generation of listeners (their kids and kids’ kids) that the outer space of Vostok and Redstone rocketry, of Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn, and eventually Apollo and Soyuz, sounds like this. Sonically speaking, outer space was a blank slate. It could sound like anything, from an angelic chorus to a jet engine. Space-age pop created its sonic language and then taught listeners how to hear it. Pallid as much of it was, it bonded astral associations to particular sounds, fit together their connotations, and built a musical backdrop for a culture obsessed with satellites and moon shots. Early efforts offered little more than gestures toward this sonic tomorrow. The famous piano duo Arthur Ferrante and Louis Teicher released Soundproof: The Sound of Tomorrow Today! (it was also an age of exclamation points) in 1956. Its blue-tone cover image from Forbidden Planet, the United Planets cruiser C-57D scanning the bleak landscape of Altair IV, suggests something futuristic is happening here, as does the record’s subtitle.8
The texture of the music on Soundproof and the technology used to record it (rather than the sounds themselves) account for the record’s innovation. Its title refers to the studio conditions necessary to produce the natural reverb often engulfing one or both pianos.9 A track like “Man from Mars” adds a sci-fi touch, but it’s an exception to the more exotic numbers, such as “El Cumbanchero,” “Baia,” and “African Echoes.” But the snapping reverb on “Dark Eyes” contributes directly to an overall futuristic feel—that and the seventeen microphones used to make the record. Part of the appeal of space-age pop derives from the new technological processes involved in recording it (called various things by various studios: high-fidelity mono, stereo, living stereo, and perfect presence sound). The sound of space arose as a technological effect, a sonic idiom perfectly tailored to technocracy. In just a few years, sound engineers would become as important as musicians, lending credence to Adinolfi’s claim that “engineers and musicians seemed to work hand in hand with the technology of NASA.”10 When Ferrante and Teicher released Blast Off!, in 1958, the primary source of whatever space-ageyness it possesses aside from its title came from the studio effects that introduce the various tunes, plus a pervasive infatuation with reverb.
Such tricks of the studio trade, frequently with electronic embellishment, increasingly came to characterize space-age pop, not always to fabulous effect. From Another World (1956), by the arranger Sid Bass, gathers dusty popular songs with vaguely astronomical titles (“Old Devil Moon,” “My Blue Heaven,” “East of the Sun,” “Stardust”) and polishes them up with twangy electronic intros and outros. Gone, Daddio. More ambitious is a record by Pete Rugolo, the arranger for Stan Kenton; released in 1957, it was originally titled Music from Out of Space. Although little about it signifies outer space beyond the cover (which shows Rugolo in a red space suit and clear plastic bubble helmet) and the title of its first track (a blustery meditation called “Stereo Space Man”), the recording process makes up for what the music overlooks. Rugolo’s technique in the studio, the notes on the back cover reveal, was “dependent on the willingness of the recording equipment—the mike, the tape machines, the play-back speaker—to go along with him.”11 Thank God for submissive equipment. Indeed, musicians on the record remain uncredited, but not so the machines; the microphones used include an Altec 21B, two Telefunken U47s, an Altec 639, and two RCA 44BXs. Wow. Music from Out of Space originates in a studio space equipped with the latest technologies to produce serious sounds for the serious audiophile, as the record’s label attests: “A Stereophonic High Fidelity Recording.”12
The annus mirabilis of space-age bachelor-pad music has to be 1958. Martin Denny released Primitiva, demonstrating his command of exotica and the commercial recolonization of Third World cultures.13 Innovative sounds came from elsewhere, too. Juan García Esquivel, also known (inevitably perhaps) as Esquivel!, released Other Worlds Other Sounds, a record that took exotica’s already rambunctious arranging and squared it, cubed it, tied it in knots, and set it spinning.14 Born in Mexico, he amped up Latin rhythms to an ecstatic tumult, suffusing his music with variety, dissonance, disruption, perversity, and noise. The songs on Other Worlds Other Sounds did not in themselves gesture to some outer space beyond, but his treatment of them did, cued by a cover that puts a red-caped and leggy dancer on a provocatively lunar landscape. Old familiars such as “Begin the Beguine,” “Night and Day,” “That Old Black Magic,” and “It Had to Be You” receive new arrangements so dynamic and bedazzling, so adventurous and bizarre, that they get pushed outside themselves, as if to become versions preferred on other planets by the advanced life-forms who inhabit them. “Primitive” cultures return here with a vengeance, looping through some undesignated future to command submission. Now! Esquivel said in an interview that he “wanted traditional instruments to play in a new and unusual way. [. . .] It was above all a game of microphones.”15 His exploitation of recording technology enhanced the imperious jouissance of his arrangements. On his next release, Exploring New Sounds in Hi-Fi Stereo (1959), the cover showing his arm draped over a telescope, Esquivel continues his adventures in otherness (and camp), importing, for instance, the electronic sounds of the Ondioline on the nutty—and popular—tune “Whatchamacallit.”16
