Sun Ra

With his spangly costumes, circus-style multimedia concerts, otherworldly cosmology, and surreal marriage of heady avant-gardism with funky tent-show gospel, Sun Ra was one of the most unique, colorful, and self-determined visionaries in modern popular music. With Miles Davis, he was one of the few authentic jazz figures to exert a wide, discernible influence not just on jazz artists (most explicitly the Art Ensemble of Chicago), but rock and R&B acts too, among them George Clinton, NRBQ, Pink Floyd, and Sonic Youth (for whom Ra opened at New York's Central Park, July 4, 1992). Composer, arranger, bandleader, keyboardist, and philosopher, Ra innovated the use of electronics, Afro-percussive polyrhythms, and collective free improvisation within big-band jazz. Perhaps the first "alternative" artist, he also documented his work through roughly 100 self-produced albums for his own independent El Saturn Research label (many of which went out of print before being reissued on CD by Evidence Music, of Philadelphia, where Ra had been based since the late '60s).

Ra, who claimed to have been born on Saturn and sent to Earth as "an ambassador of the Creator of the Omniverse," was first known on Earth as Herman Blount. Reportedly a musical prodigy, he could instantly play a piano his parents bought for his tenth birthday (or "arrival day" as Ra would call it). Blount studied music in high school under renowned teacher and bandleader John Tuggle "Fess" Whatley and majored in music education at Alabama A&M University. After graduating in the mid-'30s, he led the college band on tour, then played piano in a variety of little-known Southern and Midwestern territory bands -- sometimes under the name Sonny Lee -- and allegedly backed such blues singers as Wynonie Harris on occasion. By the mid-'40s, he settled in Chicago, playing piano in the band led by his idol, seminal swing arranger Fletcher Henderson; he also worked at Chicago's popular Club DeLisa, arranging scores for floorshows and visiting singers.

Sometime around 1948 Sonny Blount changed the name on his passport to "Le Sony'r Ra" and proclaimed himself "Sun Ra, cosmic messenger." Going against the bebop-combo grain, Ra -- though generally regarded as eccentric -- slowly built his so-called "Arkestra," attracting a core of talented, dedicated players, some of whom (tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, baritone saxophonist Pat Patrick, and alto saxophonist Marshall Allen) remained with him for decades. The first Arkestras merged Monk's off-center bebop, Ellington's exotic tonal palette, and the earthy punch of Mingus with authoritative world-music elements from Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the Orient.

In the early '60s the members moved to New York, where Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler were forging the "free jazz" revolution. Ra's controlled use of dissonance, silence, and free-form techniques set him firmly in the jazz avant-garde. From the mid-'60s on, Ra's cult following grew, especially in Europe, as he placed a heavier accent on electronic keyboards (including Moog synthesizer), massed African percussion, and the pageantry of dancers, film projections, and light shows.

The 1974 death of Duke Ellington seemed to inspire Ra to pepper his shows with punk-paced renditions of the classic Ellington and Fletcher Henderson big-band charts of his youth, presaging by several years the rediscovery of tradition by younger avant-garde jazz artists, and making his concerts more accessible. By the '80s, Sun Ra was no longer a leading-edge innovator, but a colorful elder statesman who toured incessantly, often playing rock venues. His final arranging triumph may have been in orchestrating a crowd-pleasing magical mystery tour through jazz history and beyond, from throbbing tribal percussion and roiling full-band noise, to rollicking swing and galvanic neo-gospel chants about outer space.

Despite his declining health, Ra continued performing, albeit in a wheelchair and then playing only skeletal piano. After suffering a third stroke in late 1992, Ra let his band tour without him. He returned to his birthplace, where he succumbed to mounting physical complications eight days after his 79th "arrival day." Under Gilmore's leadership, the band continued playing Ra's music; after the 63-year-old Gilmore died of emphysema in 1995 (the same year that NRBQ, the Residents, and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore contributed to the Ra tribute album Wavelength Infinity), Marshall Allen took over leadership of the Arkestra. Under his direction the band, still represented in stores by myriad CD reissues of long-lost albums, made its first new recording since Ra's death with A Song for the Sun.

From the Third EditionThe Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll