By the 1950s, the signs of hopelessness were everywhere: racism, the threat of nuclear war, stunted social movements. In response, during the next four decades, Sun Ra released more than 100 albums of visionary jazz.
When the aliens came for Sun Ra, they explained that he had been selected for his “perfect discipline.” Not every human was fit for space travel, but he, with his expert control over his mind and body, could survive the journey. According to Ra, this encounter happened in the nineteen-thirties, when he was enrolled in a teachers’-training course at a college in Huntsville, Alabama. The aliens, who had little antennas growing above their eyes and on their ears, recognized in Ra a kindred spirit.
Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, to a supportive, religious family. He was named after Black Herman, a magician who claimed to be from the “dark jungles of Africa” and who infused his death-defying escape acts with hoodoo mysticism. Early on, Ra showed a prodigious talent for piano playing and music composition.
In his album notes and interviews, Ra began sketching out an “Astro-Black mythology,” a way of aligning the history of ancient Egypt with a vision of a future human exodus “beyond the stars.” The specifics of Ra’s vision remained hazy, but he seemed to believe that the traumas of history—most notably of American slavery—had made life on Earth untenable. Humanity needed to break from it and travel to a technological paradise light-years away.
In 1968, Sun Ra and his bandmates moved into a house in Philadelphia. The group’s communal ethos is a focus of “Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise,” a 1980 film by Robert Mugge. For all his seeming eccentricity, Ra wasn’t a free spirit in his personal life. He had an ascetic vision, supposedly abstaining from alcohol, drugs, sex, even sleep. He demanded that his band be available for practice at any hour of the day.
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