Space becomes an explicit sonic concern (sort of) in two other releases from 1958, Les Baxter’s Space Escapade and Russ Garcia’s Fantastica: Music from Outer Space. Baxter’s record is pure “spaceotioca,” a recombinant hybrid of lyricized exotica (plenty of strings) and space fantasy.17 The cover does a lot of the space-age work. A cocktail-bearing astro-bachelor in a green space suit and bubble helmet is toasting his friends, a mixed gathering of three foreign/alien women (white, pink, and green complexioned) and another astro-bachelor, proud of his drink. Everyone is smiling, and why not? A carbon-dioxide fog covers the floor. Nobody seems to notice the ominous shadow of a missile on the wall behind them. The titles of Baxter’s tunes (“Moonscape,” “Mr. Robot,” “The Commuter,” “The Lady Is Blue,” “Saturday Night on Saturn”) tell a happy if vague story of a bourgeois future: moons rise; robots serve; and people work, love, imagine, and gather, usually on Saturday night, probably on Saturn. Not, however, Sun Ra’s. Baxter’s Saturn feels rushed and anonymous, a suburban shopping mall on a preholiday weekend. The gong that ends “Saturday Night on Saturn”—and the record—punctuates a space escapade notable more for emptiness than exploration, less a voyage to new worlds than just another party with exotic drinks. “With the aid of the music in this album,” liner notes promise, “we can drift into the future’s lovemist.”18 Baxter’s space is neither urban nor outer; it’s just a living room turned lounge, a place for easy listening and heavy petting.
Garcia’s Fantastica, by contrast, starts with a countdown—“ten seconds till firing time, mark”—and dares to venture into space, or its sonic simulation.19 The cover, a cloudless Earth in star-spangled black space beneath an ominous nonlinear graphic, promises “the ultimate in transistorized stereophonic hi-fidelity sound.”20 The record delivers. It’s extraordinarily restrained, channeling sounds that seem to emanate from some pitch-black beyond: space. Garcia mixes occasional strings with a vast array of tones and timbres: harps, timpani, cymbals, bells, flutes, and electronic sounds whose infrequent, disturbing colors somehow communicate the chill of outer space. The spare arrangements, polar opposite to Baxter’s, introduce space into musical composition in a new way, at least for pop, making it a constituent of the music, the instrument of absence, as if it were a player in Garcia’s ensemble. The titles of Fantastica’s tracks, too, feel like something more than empty gestures toward fake worlds: “Into Space,” “Lost Souls of Saturn,” “Red Sand of Mars,” “Frozen Neptune,” “Moon Rise.” Garcia builds on the known solar system to imagine its soundscape, one that is diaphanous, evocative, open, and speculative. Electronics enhance rather than punctuate the mood, allowing space into music as music opens to space.
Fantastica set the course for musical space exploration into the sixties. Its electronic oscillations and flutters extended the reach of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack into popular culture. Richard Marino’s Out of this World, from 1961 (according to the jacket, “a unique and startling musical adventure”), spruces up star-themed standards such as “When You Wish upon a Star” and “Full Moon in Empty Arms” with space-toned warbles and sighs woven into the fabric of the arrangements.21 Released in 1960, Marty Manning’s The Twilight Zone (“a sound adventure in space”) surfs the theme music of the TV show into an exoticized space turbid with Latin rhythms, vocal glissandi, and electronic beeps and colors supplied by an Ondioline and its keyboard cousin, the Ondes Martenot, both pictured on the record’s back cover.22 The great heir to Fantastica, however, is Project Comstock: Music from Outer Space (1962), a recording arranged and produced by Frank Comstock, who composed primarily for television and movies. Comstock retains the instrumentation of a light orchestra but remains faithful to Fantastica’s spaciousness. He fully integrates electronic sounds from a theremin and an electric violin into the soundscape he creates, described on the record’s back cover as “the music of whirling satellites, brilliant galaxies, steaming comets, mysterious planets, and the eerie reaches of space in-between.”23 The slow dissonance of “From Another World” (fading into comforting strings) and the pizzicato tension of “Out of Space” (contrasting with a gliding theremin) create a space for relaxation as much as exploration—for the bachelor perhaps in recovery from one of the more turbulent outings of Baxter or Esquivel. Space-age pop, particularly in its most literal space-themed varieties, countered the darker preoccupations of technocratic culture—weapons, surveillance, communism, and superiority in space—with soothing sounds gesturing lightly toward other worlds. As Adinolfi puts it, “Space sound, like exotica, had a tendency to comfort listeners and suggest harmony and order.”24 It was music for dreaming—of a tomorrow that would always, for all its possibilities, resemble today.
