Space Is the Place
The Lives and Times of Sun Ra
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra—aka Herman Blount—was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. John Szwed’s Space is the Place is the definitive biography of this musical polymath, who was one of the twentieth century’s greatest avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Charting the whole of Sun Ra’s life and career, Szwed outlines how after years in Chicago as a blues and swing band pianist, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters by performing music with the Arkestra that was as vital and innovative as it was mercurial and confounding. Szwed’s readers—whether they are just discovering Sun Ra or are among the legion of poets, artists, intellectuals, and musicians who consider him a spiritual godfather—will find that, indeed, space is the place.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Through deft writing and detailed chronology, Yale professor and music critic Szwed manages to make the seemingly unintelligible, shiny-turbaned pioneer of big-band free jazz more accessible to society at large. Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Ala., Sun Ra (1914-1993) denounced his past with unprecedented thoroughness--he often said he wasn't born and that he had no family--when transforming himself in the 1940s and '50s from a gifted young jazz pianist into the leader of 30-odd musicians and followers who recorded ceaselessly and could play "for the sake of beauty and enlightenment" for 10 to 15 hours straight. As Szwed shows, an elaborate, paranoid and finally incoherent pastiche of cosmology, history and sci-fi fantasy underlay Sun Ra's musical and verbal ramblings, resulting in innovations like the "space key," in which a drone anchored the piece while musicians improvised without the benefit of a particular key. Convincingly, Szwed finds method in this madness, juxtaposing Sun Ra's career and thoughts with the developing civil rights movement, and showing with encyclopedic aplomb (and an invaluable discography) how "Sonny's" career stretched from the 1930's Fletcher Henderson era through the extraordinary flowering of the black avant-garde in the 1960s and '70s, and beyond. Sun Ra, who by then had won the respect, if not the admiration, of some critics and musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, continued to compose, record and perform until his death. Photos.
