19

SPACE IS THE PLACE

The movie’s scenario is simple, best rendered in the précis circulated by its production company, North American Star System:

Sun Ra, black poet, prophet and master of the keyboard, has been trying to tell us for years that there’s a place in space for the people of planet Earth. Now, in the new feature film from San Francisco’s North American Star System, he brings his music and his message to the screen.

Ra travels through space and time with his Inter-galactic Myth-Science Solar Arkestra. He stops by Chicago, 1943, to do a gig as a boogie pianist for the tap dancing “Ebony Steppers” at a southside Cabaret; then, after literally destroying the club with his frenetic keyboard work, he is left face to face with his long-time adversary, the king pimp Overseer. Magically teleported to a desert plain, they begin a cosmic card game in which the stakes are the end of the world and the very souls of its black people. The choice is made clear. One can opt for SUN RA’s “alter-destiny” and tune into the frequencies of the cosmos through his music or choose the Overseer’s way of life and death as usual on planet Earth.

While SUN RA takes his message to the people and prepares for his final world concert, the Overseer connives to upset RA’s plans and eliminate, once and for all, this threat to his own power. He attempts this through manipulation of a variety of type-cast characters, government agents, prostitutes, idealistic youths, ultimately to no avail. Finally RA departs the doomed planet, taking a few souls on a cosmic trip into space toward peace and the “alter destiny.”1

Astro-black mythology faces off against worldly pleasure in a game to claim the souls of black folk. The new scenario of this science fiction film is hauntingly biblical in envisioning an end to human captivity. The Seventh Seal meets Superfly, and the fate of the planet hangs in the balance.

Space is the place. But in what sense can space and place coincide? It’s a truism of contemporary social criticism that the two realms are distinct: the former is an abstraction (outer space, for instance, or its digital descendant, cyberspace), and the latter, vividly particular (the South Side of Chicago in the fifties or downtown Oakland in the seventies). Yet the copula of the movie’s title fuses them together: space is the place. More than hippy-dippy dictum, the phrase announces the aim of Sun Ra’s cosmo-drama and the space music that sustains it: to envision an abstract space conducive to everyday life. Through myth—the abstract nothing that yet is and produces living effects—space and place might come to coincide. The movie offers a solution to the problem posed by its title, staging an encounter between outer space and inner city that only astro-black mythology can resolve. As Sun Ra and the Overseer cut tarot cards to determine the fate of planet Earth, myth confronts reality with a new scenario for a better tomorrow, the “alter-destiny” of the synopsis. Sun Ra retailors the Thmei message for planetary consumption, delivered not by broadsheets in a city park but by film to a mass audience. At least that was the hope.

The movie opens with a bulbous, bright-orange spaceship flying through the spangled darkness of outer space. Then comes June Tyson’s brassy voice with a wake-up call that reveals time, too, to be medium for travel:

It’s after the end of the world,

Don’t you know that yet?

It’s after the end of the world,

Don’t you know that yet?2

Space Is the Place begins by transporting its viewers to a point in time after the end of their world—and therefore after the movie they are watching, forcing them to reflect on life from a posthumous, or maybe posthuman, perspective. A second dislocation follows immediately, transporting viewers to another planet whose lush, lunatic foliage might have been imagined by Max Ernst. A guide appears, a black man wearing a pharaoh’s headdress: Sun Ra. Cocking his head as if to listen, he speaks in a gentle voice. “The music is different here, the vibrations are different. Not like planet Earth.” Sun Ra explores a place that is not (utopia = “no place”), yet nevertheless is, an abstract, ideal, fictive—mythic—place where people might live out an alternate destiny.³