The Space Age left its mark on mainstream jazz, too. The cover of Betty Carter’s acclaimed avant-bop record Out There with Betty Carter, released in February 1958 just after the launch of Explorer 1, shows the singer gazing from a square widow on a round satellite, with a horizontal US missile (clearly a model) framed against a background of stars.25 Also in 1958, Duke Ellington, fronting a nonet he called the Spacemen, which included Clark Terry and Paul Gonsalves, released an LP called The Cosmic Scene. It contained mostly up-tempo standards but also an Ellington original called, not surprisingly, “Spacemen.” In an unpublished essay written about the same time, Ellington offered his opinion about the national rush to space superiority: “So, this is my view on the race for space. We’ll never get it until we Americans, collectively and individually, get us a new sound. A new sound of harmony, brotherly love, common respect and consideration for the dignity and freedom of men.26 Ellington here equates a new sound with dignity and freedom, qualifying the complacency of most exotica and space pop. Maybe jazz could innovate in ways they couldn’t. Maybe jazz could explore space from a social as well as musical perspective. Whenever black musicians refer to space, they do so from a social place light-years away from that of their white peers.
The organist Sam Lazar recorded Space Flight (1960) in Chicago. The cover displays a missile fitted with a large payload lifting away from its launchpad. The promise of the record’s title seems somewhat qualified, however, by that particular missile, which was designed for suborbital deployment.27 Spaceflight here remains technologically impossible. And socially, too, perhaps? The question hovers around jazz recordings with similar titles, such as Grant Green’s composition “Outer Space” (on Born to be Blue, recorded in 1962) or Lou Donaldson’s “Spaceman Twist” (on The Natural Soul, also from 1962).28 Such tunes respond playfully to the complacencies of space pop with a blues-based blast of improvisation likely to upset the bland satisfactions of any living room turned tiki lounge. John Coltrane, who would pursue the exploration of musical space with utmost seriousness, creates a free-jazz counterforce upsetting all listening considered easy; for instance, Sun Ship (recorded in 1965 but not released until 1971) sails forever away from the space of pop into an outer openness of free improvisation.29 More representative of a jazz idiom in the early sixties is George Russell’s Jazz in the Space Age (1960), which takes the Ferrante and Teicher trademark two pianos (played here by Bill Evans and Paul Bley) in concertedly new directions.30 Three of the record’s six tracks bear the title “Chromatic Universe” and interlineate the others: “Dimensions,” “The Lydiot,” and “Waltz from Outer Space.” Here, it is formal rather than thematic innovation that renders space sonically. Eighteen musicians create a music centered more on individual tones than on keys, highly arranged and yet, as the pianos interpret and respond, improvised, too. Jazz in the Space Age will experiment with new forms, or so Russell’s compositions appear to promise; they offer an intellectual exercise in advancing not so much new sounds as new arrangements of them.
When Sun Ra turned his music toward space in the late fifties, he did so in the context of a popular culture awash in space-age images and sounds. One of his responses to the confinement of blacks, segregated as they were in Chicago’s South Side and other such urban spaces, then, involved deploying the cultural rhetoric of the Space Age toward the progressive ends of opening up wider vistas, new horizons. If blacks couldn’t flourish in segregated cities, then maybe they could follow exotica into space. That Sun Ra and Abraham were deeply aware of space pop’s wide appeal is the lesson of the cagey cover of Jazz in Silhouette, released not long before the Arkestra left Chicago. Corbett calls its depiction of topless African nymphets in orbit “300 space miles” above the surface of one of Saturn’s moons “enormously strange.”31 But in the context of the musical genre it clearly references—exotica—the cover slyly charts the Arkestra’s agenda of taking the music of so-called primitives far beyond the limits of popular expectation. Images of black women—on the cover of a record that blacks had produced—reverse the priorities, visually and musically, of recordings such as Esquivel’s Other Worlds Other Sounds or Denny’s Primitiva. Blacks already inhabited the (primitive?) new worlds of exotica, transported there by the power of music. Sun Ra listened carefully to exotica and took some of what it offered into his sound: tightly orchestrated arrangements, intense rhythms, dense percussion, transient noise, and unusual instruments, either homemade or from other cultures (“space harp,” “Flying Saucer,” “solar drum,” Rhodesian bells, zither, violin-uke, tabla, etc.). But he eschewed its tricks of sudden contrast and campy commentary and depended instead on exuberant musicians to induce the unexpected through spirited improvisation.
