💥Xih💥

Remembering Sun Ra (@SunRaUniverse) (Friday, May 22, 1914 – Sunday, May 30, 1993) Born Herman “Sonny” Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, Sun Ra came through the Black Southern musical world of school bands, social-club functions, Masonic halls, Black community spaces, and disciplined music education. At Birmingham Industrial High School, he studied under John “Fess” Whatley, a respected band director whose students went on to play with major figures including Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Sun Ra was not simply a pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader. He became one of the great architects of cosmic Black sound. After moving to Chicago in the 1940s, he worked as a pianist and arranger with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra at Club DeLisa, then built the musical world that would become the Arkestra. By the 1950s, he was releasing music through his own Saturn label, making him an early pioneer of independent music production in Jazz. With the Arkestra, Sun Ra bent Jazz into a universe of its own: swing, big band discipline, free improvisation, electronic instruments, chants, dancers, robes, Egyptian imagery, outer-space mythology, and Black futurist possibility. His work linked the Black American experience with ancient Egypt, space travel, mythology, technology, and liberation long before “Afrofuturism” became a popular cultural term. His recordings and performances were vast, strange, disciplined, and alive. Albums and works connected to his legacy include “Jazz in Silhouette,” “The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra,” “Space Is the Place,” and “Purple Night.” His long-running Arkestra included major voices such as John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, Pat Patrick, and June Tyson, helping carry his sound from Chicago to New York, Philadelphia, Europe, and beyond. Sun Ra was named a 1982 NEA Jazz Master, inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1979, and later inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 2014. His Philadelphia home, the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra at 5626 Morton Street, has also been listed as a historic landmark, preserving the physical space where the Arkestra’s disciplined, otherworldly work continued. On Sunday, May 30, 1993, Sun Ra left the earthly realm in Birmingham, Alabama, however his Arkestra continued the sound, first under John Gilmore and later under longtime alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, keeping Sun Ra’s sound-world alive across generations. Sun Ra did not just imagine another world. He created for it. Photo: Sun Ra by Christian Rose/Roger Viollet via Getty Images, February 27, 1983