Nature in its whimsical abundance characterizes life on this planet, a circumstance fundamental to Sun Ra’s understanding of the way space and place might coincide. Their disjuncture on planet Earth testifies to a baleful destiny. In “My Music is Words,” Sun Ra aligns nature with other worlds: “My natural self is not of this world because this world is not of my not and nothingness.”⁴ Everyday reality is too present to be natural, too unequivocally real to yield a better future: “the potential impossible is [. . .] calling softly to the natural selves of nothingness according to the standards of infinity nature and infinity nature’s BEING.”⁵ If nature includes the nothing that gives rise to impossibility and myth, infinity nature (reading “infinity” as “never finished”) involves never-ending creativity. Freedom exists, then, but not in this world: “FREEDOM TO ME MEANS THE FREEDOM TO RISE ABOVE A CRUEL PLANET AND TRUE PROTECTION IS PROTECTION BY THE BROTHERS OF NATURE AND NATURES [sic] GOD.”6 Protection (continued living) comes through alignment with a higher nature, which is exactly how Sun Ra understands the way he works as a musician: “What I am playing is my natural way of playing. It is of, for and to the Attributes of the Natural Being of the universe of which is, and it is to everything that should be is, because to me it is natural.”⁷ Sun Ra’s sense of nature collapses the potential into the actual, what is not yet into what is natural. When the impossible coincides with the present, space and place align, as in the name “Sun Ra,” an Egyptian deity and a jazz musician. The living myth. “I have to do like the sun and the stars in the sky,” he said not long before he left this planet. “They have to be right in place all the time. That’s what I have to be.”⁸ Space is where sun and stars and people realize the impossible by always being in the right place—naturally.

Sun Ra imagines such a place on the planet he explores as Space Is the Place opens. In a reversal of history, he proposes setting up “a colony for black people here. See what they can do on a planet all their own, without any white people there.” The steely black activism of his years in Chicago returns here to underwrite the alignment of space and place. Only a black planet can ameliorate ills wrought by racism and segregation. What appears to be separatism, however, opens to myth as Sun Ra sheds history as a condition for racial identity. “Equation wise,” he says in his arcane way, “the first thing to do would be to consider time as officially ended. We work on the other side of time.” With the official end of time comes the end of a history that includes African slavery and all the miseries of the dead—an obvious impossibility but for that very reason the province of another kind of knowledge, that of myth, which works on time’s “other side.” Sun Ra’s Egyptian headdress combines with the prospect of space travel to produce an astro-black solution to historically enforced injustice. When Sun Ra describes how he intends to create his extraterrestrial colony, his real (impossible) agenda becomes clear: “Teleport the whole planet here through music.” All planet Earth; Sun Ra’s musical teleportation holds out the potential for everyone on Earth to become black. No longer merely a historical identity, blackness becomes a transformative effect of space music, the cultural means of inhabiting a new world. Blacks may be in the best social position to make the most of this opportunity, but Space Is the Place holds it open to others, too, at least theoretically. Astro-black mythology can transport people to a brave new black world.

Or it can take them back in time. At this point, the scene shifts to “Chicago 1943” and a lounge called Byron’s, with a can-can stage act featuring the scantily clad Ebony Steppers. “Sonny Ray” beats out a boogie-woogie accompaniment to entertain a racially mixed and uppity audience. The situation resembles Sun Ra’s sweaty nights working clubs in Calumet City, except that time (officially ended) seems somehow out of joint, for in 1943, Sun Ra (then Herman Poole Blount) spent thirty-nine days in a Birmingham jail and several weeks confined to a work camp for conscientious objectors in Marienville, Pennsylvania. Apparently club gigs in Chicago amount to particolored imprisonment. When the smiling black Overseer enters the lounge, wearing a luminous white suit with a blood-red rose boutonnière and a woman on each arm, it becomes clear who rules this roost. “He sees something he wants,” says one of the cigarette girls, “he gets it.” Desire and its satisfaction make him a swaggering, brash, domineering force. The Overseer (played by Ray Johnson) accepts material reality on its own terms and exploits its every potential for worldly gain and happiness. Music offers little more than a soundtrack to his self-indulgence, and when it doesn’t flatter his libido, he makes his dissatisfaction known to everyone: “This piano player sounds like shit!”