Sun Ra took exotica on an odyssey that makes space pop feel like the auditory equivalent of Lost in Space. Given the time warps characteristic of El Saturn releases in the sixties, records belonging to the early days of his turn to space did not appear until long after the Space Age was in full swing, giving them a sense of detachment from the cultural conditions that inspired them. But Sun Ra’s early space music remains some of his best. He recorded a slew of it during the marathon 1960 session in Milwaukee, the summer before the Arkestra left for Montreal. A record containing some of that material appeared first in 1966, under the title Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus, and then again three years later with the new title Interstellar Low Ways. It offers an exhilarating trip to destinations to which space pop never dared to go. The later title plays a little joke on the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, combining interstellar travel with the ways of low folks (as Sun Ra referred ironically to blacks in the Thmei broadsheets). The tracks on the record all reference space pop, even the opening tune “Onward,” which begins Sun Ra’s explorations of space with a hip gesture toward what’s to come. The head presents a savvy statement of urban cool that ends in punctuated dissonance. Prepare for takeoff.
The music conjures space in all its analog glory, with Sun Ra forgoing electronics to create an acoustic structure for musical space travel. Three tunes unfold to an evocative spaciousness. “Somewhere in Space” offers Gilmore a vehicle for sinewy flight, Sun Ra toggling up and down a half-step while the horns harmonize microtonally. Wherever this somewhere is, it’s dreamy and unresolved, fading quietly to nothing. The tune “Interstellar Low Ways” could be pure exotica, but its title puts it between the stars. In good Baxter form (but thankfully without strings), a flute dances over a jungle rhythm that, were it any less restrained, might parody exotica’s parody of the primitive. The tune meanders for over eight minutes through an astral garden of sounds, creating space for speculation with a lone drum or bass. This is interstellar travel by underdrive to destinations unknowable. After a funereal opening statement, “Space Loneliness” becomes a minor blues of unutterable wistfulness, backed by Sun Ra’s shimmering yet discordant piano and leading to no particular consolation. Loneliness as big as space, a feeling communicated almost painfully by a haunting, recurring, reverberating snap over the melody.
“Interplanetary Music,” on the other hand, is unabashed happiness. Over the squeal of a bowed violin-uke and the clunk of an on-the-beat cowbell, the band half sings and half chants, “Interplanetary, Interplan-etary, Interplan-etary Music”—hilarious and fun. Then comes the chorus: “Interplanetary Melodies, . . . Interplanetary Harmonies,” the bass walking and the piano flirting. The Arkestra advances a plan for conquering the cosmos through sound and a sense of humor. The violin-uke breaks into a tortured, shrill solo while the bell clunks on. Then it all cycles again until they all head out: “music, . . . Music, . . . music.” Never has space pop achieved such untempered joy. There’s more to space than technological superiority and shaken cocktails. “Space Aura” picks up the pace two tunes later, a double-time romp through harmonies stacked and leaning like they are about to fall over. Postbop, anybody? Sun Ra’s spare chords give Gilmore space to soar vertically before the Arkestra reconverges on an orchestrated chorus that feels accidental and sharp. Then the raucous finale: “Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus.” What a record! Interstellar Low Ways launches space pop to heights unimaginable in purely popular terms. Improvisation as antigravity: the extraordinary feeling and technique of the Arkestra’s musicians derange exotica to reassemble and extend its possibilities somewhere—else—in space.
Sun Ra had in mind an agenda higher than either space pop or NASA could sustain. “Space music,” as he would later put it, “is an introductory prelude to the sound of greater infinity. . . . It is a different order of sound synchronized to a different order of Being.”32 Good-bye primitivos and space-capaders. Sun Ra aimed to transform the planet. Joining his space program will require serious preparation for outer space, and music provides the only education:
In this age of Outer Space challenge, People will have to change their tune, i.e. they will have to be tuned up or down (according to what is necessary) another way. The intergalactic counsil has a different tuning system. The insistent idea is that people will have to change their tune and that tuning should be in tune with the intergalactic outer universe, which is everything which is not yet in. And this is the meaning of the Kingdom of Not and its phonetic note. Note!33
In Sun Ra’s music and words, the language of science fiction converges with the sonic possibilities of space music to retune people so that they may inhabit worlds yet to come. From the South Side of Chicago to infinity: Sun Ra plots a course for blacks and anyone else who can keep up with him through outer space to a new tomorrow.