Space is the place
Subtitle: the lives and times of Sun Ra
By: John F. Szwed.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 476
Subjects: Sun Ra.; Jazz musicians -- United States -- Biography.
Description: Sun Ra - a/k/a Herman Poole "Sonny" Blount - was born in Alabama on May 22, 1914. But like Father Divine and Elijah Muhammad, he made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early life.

After years as a rehearsal pianist for nightclub revues and in blues and swing bands, including Wynonie Harris's and Fletcher Henderson's, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to find a way to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters through the various incarnations of the Intergalactic Arkestra.

His repertoire ranging from boogie-woogie, swing, and bebop to free form, fusion, and whatever, Sun Ra was above all a paragon of contradictions: profundity and vaudeville; technical pianistic virtuosity and irony; assiduous attention to arrangements and encouragement of collective improvisation; respect for tradition and celebration of the fresh.

Some might have been bemused by his Afro-Platonic neo-hermeticism; others might have laughed at his egregious excesses. But Sun Ra was at once the last of the great romantic composers, one of the premier avant-gardists of the latter half of the twentieth century, and a black cultural nationalist who extended Afrocentrism from ancient Egypt to the heavens.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 409-425) and index.
Discography: p. 427-448.