Working “the other side of time” allows Sun Ra—here playing both the piano and Sonny Ray—to escape his confinement to Byron’s and his subjection to the Overseer. The anachronism of Sun Ra’s dress signals his disregard for history; from the wide lapels of his double-knit jacket to his knitted cap to his chrome-rimmed shades, this piano player comes from the future—the seventies, to be precise. The music he plays follows suit. It begins as boogie-woogie, but as the Ebony Steppers make their entrance, Sonny Ray decides to show the Overseer what his music can do. Blues changes slide into improbable dissonant harmonies in rhythms uncongenial to the ebony steps of the confused dancers. Sun Ra unchains melody to create a wind of sounds that blows through the bar at gale force, taking with it patrons, dancers, cigarette girls, and ultimately even his piano, which spins smoking across the proscenium. Music as mere entertainment? Sonny Ray demonstrates the capacity of his playing to transform reality, rearranging space so it will admit new possibilities. “Are you ready to alter your destiny?”

Sun Ra’s question hangs in the air as the scene shifts again to reveal the ideological divide that shapes black life on planet Earth. Sun Ra and the Overseer now vie to determine its destiny, drawing cards at a table engulfed by empty desert. A better tomorrow or a squalid today? Myth meets history to contest the future. The Overseer’s identity indicates that, historically considered, life for blacks occurs on a plantation of now planetary proportions. The best they can hope for is the dubious reward of proxy domination, the Overseer’s black rule over blacks, sustained, of course, by a white state and its security network. Alter-destiny advances an astro-black alternative, spiritual in aspiration and mythological in means. True to his Thmei roots, Sun Ra appeals directly to the black community to change its ways and choose between the terminal pleasures of today and a more challenging call of tomorrow. He draws an ominous card—Judgment—bearing the image of his spaceship and portending the imminent arrival of the Arkestra from outer space.

And arrive they do, a few minutes later, to an awed reception by a curious crowd, among them members of the news media. In a scene that parodies the initial appearance of Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, a door on the throbbing double-eyed spaceship slides open to reveal Sun Ra and his musical astronauts: “I am the alter-destiny, the presence of the living myth.” The crowd surges and the journalists bristle. In answer to a question about the power source of his strange craft, Sun Ra answers, “Music. This music is all a part of another tomorrow. Another kind of language. Speaking things of nature, naturalness, the way it should be. Speaking things of blackness, about the void. The endless void.” Sun Ra’s spaceship is music. The Arkestra’s musicians travel the spaceways on waves of sound, a means of propulsion somehow commensurable with the void even though sound waves can’t propagate through outer space. Music transports, but it arises out of nothing, to arrive—in the best possible sense—nowhere:

music’s a language, and it’s telling people they have to become nothing in order to survive in the Kingdom of Nothing. See, nothin’ can’t hurt nothin’, nothin’ plus nothin’ equals nothin’. [. . .] You can’t go into outer space unless you count down to zero. Everything started from zero, you see. You count down to zero, then you can go into outer space. They do it, NASA does it every day, they count down first.9

Sound transports the Arkestra through empty space to planet Earth as music and astro-black mythology conjure an impossible future out of nothing.

As if to emphasize the perversity of this enterprise, an interior shot later reveals the navigation console of Sun Ra’s spaceship to consist of technologically advanced musical instruments, including a Minimoog, the portable analog musical synthesizer designed in 1968 by the engineers at Robert Moog’s factory in Trumansburg, New York, and put into production in 1970. Sun Ra’s relationship to the Minimoog and its synthesized rainbow of auditory vibrations shows how sound in the widest sense propels the Arkestra through space. The latest advances in keyboard instruments inspired his constant experimentation; Sun Ra was an early player of the Solovox, the Clavioline, the Clavinet, the Kalamazoo K101, and the Rock-Si-Chord, among others, which he credited on his records with names such as “Solar Sound Organ” or “Intergalactic Tone Instrument.” He coaxed sounds out of them beyond the tolerances of their intended designs, taking the keyboards in strange new directions, as on the tumultuous LP Atlantis, recorded in 1967 and released a year later. After exploring a forbidding planet of keening bleeps and storming intervals, the record ends with the Arkestra happily chanting, “Sun Ra and his band from outer space have entertained you here.”¹⁰ In the mid- to late sixties, when analog synthesizers began to open up a new spectrum of sonic possibilities (or perhaps impossibilities), Sun Ra showed immediate interest. By 1969 he was making his first recordings with a synthesizer, one of Robert Moog’s modular beasts complete with patch chords and amplitude pots, programmed on the fly in the studio by the early Moog enthusiast and virtuoso Gershon Kingsley.11

