Recently, The New York Times asked jazz musicians, authors, and academics to share their favorites that make friends fall in love with Duke Ellington, Alice Coltrane, Bebop, Ornette Coleman, and jazz vocals.
This time, we spotlight experimental pianist, organist and bandleader Sun Ra. His unique blend of jazz imagined life on another planet. Born in Birmingham, Alabama as Herman Poole Blunt, he wore ornate robes and Egyptian headgear and composed progressive music meant to befriend Saturn. “My whole body changed into something else,” Sun Ra once said. “I could see through myself.” He said aliens spoke to him. When I speak, the world will listen. Sun Ra’s music, on the other hand, centered on space travel as a form of black liberation. He believed that black people would never find their freedom on earth and that true liberation was in space.Sun Ra continued his band (Alquestra ) recorded more than 200 of his albums.
Sun Ra’s music can be challenging both artistically and with the intimidating size of his discography. So while this is by no means a comprehensive list (what?), the songs selected here by various musicians, authors and critics represent swing, fusion and free cross-sections of his jazz. Enjoy the excerpt or full playlist at the bottom of the article. Leave your Sun Ra favorites in the comments.
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Creative flutist Nicole Mitchell
“El Is a Sound of Joy” is a symphonic, blue, melodious, laid-back song that expresses Sun Ra’s incredible love for black people, which is at the heart of his soul. I’m here. His piano His solo gracefully reflects the changes life brings us, with a mellow tempo that resists the stressful isolation and poverty faced by the black community in Chicago in 1956, when this song was recorded. Knock Just as Lah’s founding of the Saturn record label was a model of self-determination, “El Is a Sound of Joy” is the central track on this first Saturn album of his, “Supersonic Jazz,” and we It is a mission statement that sings the mission of Boldness to be beautiful. “Er”, which in Hebrew means “strength, strength, power,” is a distinction of Moorish wisdom, linking philosophical wisdom with a sound meant to liberate. Against the background of baritone blues shouts, effortlessly ascending the entire register, we levitate into ethereal pleasure. It is the sound offered for our salvation.