Sun Ra
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- Profile created: February 2007
- www.bebo.com/sunrafanpage
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- Label:
- Saturn Indie Label
- Hometown:
- Birmingham United States
- Me, Myself, and I
- Sun Ra, among the most unusual composers in the history of jazz, was born Herman "Sonny" Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914. He developed a remarkable Afro-Futurist cosmology of redemption which was infused with an Ancient Egyptian aesthetic.
Ra formed a Chicago-based group called the Arkestra, which played an intriguing mix of bop, free jazz, and proto-electronic music. In 1956 he founded his own label, Saturn Records, and five years later relocated to New York, where he established himself as one of the more eccentric performers, releasing recordings which foreshadowed jazz fusion and ambient music by blending traditional jazz instruments with electric keyboard and unconventional song structures. In 1970 Sun Ra moved to Philadelphia, where he continued recording and performing for a small but loyal jazz and rock audience until his death in May 1993. He left behind more than 150 recordings. Official Arkestra website: www.thesunraarkestra.com
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New book on Sun-Ra and Afro-Futurism
There's a new book out on Sun Ra and Afro-Futurism called "Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-68".
More details here : http://www.jazztimes.com/columns_and...
Can be purchased from : http://www.press.uchicago.edu0 Comments 953 days
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More details about Sun Ra & The Arkestra
If you want to know where to start with collecting Sun Ra, check out this article from the Village Voice : http://www.villagevoice.com/music/06...
A Good biography and short overview of his career is available here: http://missioncreep.com/mw/sunra.html
The Wire have an interview with Sun Ra online at : http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/199/
The best biography in print is John Szwed's "Space Is The Place" - you can find it by searching a site like "www.abebooks.co.uk"
There is also a feature film entitled "Space Is The Place" from 1974, with Sun Ra and the Arkesta playing the lead characters.
Film Homepage : http://www.outerspacewaysinc.com/ind...
Forced Exposure have copies (I think): www.forcedexposure.com/artists/ra.su...
If you want to delve deeper into the Sun Ra Universe, there are two very detailed M.A. Thesis' on the subject available online:
The Cosmic-Myth Equations of Sun Ra
by
David A. Martinelli
http://www.ethnomusic.ucla.edu/staff...
AND
From Ephrata (F-Ra-Ta) to Arkestra
by
David Stowe
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeV/...0 Comments 1017 days
dum dum dank dut de dut dank dit woooskkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk where is the mothership? dum dum dank dut de dut dank
Not Sun-Ra specific, but this is an interesting article on Afro-Futurism by the cultural critic, Mark Dery...
http://www.detritus.net/contact/rumo...