Sun Ra’s devotion to the synthesizer as an instrument perfectly suited to space music coincided with the development of Moog’s most influential model, the Minimoog. Simple to operate and easy to transport, it quickly became the performer’s choice for creating a vast array of electronic sounds live and in the studio. The story of Sun Ra’s acquiring his first Minimoog, an early prototype known as “Model B Min Moog,” is worth hearing from Robert Moog himself, who told it to Peter Hinds in an interview: “Well, it was a prototype. That’s basically the story. We loaned it to him and Sun Ra’s way of working is that when you loan something to him you don’t expect to see it back (laughs). So that’s really the only story.”¹² Sun Ra drove to Trumansburg in 1968 to procure the Minimoog while it was still in development, bringing the Arkestra with him: “His whole band came by to this small upstate town in New York. It was, you know, I don’t know, 14 or 15 people and they came up in cars, I don’t know, three or four cars and each one was older than the other.”¹³ One of Moog’s engineers, Jon Weiss, remembered the impression they made: “This was a fairly rigid, straight-laced, little sleepy New York state town. And here’s this bizarre looking black guy with, you know, robes and all this stuff in the local ice cream parlor!”¹⁴ The Arkestra came in quest of new sounds and found them, sounds to drive space music further than ever into outer blackness.

Synthesized sounds: part of the appeal of the analog synthesizer, particularly in comparison to other keyboard instruments, comes from its sonic spectrum, which is almost infinite, practically speaking, because a player can vary any given tone’s pitch continuously rather than only through the meager twelve increments of the Western chromatic scale. And the variety of tones available is vast, many of them patently unmusical in a Western sense. The sonic palette of the Moog synthesizer opens a creative space as vast, seemingly, as the cosmos. Sun Ra played myriad sounds between those that “count” in conventional composition. As for the Minimoog itself, it proved capable of creating whole new registers of possibility: a viscid bass that stirs the entrails, a tonal warmth that solicits well-being, a cringing static that conjures animal fear, a piercing screel that commands almost spiritual submission. How the Minimoog produces these effects (and affects) remains part of the mystery of musicianship and engineering. Bill Hemsath, another of its designers, pointed out that because the Minimoog uses three oscillators (responsible for tone production and thus tuning) that tend to drift slightly in pitch, they never “lock,” or become perfectly synchronized, remaining slightly out of tune with one another and creating the device’s distinctive analog frisson.15 Hemsath’s colleague Jim Scott added information familiar to vacuum-tube devotees: overdriven by design, the Minimoog’s circuitry slides gradually toward distortion, creating the warm overtones felt along the arteries and associated with a “fat” sound. He also offered a somewhat mysterious explanation of the way inaudible ultrasonics can have audible effects: “there were things that happen up in the ultrasonic range that can cause inner modulations and distortions, [and this] reflects back and can be heard in the audible range.”¹⁶ Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard beseech infinity. In the right hands, the Minimoog’s huge spectrum of sounds might transport people, materially and spiritually, to unknown worlds.

