SUN RA'S LEGACY

SUN RA’s LEGACY

Sun Ra has been an influence on a myriad of musical artists and luminaries. These include pianist Lonnie Liston Smith but not just jazz artists alone: George Clinton (Parliament, Funkadelic et al), Afrika Bambaataa, Flying Lotus and Sonic Youth are just a few cited examples for whom Sun Ra’s music resonated, but Frank Zappa also seems an obvious connecting point, consciously or not. John Sinclair, manager of the MC5 was a fan and brought the Arkestra to Detroit where they won over a whole new audience of white fans. The 1974 film Space is the Place, directed by John Coney, has been described as ‘Afrofuturist’, combining a science-fiction plotline with Sun Ra’s philosophy and music. At the start of the film Sun Ra is wearing Egyptian garments on an alien planet, with the plan of colonising it with black people by ‘isotopic transportation’ or by transferring molecules through music. He manages to save a few black people in his version of ‘Noah’s ark’, actually a music-powered space rocket just after the Earth explodes. Sun Ra looked at the issues of equal rights from an unusual angle, telling some young black people, “You’re not real. If you were, you’d have some status among the nations of the world.” Sun Ra’s fallout with the Black Panther Party (The Arkestra lived in a house owned by the Panthers and were under surveillance by the Oakland Police and the FBI) is also depicted in the film. Indeed, the FBI and NASA are seen as obstructing Sun Ra from playing music and liberating the black people. Sun Ra’s vision was that black people were paralysed by racism and subjugation from fulfilling their true potential and the ‘myth’ world had taken them away from the ‘splendours’ of ancient Egypt where a ‘place in space; was the only way to ensure their future. It is interesting to note that in 1971 Sun Ra was appointed as an artist-in-residence at the University of California in Berkeley where he taught a course entitled ‘The Black Man in the Cosmos’. He also travelled around Egypt with his Arkestra that same year. Compared to the earlier Arkestra when as Ted Gioia put it, “Sun Ra’s coterie of fans came to expect the unexpected.” (This was a time when, almost on a whim, Sun Ra lurched from live shows,with ten musicians to possibly treble that number, with dancers and slide shows sometimes thrown in. It must have been thrilling to attend a Sun Ra concert not knowing quite what to expect!

 I have written loads more about Sun Ra if anyone is interested.