Sun Ra had those hands—and ears. The engineers who created the Minimoog built it from the ears up, tinkering until it produced inspiring sounds for Sun Ra and other musicians to play with. His discoveries riveted and roiled and soon showed up on recordings. Beginning with My Brother the Wind, Volume 2 and The Solar Myth Approach, volumes 1 and 2 (portions of both recorded in 1970), the Minimoog would increasingly come to power the Arkestra’s exploration of space. In 1970, as if to mark the next phase after the successful moon landing, Sun Ra began labeling his ensemble the “Astro-Infinity Arkestra” on record jackets, designating not so much a new departure as a higher flight, as he explained to Henry Dumas: “Astro-Infinity music is just one aspect of my music. It is heavenly and eternal, no beginning and no ending. The highest aspiration for man on earth is freedom. Astro-Infinity music is beyond freedom. It is precision, discipline. It is not just freedom. It is coordination and sound interdependence. It is the design of another world.”17 The Minimoog helped push space music into new zones of discipline and precision—but not because its designers provided new charts to follow. Weiss visited Sun Ra in New York to check the performance of his borrowed prototype: “I happened to hear this machine, and he had taken this synthesizer and I don’t know what he had done to it, but he made sounds like you had never heard in your life, I mean just total inharmonic distortion all over the place, oscillators weren’t oscillating any more, nothing was working but it was fabulous.”¹⁸

Sun Ra played—and played with—the Minimoog, taking its sonic possibilities far beyond the limits imagined by its designers. It makes perfect sense, then, that the Minimoog features prominently in the navigation console of Sun Ra’s spaceship in Space Is the Place. It navigates infinity, boldly going where no jazz has gone before—taking black folks along with it. This is synthesized music as interstellar transport. The Moog’s historians understand this potential: “Great musicians like Sun Ra could always do the impossible.”¹⁹ Such as, for instance, saving the planet, as Sun Ra testifies he must do in an interview with Newsweek: “I have astro-infinity gifts to offer, solutions for all people and all nations concerned. I’m playing for the whole planet. I’m supposed to do the impossible, demonstrate to the people that there is something beyond the God they have been worshiping. My music is about friendship.”²⁰ To the crowd in Space Is the Place that gathers to greet him on his landing, he offers consolation and promise born of the friendship such music cultivates: “Earth doesn’t fall—it’s the music. Vibrations. Your music too. You all astronauts. Everyone is supposed to be playing their part in this vast Arkestrey of the cosmos.”

Just before he utters this benediction, June Tyson’s clear, exhortatory voice chants a canticle that serves to plot the course of the film’s coming cosmo-drama:

The satellites are spinning

A new day is dawning

The galaxies are waiting

For planet Earth’s awakening.

Oh we sing this song to

A brave tomorrow.

Oh we sing this song to

Abolish sorrow.

The satellites are spinning

A better day is breaking

The galaxies are waiting

For planet Earth’s awakening.21

Galaxies await Earth’s awakening. This is the language of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1819), updated and now made imaginable by the legacy of Sputnik. The reference to spinning satellites is no mere sop to space-age imagery. By the time Space Is the Place was made, they consolidated a legacy far greater in social effect than the moon landing provided. Satellites circling the Earth weave an orbital warp for global communications. Their “spinning” creates a network that makes it possible to broadcast sounds on a planetary scale. Thanks to those satellites and the whole machinery of heavy ballistics that lifts them aloft, space music can go global and more; it can become interplanetary, intergalactic, hurling toward astro-infinity.

Space Is the Place proves to be perceptive about the role mass media plays in contemporary life. The crowd around Sun Ra’s spaceship includes a famed radio announcer named Jimmy Fey (played by Christopher Brooks), whose celebrity in the black community derives from his employer’s market saturation: “Channel 5 Stone Jive, the all-black station for the all-black people with all the news that grooves at noon. Live from Oakland.” The Arkestra arrives on the outskirts of Oakland not to commemorate the group’s stint at Berkeley but, more radically, to make the black community there a test case for the transformative force of space music and cosmo-drama. Oakland resembles the South Side of Chicago after a twenty-year time lapse: empty storefronts, languid street life, black poverty and persistence in a segregated urban cityscape—all the squalid imagery of Cry of Jazz, but remixed in living color. One big difference, however, appears in the person of Jimmy Fey and the keen attention he devotes to this band of travelers from outer space. Media coverage offers a means to spread Sun Ra’s message both within and beyond the black community. It links the place of segregation with the space of infinity through Fey’s live coverage and commentary broadcasting the arrival of the “black musician and thinker” Sun Ra: “He is reported to have disappeared while traveling in Europe in 1969, reputed to have been traveling in space all this time with his Intergalactic Solar Myth-Science Arkestra.”

The centerpiece of Sun Ra’s sojourn in Oakland is a visit he pays to a youth development program at a black community center. As if to underscore the parallel to Chicago’s South Side (with all due deference to the latest fashion), a group of Afro-coiffed, slim-fitted, and bell-bottomed young men sing doo-wop around a pool table: “That’s the way love is, oo–oo–oo–oo.” Young women talk urgently as a few youths read quietly, surrounded by wall-hung posters depicting black activists: Angela Davis, Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones. Then something weird happens: Sun Ra beams into their midst—big red moonboots appearing first—wearing the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh and flanked by life-sized living images of the gods Horus and Thoth: “Greetings black youth of planet Earth. I am the ambassador from the Intergalactic Region of the Council for Outer Space.” Reasonably enough, the black youth respond with skepticism: “How do we know you ain’t some old hippy from off Telegraph?” “Is he for real?” The latter question prompts Sun Ra to utter one of the central statements of both the movie and astro-black mythology itself:

How do you know I’m real? I’m not real—just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real. If you were, you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we’re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as the myth. Because that’s what black people are: myths. I came from a dream that black man dreamed long ago. I’m actually a presence sent to you from your ancestors. I’m gonna be here till I pick out certain ones of you to take back with me.

Sun Ra schools the black youth of inner-city Oakland in the fundamentals of astro-black mythology. He comes from outer space. He appears out of the deep black past. Like his audience, he lacks reality on planet Earth. But being nothing, he and they become myths. And as myths, these black youths together with their intergalactic antique black mentor might create worlds beyond the reality that neglects them, worlds hitherto unknown but not beyond the force of myth to imagine. Sun Ra arrives to take those he chooses, those who have ears to hear the music, back to the outer blackness of infinite space.

Through music, astro-black mythology moves toward eschatological possibilities. In the segregated Oakland of Space Is the Place, the means of salvation are multiple. “If you find Earth boring / Just the same old same thing / Come and sign up with Outer Spaceways Incorporated”; one means of salvation is thus an employment agency. Down a busy street of closed and boarded-up storefronts stands a freshly painted door whose sign announces unusual hours: “Eternally Open.” Sun Ra’s Outer Space Employment Agency offers full-time work for qualified applicants. Several stop in for interviews with the agency’s chief officer, Sun Ra himself, who sits behind a half-door in a small office loaded with musical and other communications equipment. Thoth handles the telephones as a dancer gyrates in the background. A nervous, middle-aged white man appears at the doorway. Kurt Rockman, an unemployed NASA engineer specializing in guidance-systems design, desperately needs a job so that he can support his wife and seven kids and avoid—uh, you know—welfare.

In response to Rockman’s offer to take a cut in pay, Sun Ra explains what should be obvious: “We really don’t have salaries in our division. We creators never receive anything for our work.” Then he describes his own methods of space travel in a joyous parody of scientific jargon: “Multiplicity adjustment, readjustment synthesis, isotope teleportation, transmolecularization, repolarization, intergalactic realm of eternal darkness, intergalactic realm of eternal blackness darkness, white darkness, infinity incorporated.” Confronted with this technical counter-vocabulary, the white engineer turns a little whiter and hurries away. Another applicant, this one black, poor, and drunk (played by the porn star Johnnie Keyes of Behind the Green Door fame), presents his credentials: “I been doing nothing.” “You must be an expert at it,” says Sun Ra, “we’ll hire you to do that.”22 But salary again becomes an issue: “How much will I get paid, man?” Sun Ra, deadpan, responds, “Nothin’.” Already nothing but unwilling to work for it—to inhabit his condition as an occasion for myth—this black hustler turns away with indignation: “I gotta have somethin’.” Employment by Sun Ra’s space program requires commitment—to nothing and its potential for creation—by white and black applicants alike. Most leave empty-handed.

A more potent means of astro-black salvation comes through the Arkestra’s music. Space Is the Place generates narrative momentum through the ultimate goal of Sun Ra’s terrestrial visitation, a “world concert” to be staged in Oakland and broadcast live around the world. Jimmy Fey arranges the details of time, place, and media coverage (“I’ve got my fingers out to the entire communications network in this country, every TV, radio, movie house, newspapers, magazines, you name it”), while the Overseer does his damnedest to see that the event flops, colluding with the FBI in a plot to kidnap and interrogate Sun Ra as a dangerous black agitator (agents tie him to an armchair and force earphones on him blaring “Dixie”). The plot unravels thanks to the just-in-time intervention of three black youths from the development program, one of whom—initially skeptical (“I think this whole big concert business is a by-product of the Eurasian-Occidental conspiracy”)—takes an FBI bullet meant for Sun Ra. Shot in the chest, he dies onstage as Sun Ra readies his keyboards, to be resurrected in and through the music that drives the Arkestra through space.

The cosmo-drama must go on! And it does. The great and activist purpose behind Space Is the Place was to stage it in a mass medium—film—that might achieve planetary circulation and a global market for astro-black mythology. A show unfolds that, however beyond description, remains as close to cosmo-drama as those who never witnessed it can come. Space chord: a clangor, clash, and cacophony fill the air of the theater, wrestling, beating, struggling against tempers tuned to other, less vital vibrations. A long, stentorian call and response erupts between Sun Ra (leaning swiftly into and away from his microphone) and June Tyson (standing behind him), the effect of which is to catechize listeners in the fundamentals of astro-black mythology and inspire their participation:

We are another order of being

We bring to you the mathematics of an alter-destiny

Look up, see the greater universe

Everything is in place, every star, every planet

Everything is in place but you, planet Earth.

A call to awakening: cosmo-drama proceeds through confrontation to affirmation, offering the example of Sun Ra as living myth, arising out of nothing and nowhere (the South Side of Chicago) to journey through outer space (infinity). Another space chord: a nuclear detonation of noise within noise to trouble and provoke the spirit. Then Sun Ra sets to testifying:

I am the brother of the wind

I cover the Earth and hold it like a ball in my hands

I can take away others to another galaxy

I will take you to new worlds

I will take you to outer unseen worlds

That are more beautiful than anything the earth presents

If you are fearful you will die in your fears

If you are fearful you have the futile persuasions

We are the pattern for the spirit of man!

Cosmo-drama fulfills the street-corner activism of Thmei’s black intellectuals in the performance of a total work of art, as dancers swirl and sounds howl and lights strobe and voices command.

Sun Ra builds toward a wholehearted rejection of the worldly ways of Earth, driven by blasts of gale-force music:

I the wind come and go as I choose

And none can stop me

I hate your reality

I hate your reality

I hate your positive absolute reality

We refuse to be a part of your life, your . . . death.

A hurricane descends, a perfect storm of synthesized sounds, sizzles of lightning, thunderous rumbles, keening blistered banshees soaring stratospheric to inaudible heights, plunging parabolic in leviathan dive beneath the weeded deeps of subsonic seas. All sounds happening, all the time. In space. Through music. The world concert must finish, and Sun Ra must forsake a planet recalcitrant to his message of discipline, precision, and wisdom.

But before he sets the controls of his Minimoog for astro-infinity, Sun Ra reclaims the black souls of those receptive to his sounds. “My kingdom,” he tells Fey earlier in a radio interview, “is the kingdom of darkness and blackness, and none can enter except those who are of the black spirit.” Sun Ra finds them and spirits them away in his spaceship; the elect include a drug-addict pimp, the youths who saved him, a group of whites (cut from the movie to avoid the wrath, Sun Ra said, of the NAACP), and even the “black part” of Jimmy Fey, whose “white part” lives on to scorn the Overseer: “You colored people never learn, do you?”23 For all his streetwise, badass cool, the Overseer can never be of the black spirit. His is the kingdom of reality. He wins the world but loses the cosmos. Astro-black mythology offers an alter-destiny that he—and planet Earth—refuses. So Sun Ra and the Arkestra must bid this doomed world good-bye: “Farewell, earthlings. You just want to speak of realities. No myths. Well, I’m the myth talking to you. So it’s farewell.” The spaceship Arkestra blasts off from a planet destined to explode on this side of time.

But on the other side, the time of astro-black mythology, the Arkestra plays on and awaits human awakening:

In some far off place

Many lightyears in space

We’ll wait for you.

Where human feet have never trod

Where human eyes have never seen

We’ll build a world of abstract dream

And wait for you.24

The cosmo-drama of Space Is the Place answers the hopelessness of human destiny with a hope born of myth, music, and outer space. Sun Ra and the Arkestra will wait for you.

In the meantime, they will keep performing space music. Space Is the Place: Sun Ra also released an LP under that title in 1972; Astro Black: another LP, this one released in 1973; Discipline 27-II, also from 1973: maybe the greatest of this great spate of records, in quadraphonic format.²⁵ In these recordings, the Arkestra’s music becomes a mythic enterprise, disseminating the vision of a better tomorrow through the media of mass communications. Myth transmutes the Arkestra’s recordings and myriad national and international performances into an interstellar network of teleportation capable of transporting all those who are black of spirit to a place called space.

Transcribed by an unknown typist (perhaps Abraham), a ten-page document entitled “intergalactic correspondence” and “dedicated to those seeking the many treasures of the universe” presents several of Sun Ra’s recitatives from various performances, creating a brief script (or scripture) that summarizes cosmo-drama and illuminates its aims. Out of antiquity speaks a voice of black command: “Well I’m old Pharoah [sic] and I’m not going to ever let you go.”²⁶ It announces a new understanding of the past that liberates it from whips and chains:

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 outerspace.27

Not Africa but Saturn, not Egypt but Mars: a history of terror and dislocation opens blacks to new worlds and otherwise impossible identities. The wisdom of antiquity antedates that history and pivots upward, into space: “you need to listen to your black ancestor who said / swing low space chariot coming for to carry me home / your home is among the stars.”²⁸ A solar boat awaits those who heed the ancestral voice of Sun Ra soliciting a better tomorrow: “And so here I am again my people saying space is the place / While nations around you fight for a place in space.”²⁹ And why space? “I want to open up to you the regions of the outerspace eternal immeasurable and endless so you may have a better way of life than you have ever known.”³⁰ The final lines of this fortuitous libretto crystallize the whole of Sun Ra’s life’s work in music and myth: “come my brothers out into the blackness of outerspace / there is no limit to the things you can be.”³¹ From Herman Poole Blount to Le Sony’r Ra, from Thmei activism to astro-black mythology, from the South Side of Chicago to astro-infinity, from inner city to outer space: Sun Ra and the music of the Solar Myth-Science Astro-Infinity Intergalactic Research Omniverse Arkestra herald and create a better tomorrow. “Beta music for a Beta people for a Beta world.”

Sun Ra remained committed to that prospect until 1993, when he left the planet. Space is the place for achieving the impossible, and if NASA could help, why not exploit its resources? At a moment when an orbital space station seemed a plausible national venture, Sun Ra completed a questionnaire created by a NASA space station task force “to measure interest in the idea of allowing a wide range of artists to use the NASA Space Station.”32 It solicited suggestions for “Programs of Artistic Merit in Space.” How could Sun Ra resist? On the line for “Name of Organization,” he wrote, “Sun Ra Omniverse Arkestra.” On the lines following “Type of Organization,” he entered, “Music,” “Tone Science,” and “Poetry/Literature.” Responding to the form’s request for specific ideas for artwork, he remarked, “Without the proper type of music your program will be more difficult than need be.” But a bigger question follows: “What kind of technology, process or facilities do you or your group employ that might have artistic application relevant to an Art in Space program?” Sun Ra’s answer bears pondering: “Music that enlightens and space orientate discipline coordinate.” The technology relevant to an “Art in Space” program is music. Space music. It enlightens. Orientates. Coordinates. Induces discipline. Sun Ra’s sounds for the Space Age make space the place for creating new words and better worlds.